A Heart Connected to Song, A Life Connected to Land
Camille T. Dungy in conversation with Jason Myers
I first discovered the invaluable work of Camille T. Dungy when I attended a panel celebrating the release of her landmark anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009). Her own writing exudes the qualities that make her editorial contributions so gratifying: a keen attention that elevates what has been neglected; a rhapsodic appreciation of beauty that does not negate the stings and stigmas of injustice; a sensuous richness that encompasses indelible sights and sounds, tastes and touches both wild and domestic; and a wisdom that troubles such categories as “wild” and “domestic” and enlarges how we think about “nature” writing.
Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan, 2017). In addition to Black Nature, she co-edited From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009). Visual art lovers can revel in Immaterial, the podcast she hosted from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, and lives with her family in Fort Collins.
We corresponded as Dungy was preparing to celebrate the release of her extraordinary new memoir SOIL: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, and agree with Jami Attenberg who hails it as “an instant classic.”
Jason Myers: The epigraph for SOIL comes from Lucille Clifton, a poet we love here at EcoTheo. Can you tell us what you have learned, personally and poetically, from Clifton? How has she influenced your gardening and mothering as well as your writing?
Camille T. Dungy: It would take another whole book to tell you what I have learned personally and poetically from Lucille Clifton. She is one of my guiding lights on so many levels. I write directly into your question in SOIL in several places. What I can say here briefly is that Lucille Clifton has taught me a lot about balance and grace and clear-eyed attention, and she has proven that a person can write truly necessary work even when tending to and surrounded by family and community.
JM: You refer to one of the aims of a garden as “to give the eye entertainment.” Do you prioritize senses in the garden? Sight, smell, taste? How does your visual imagination as a poet affect where and what you plant?
CD: When I plant, I try to prioritize the needs of the land and the needs of the plants and also the needs of the beneficial insects and birds and such who live around me. One of the big mistakes people often make in landscaping decisions is to prioritize human interests over the needs of the plants, so that they plant things that need sun in a place where it won’t get enough just because that’s where a particular window is or something like that. If I give the plants the priority, then I find I reap more rewards (the full expression of those manifestations of sight, smell, and taste you refer to).
JM: The prose narrative(s) in SOIL are interspersed with poems (as well as photographs and illustrations). How did you decide on this structure? One of the poems, which recently also appeared in Poem-a-Day, ends with a little litany:
prairie wants prairie wants
prairie wants
How have the desires of the land shaped your own desires?
CD: I sent clippings from my garden to the amazing photographic artist Dionne Lee. Lee made those photograms that look a bit like pen and ink drawings. The photographs in the book are a joint project by me, my daughter, our friend Mary Ellen, and Dionne Lee. I’m not really sure who took which picture. Our work feels inseparable at this point.
There are a number of reasons I wove a variety of mediums and so many women into the art in the book. A key one is that the book is interested in what can be attained through deep interconnection and communal care. I didn’t want to be the solitary genius of the book. I love having other people’s hands made evident in these pages.
Since you also ask here about how I incorporate the desires of the land, I would say that my big desire is to be more and more conscious of my interconnected experiences: with the land, with other living beings, with other humans, with many ways of making meaning and beauty, with all of it.
JM: You observe the way that many celebrated nature writers, especially if they have been white and male, can make it seem like they never have to cook a meal or do a load of laundry. There’s a sense of dailiness and labor missing from “classic” environmental literature. Who are the writers, whether contemporary, canonical, or neglected by the canon, who you look to as models? Or do you feel, as LC states in her well-beloved poem, you had no models when you began to write SOIL?
CD: Ah, Clifton! That line is a gem. That whole poem. I do want to say that poetry is different than prose in so many ways. I have models for this kind of interconnected thinking much further back in poetry than I see it in prose. I also want to point out that I make sure to say that my concern is about the canonical tradition. A canonical tradition that erased or diminished writers who might have presented other ways of understanding the world.
One writer who I love is Josephine Johnson, whose The Inland Island is a gorgeously interconnected meditation on life and politics and motherhood and her family’s efforts to rewild a large swath of land. Though I didn’t come across her work until it was re-released in 2022. This sort of dropping out of sight is all too common. Read Zora Neale Hurston through the lens I describe in Soil and you’ll find a whole new way of thinking about nature writing. But neither Josephine Johnson nor Zora Neal Hurston have traditionally been championed as key environmental writers. Both Hurston’s and Johnson’s books were long out of print, partially because of how they wrote about the world.
JM: You write: “Gardens, history, and hope are the same. Though once dearly beloved, if left untended, without anyone’s dedication and care, much will be totally lost.” If you could offer advice to future readers and scholars who will be responsible for preserving your work, what might you say to them?
CD: Whoa. That’s a question! Let me simply say, “Thank you. Thank you for your efforts to preserve my work. I hope there remain many passages here that move you and bring you joy. I also hope that some of the worst of the human brutality these pages witness will seem hard to believe because nothing like that has occurred in your lives for so long.”
JM: In addition to your four collections of poems and two books of creative nonfiction, your contributions to literary culture and community have encompassed work as an editor – of landmark anthologies as well as curating the poetry for Orion – a podcaster, and a teacher. What are the similarities and differences between these roles? How do they make your soul sing?
CD: My aunt Mary, who I write about in Soil, always told us, “You make my heart sing,” when she saw us. She also asked us to make sure to live a life that makes our hearts sing. One of her granddaughters has perhaps the coolest tattoo I’ve ever seen. It’s the official bird of Aunt Mary’s birth state perched on an anatomical heart. There are musical notes floating around all of it. A heart connected to song. Your last question made me smile. Thanks for that.
Anyway, all of these roles you mention require me, and also allow me the opportunity, to live in direct communion with language and ideas and with people who are excited about language and ideas. As an added bonus, they connect me with communities that tend to care about the well being and positive progress of others. Those are communities and concerns that bring me a great deal of satisfaction. This is all work that makes my heart sing.
JM: One of my favorite sections in Soil responds to the toxic theology presented by Diego Valades in his famous and influential 1579 engraving, The Great Chain of Being. The top-down, divisive rhetoric of divine order which the engraving represents was used to justify a variety of horrors enacted by colonialism and its perpetrators. I love your interrogation of this form of thinking:
If I understand God as separate, as above all creation, then what happens elsewhere, to others, may not matter much to me. But let me believe God is in all creation, that birds and beasts and boulders and streams are all part of God’s body. How much better might I treat the lives around me?
How has your faith shown up in your garden? And how does gardening affect your sense of religious community and commitment?
CD: True story, you know how people often ask writers who our ideal readers are? Well, as I worked on that section, I had you in mind. I am deeply touched that you felt a connection to that part of the book.
My garden sustains me and my garden challenges me. My garden offers beauty and my garden does not hide from the reality of death. My garden presents opportunities to put words into action. Those are some of the many ways that my garden connects me to a kind of communion with faith.
JM: As you discuss your garden, you mention some of the plants you inherited from previous tenders of the land where your family now lives. You write, “I might find the root system of some kind of insistent thriving.” Where are you noticing insistent thriving these days, in books or gardens or meals or…? And to somewhat echo an earlier question, what do you imagine or dream that future inhabitants of the bit of earth you’re tending will discover and inherit?
CD: This is another set of big questions, and I’m not sure I’d be able to answer them succinctly since what you’re really asking about is a whole ecosystem of communities and actions. But I can tell you that I’m on book tour now, and I am thrilled to meet so many like-minded folks out there in the world. People who are already invested in this work, or who are eager to join in the efforts. They are also part of this root system of insistent thriving and I am happy to be working in communion with so many others.
