Poetry’s Responsibility to Serve as Witness: An Interview with Chera Hammons about her latest collection Birds of America.
Birds of America | Penguin Random House | $20.00
Birds of America by Chera Hammons is an expansive collection that tackles legacy, violence to humans, as well as violence to the environment and animals. Throughout the three sections “Alarm,” “Flight,” and “Contact,” terms borrowed from ornithology, Hammons brings attention to systemic and environmental injustices honestly and critically while still highlighting the importance of connection and its ability to create positive change.
William Brown: I'm wondering how you feel about labels. Do you consider yourself a nature poet, or are you a poet who is concerned with nature, concerned with the environment? You write about extinction and climate change, but you also write about violence upon human bodies.
Chera Hammons: I write a lot about nature, obviously. I'm chronically ill, so I spend a lot of time looking out my window at the birds and the animals, and we have a ton of wildlife right outside our window. It's like living in the middle of the Discovery Channel. I think labels can help readers find what they're looking for, so I don't mind them to an extent. I'm definitely a nature poet. Every poem I write has some kind of nature in it, so I'm all about that one. I think it's very accurate, and I prefer nature to people. So yeah, I think the nature label is good. I'm definitely concerned with the climate. I've been called an illness poet before, which I don't mind, but I'm not always an illness poet. I am always a nature poet.
WB: Do you see yourself approaching the human through nature? Or do you see yourself approaching nature through the lens of the human?
CH: I think it's the latter. As much as I want to feel like there's no separation between me and nature, there is because of my perspective. I mean, I can't be purely from the point of view of nature. I let what happens happen naturally most of the time because the poems are better that way than when I try to control them. Part of why I write is because that separation between me and nature kind of breaks my heart. I want to make it a little bit thinner, if that makes any sense. I think we're the only species that vanish from the face of the earth and the earth would be just fine without us, better even.
WB: In your collection, you talk about a murder case for one, and in the acknowledgments, you thank the police department for looking into things. But you're also talking about climate change and endangered and extinct species and that sort of thing. What is the responsibility of poets and of poetry? And to further that, to what extent can poetry change something?
CH: I think poetry's main responsibility is to be a witness. In that way, we preserve some of what is being lost, even if we can't stop it. And also to translate the abstract to something that people can access. It makes you part of this bigger human conversation, and it benefits us as well as the planet. One reason I went with the commercial press with this last book was that it feels like a lot of times as a poet, you're just writing to other poets, and they already agree with what you're saying most of the time. I hoped to get a wider audience of people, maybe people who wouldn't normally pick up a poetry book from a small press, and maybe reach further with people who didn't already think that or maybe hadn't thought about that before.
WB: I know earlier you said you don't try to steer the poem and they turn out better when you let them write themselves, but I'm considering subject matter and wanting to approach a larger audience. Are you making any decisions on a micro or macro level because of that?
CH: I did after we sold the book. It's double the length that it started. With the poems I added, I already knew who was going to publish it and who the audience was probably going to be. Because of that, I did more consciously direct the poems that were added. It was too dark for a mainstream audience, the original version. Most of the newer poems are added to the second and third sections where you start to kind of climb out and see light.
WB: When I was reading the author's note at the beginning, I recognized that the collection is in three distinct sections starting with “Alarm” and ending with “Contact,” so immediately I thought, “That seems like a pretty clear trajectory.” However, we do see hope early in that first section, too. I was wondering if you could speak about those sections and what made you organize the collection that way?
CH: Part of the arrangement I have to give big credit to my agent and editor. They were very hands-on. They saw things that I was missing, and they would say, “There's a hole here, we need more information,” so I'd write a new poem that would fill in that gap. But I think my agent was the one who said that we need to add a little hope to the first section to get people to feel like they can make it through. That first poem “Trill” was actually my agent's idea, but it's interesting because this is my biggest book and I have less ego about it than the others—because so many people had a hand in making it what it is. I'm so grateful to them because it wouldn't be as cohesive without their help.
WB: Out of curiosity, is there a version of this that still exists more for yourself?
CH: It started as a chapbook that I kind of wrote all at once, and the reason I was able to write it is that I had given up on the poetry business. I had gotten really burned out, and I didn't write anything for a year and a half to two years. Thinking of writing poetry made me feel sick, and every time I felt the urge to write a poem, I would go do something else. With this book, I realized I'm not myself if I'm denying this. I wanted to just write something that meant something to me and was honest, and that's where the original version came from. It was just me in a room.
WB: One of the questions I had is the blurring of “Alarm” and “Contact.” As early as “Conservation List” in “Alarm,” the speaker mentions hunger for someone. I was wondering specifically when we think about those bird calls, in what ways do our calls differ as humans as opposed to birds? Are those bird calls also really as rigid as they seem, or is there like more nuance there similar to how there’s a lot of overlap for us humans?
CH: Yeah, I think there's a lot of nuance and gray areas just like for us. We have birds all around us; I'm watching them constantly, and when I was revising the book, we bought two parakeets so that I could watch them and see how they interacted. I think especially really intelligent birds like parakeets or corvids have a lot of nuance. It's kind of like a general classification when we say those calls. Then you have birds like the blue jay that'll imitate a hawk call to scare the other birds away so it can get the peanuts. They're very, very intelligent, and there are nuances with them too, for sure.
WB: The collection gets its name, Birds of America, from Audubon, and there are sketches of birds throughout the collection. You speak to this a little bit in the author's note, but then there are also erasures of some of Audubon's notes. I was just wondering how you approach those moments in which we look up to someone, or we revere someone, then find out that their legacy isn't really as tidy as it could be.
CH: I feel like there's so much in our lives like that, just normal people in our lives, our country, our state, our city. I feel like it's a universal kind of thing that you will be disappointed in the people you look up to, albeit to different extents. Whenever I was writing the book, there was so much revisionist history going on. I mean, there still is, like taking away plaques about slavery and redoing things with the Smithsonian. I have a line like that in one of the poems—I want to know everything about what I love. I feel like if you love something, you don't close your eyes to it. You want to know what it is, and you want to know it thoroughly. I feel that way about our country. I don't understand why we're letting all this happen.
WB: I love that idea, “If you love something, you don't close your eyes to it.” I similarly feel like there's a certain responsibility to be critical as well to something you love, to show the thing honestly, and that it doesn't have to be void of critique for it to be a love poem.
CH: Yeah, absolutely. My own philosophy is that Audubon is long dead, so he gets no benefit if I hang one of his paintings in my house. I can look at that painting and not see Audubon. On the other hand, JK Rowling is very much alive, and she does benefit if I watch the new Harry Potter series, so I'm not going to watch it. I think everybody has to decide where the line is for themselves, and I don't judge anybody else for where their line is. That was one reason I wanted to do the erasures because an erasure is a way of taking something and making it your own.
WB: It was interesting seeing the erasures of both the news stories regarding the murder case and the erasures of some of Audubon's notes and things, because the pairing highlights how different forms of violence are often overlooked in similar ways. I was wondering if there's a method for when some poems about nature or humanity operate as conceits for the other while others operate more in their more explicit focus. For you, do some subjects function better as conceit or does each poem simply find its own way?
CH: Usually whenever I start with the human, it's because I've had a feeling for a few days and then I see something that matches it. Then I know how to translate the feeling. I'm not thinking so much like, “I'm going to write a poem today, and this is the process I'm going to follow.” I feel like I have things stored up that I don't quite understand, and then I see something that makes me understand it; then all I have to do is figure out how to communicate that it's tied together. Even then it's more of like, you'll have this feeling, you see something that is reminiscent, and then it's still an unconscious process of whether this exists solely as conceit or whether there's like an explicit overlaying of the two, like a palimpsest. Most of my actual poetry writing happens in revision because I have this like blob that's connected and then I have to figure out how to make it into a poem.
WB: Do you think that there's a relationship between the natural landscape around us and form, especially in the Texas panhandle where we have a lot of wide open spaces?
CH: I have spent my whole life in Amarillo, pretty much except for the foray into New Mexico, and whenever I travel, if I go somewhere with trees, I think it's amazing for the first couple of days, and then I start to feel claustrophobic because I am used to seeing things as far as they can go. So yeah, I think that's definitely part of why I write the way I do. And then, like training horses, this is just an anecdote, but if you buy a horse from somewhere that's wooded, that's never been a place like this, it will freak them out whenever you unload them from the trailer, and they see this for the first time. So I think, yeah, where you're from, especially for rural poets, really, really affects how you write and how you think. I think most people feel uncomfortable here. If you came from somewhere else and moved here, you might feel really exposed for a bit because there's nothing to hide you here. Everything is just there.
WB: In section three, “Contact,” there are poems such as “Basis,” “Sustain,” and “Peacocks” that all discuss a sort of legacy and what one leaves behind, but they come from very different places. Even in the author's note, there's the discussion of Audubon's legacy. Do you see poetry as something to leave behind, is it a method of discovering what to leave behind, or some combination of both? Or, are you even concerned with that at all?
CH: I do think about that, and I think it's a mix of both. But I also don't think so much of myself that I think people are going to be reading my work after I'm gone. I hope they do, but I'm not like Mark Twain, who really thought he was going to have longevity, and he was right. I think part of that for me is coming to terms with the fact that I might leave nothing behind that anybody will care about, but that the earth will know that I tried to do no harm. There's this poem about Georgia O'Keeffe and how she planted things in the ground and that the earth remembers her through those things. In the process of writing this book, one day I heard a noise, and I looked out, and there was a raven playing on my horse trough, and she was just jumping around, splashing and having a good time. I took some food out there, and she looked at me, and I looked at her. I showed her the food, and I sat down with the food on the ground in front of me. That raven left the horse trough and sat in front of me and ate the food, then flew away. I thought, “Well, maybe that raven will remember me.” And I thought of the people making friends with crows. And I thought of my donkeys; they have very long memories. And then the peacocks, they'll probably outlive me. They can live 50 years, and they turned two on August 1st, so they've got a long way to go. But yeah, I was thinking of all the ways that we can be remembered that maybe people don't think to value that are valuable.
WB: In your poem “Vitality,” the speaker mentions a stranger who says, “You write too harshly about this place.” Earlier we talked about love poems still having critique, but I was wondering what you think about the role of honesty in poetry, specifically regarding fact versus truth.
CH: I'm okay with changing details to get an emotional truth. In the poem “Proof,” it's actually about my mammoth donkey, but the word donkey doesn't have the right connotation for what the animal is. I changed it to what her aura feels like, and that is a draft horse because she is a very drafty animal. She's taller than my horses. She's got very big bones and her energy is very farm animal and draft animal. I changed that detail so that the emotion of it would be true, but the fact isn't necessarily true.
WB: So favoring the emotional truth of a thing at times over being factually or historically accurate?
CH: Yeah, I try to make it true, but also sometimes in a poem, if you told the entire truth, it would take too long and feel too clinical. So sometimes I'll summarize as well just to make it fit into the space better.
WB: And so even then about being clinical, I was also intrigued by some lines in “Open Mic Night” where you write, “You have spent too much time / caring for horses / to write that wonderfully about them.” It's one of those things that immediately for me rang very true and very untrue for me. At times, separation from a thing makes it easier to write about it, but also intimate knowledge of a thing allows me to access the subject in a certain way. I was wondering how much you firmly believe your own words there as opposed to that not being an absolute truth.
CH: I love that something can be two things, that two things can be true about one thing. I love pointing out dualities. With the horses, part of where that line comes from is when I was little, I was obsessed with horses. This is before I ever got one, and I talked about them all the time, and I drew them, and I wrote about them. My mom one time told me, “Honey, people don't like to hear about horses as much as you like to talk about them,” but that didn't change my behavior at all because I didn't see why that mattered. So, yeah, I think I see people sometimes get bogged down because they know too much about a thing and they want to show off what they know. I see poets do that sometimes. You have to be able to find the balance between the right details that are going to have the most punch and the most efficiency. Whenever you know a whole lot of details about something, you have to pick the right ones.
WB: There have been plenty of people that talk about poetry having like a certain economy of language compared to prose, but also going back to something we talked about earlier, especially by modern collection standards, Birds of America is a longer collection, and there are some poems in there that span a couple or three pages. I know we talked earlier about the melding of form and where you are geographically and that some of the decisions on length came from considering an audience, but is there any tension for you between that economy of language and the length of the collection?
CH: Yeah, I always follow the Jeffrey Levine rules of arranging a manuscript. He says it should be 65 pages, and that was the length of the one I sent to my agent. She had me add the author's note, which I had never done before; then we all really liked how it turned out. When presses were looking at signing the book, all of them commented on how much they liked the author's note. One of the funny things about publishing a poetry book when so many people are working on it with you is that sometimes there are reasons for things that seem like they should be profound, but they're not. I had already published four poems from the book, and that was too high a percentage for the press. I had to add a lot of pages so that the percentage of previously published work would be less. Originally, knowing I had to add pages, it was it was more of a legality type of thing. Then I started thinking about the story, and my agent and editor were guiding me by saying things like, “Here's where we would like more, here's where we'd like less.” It was originally not very memoiristic because I liked that it was about something other than myself. Then they told me that it needed to be more memoiristic so that people would have more to identify with the personal, so I added several of those grittier relationship poems. So it started from a place of, “Here's the problem we need to fix,” then it turned into expanding the story and filling in the blanks that they want filled in.
WB: Is there anything about the collection that you wish more people asked about?
CH: I wish people would talk more about the climate aspect of it and the realities that we're dealing with, how it speaks to those. But I also am used to working invisibly. The attention that this has gotten has been very strange, and I'm not going to complain.
WB: Especially because climate change is only becoming exponentially easier to see now.
CH: I don't know how anybody could deny it now. And I've heard people say before, “What's the worst that could happen if you try to make the planet better? We have cleaner air and cleaner water, and we're healthier.” What is the downside to that?
WB: I remember during COVID when everyone was indoors, and we saw so many canals and riverways clearing up and dolphins were going to areas that they hadn't been to in decades, just how quickly that happened. I’m surprised we haven’t seen a larger ripple effect from that visibility yet, but maybe it’s coming.
CH: Yeah, like a wound trying to heal. I feel like with social media and everything now, it's really hard to break through. But if you are able to break through, then yes, it could matter. And you never know what's going to matter, so you just have to kind of try everything. I think a lot of the challenge too is that people are so fatigued just from trying to survive that they don't necessarily want to hear about it. I think that it's going to take somebody who has an audience already or a platform or some other way in that can tie it together. But in the meantime, we keep writing because we're witnessing. And by that way, we're preserving. Even if things vanish, we have a record of them.
Chera Hammons is a winner of poetry awards through PEN Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Lit Hub, People, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. Her most recent book, Birds of America, is available through The Dial Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House). She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle.
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