Place and Displacement

Disappearance: North Sea Poems. Lesley Harrison. Shearsman Books, 2020. 78 pp.
$18.00 (paper).
Civil Bound. Myung Mi Kim. Omnidawn, 2019. 96 pp. $17.95 (paper).
Colonize Me. Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley. Saturnalia, 2019. 112 pp. $16.00 (paper).
Doomstead Days. Brian Teare. Nightboat Books, 2019. 176 pp. $17.95 (paper).

This spring, during Michigan’s stay-at-home order in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I birded the same stretch of woods in a suburban
neighborhood, multiple times each week. In southeastern
Michigan the edges of the Mississippi and Atlantic flyways merge, and the
region’s vast stretches of water and many points and peninsulas create
natural funnels for migrating birds that can result in high concentrations
of migrants in small areas. The twenty acres of woods near my
house act as a rest stop for birds passing through on their way to
various points north or as a nesting spot for those who will stay and breed
in Michigan over the summer months. I saw or heard nearly eighty
species of birds this May: black-throated green warblers, blue-headed
vireos, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and great crested flycatchers, their
names poems in themselves.

Add to this bird list the layers of occupation and history my River
Rouge–adjacent wood-chipped path traces—the Anishinaabe people,
the European colonizers, the industrial legacy of the down-river Ford
plant and military arsenal, the river’s AOC (Area of Concern)
designation due to PCBs and PAHs—and things get more complicated than a
forty-three-year-old White woman bird-watching in a suburban forest
scrap. Find trout lilies and mayapples emergent alongside invasive
garlic mustard and Japanese honeysuckle, while mallards and their
ducklings float downstream to where my daughter digs shells and rocks
in little alcove surfactant pools. Track the history of a single invasive
species, and you will find a story of colonization, industry, agriculture,
and globalization.

In these four books, Lesley Harrison’s Disappearance: North Sea
Poems, Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days, Myung Mi Kim’s Civil Bound,
and Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s Colonize Me, the poets map the
contours of inner and outer geographies, using place and displacement
to define somewhere, someone, some history, some beauty, and
a great deal of violence. “Geographies are storied places,” Craig Santos
Perez writes in the introduction to Geopoetics in Practice. That is the
through line from Harrison’s North Sea gulls to Teare’s treks through
toxic though beautiful landscapes to Kim’s fraught and fragmented
trajectory of power/dominance and displacement/erasure, and finally
Kingsley’s intimate charting of place and person in a country partly
foreign, partly ancestral, and often hostile to people of color.

Lesley Harrison’s approach to place is immersive from the beginning
of this book, her first full-length collection (n.b.: this Scottish poet
is not the similarly named Leslie Harrison perhaps more familiar to
American audiences). In the first poem, “Birds of the North Sea,” she
places us geographically on the globe and then maps the shifting names
for bird species across islands, as we move from Orkney, to Shetland,
to the Faroe Islands, to Iceland, and finally to Svalbard. The poem is
“to be read aloud,” and though we are probably unfamiliar with the
languages, as we voice the words, we briefly inhabit somewhere else:

arctic skua                            tyvjo – aulin – kjove – kjói -tyvjo

arctic tern                             ritto – tirrick – kría -kyst

black guillemot                   teistie – tystie – tjest – peiste -teist

curlew                                  whaup – whaap –wulp

Some names vary widely, but most have similarities as we move around
in an S-shape from south to north in a constellation of bird names.
Harrison creates a field of shifting language connected by water and
by species not contained by the borders of one island or the borders
of human language.

These are poems made of water and rock, as the places she describes
are defined by shoreline and wave. Harrison captures the ethos of the
North Sea by documenting shipwrecks, journeys, species, and her own
physical experience of this landscape’s physical spaces. In “Topophilia”
she writes,

Spring tide.
I walk into the sea’s cold bloom, 
its heft, its anonymity.

I trace my entire belief
in the viscera of salt and wind, 
the natural fall of cloud.

here is only everything :
the secular ocean,
the crush and crush of new waves

Harrison’s place poems are placed poems, dropping the reader into a
sensory experience of cold water, salt, and wind. From that sensory
experience—felt in the body—comes a different kind of knowledge
known in the mind. The ocean itself is “secular,” but in it, the speaker
traces all “belief.” This experiential knowing, that to live means to be a
part of the natural world, is an overt theme in Harrison’s poetics, such
as when she writes later in “Topophilia,” “to dwell outside myself, / to
live in the lived world / among snails and grasses.” Furthermore, Harrison
is conscious of herself as chronicler of this place-based epistemology,
which she describes in “The Voyage of the ‘Fox’” when she notes
“unenchanted islands, / their tiny black rivers inked in. // My pen lifts them from
the darkness.” And yet, as her pen “lifts” these islands from
darkness, she acknowledges the geological impermanence of those
same structures within the scale of deep-time, illustrated in these lines
from her poem “December: Skagaströnd”: “the steady hiss of rain / the
mountain eroding, molecule by molecule.”

Harrison’s poems take many different forms throughout the book:
imagistic poems, definition poems, spatial poems interspersed
with images—drawings, maps, and photographs—and a number of
intertextual/ erasure poems. From “Orkney Road Trip with Samuel Beckett”:

Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on. 
Someone said, You can’t stay here. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t
go on. I’ll describe the place, that’s unimportant. The top, very flat, of 
a mountain, no, a hill, but so wild, so wild, enough. Quag, heath up 
to the knees, faint sheep-tracks, troughs scooped deep by the rains. 
It was far down in one of these I was lying, out of the wind. Glorious 
prospect, but for the mist that blotted out everything, valleys, loughs,
plain and sea.

With Beckett’s words in gray-scale text and Harrison’s words in black
text, she creates two concurrent narratives. The gray text feels anxious
and uncertain, agitated, but the black text brings the natural and solid
phenomena to the surface, the tangible things that stay: “the place / a
mountain, no, a hill / Quag, heath / far down / the / sea.”

I enjoy the highly lyrical moments in the text, when Harrison depicts
the miniscule, the minutiae of birds and ice and wind. In
“December, Skagaströnd,” with a single image to a line, she writes:

Sunday – low tide.
gulls pick relics from the beach, 
tinkering with molluscs

pattering triangles 
into black    thick mud.

a tiny agnostic piece of ice 
floats out / in
warped, like concrete.

Small moments are brought into sharp relief—mollusc triangle stuck in
dark mud, a small ice chunk heavily drifting. In Disappearance, Harrison
doesn’t venture into the myriad environmental catastrophes affecting
the natural world, but she details this one corner—creating a natural
and cultural ark of curiosity and beauty.

In contrast, Brian Teare’s remarkable Doomstead Days documents place
through environmental crises and toxicity. He traces disaster and
pollution—and consequences large and small—through water, wild
places, cities, trees, animal bodies, and the human body. Doomstead
Days is composed of eight long syllabic sequences of various lengths
and shapes, and the voice alternates between essay and lyric, and
between outer and inner geographies. In the book’s opening sequence,
“Clear Water Renga,” Teare describes the Cosco Busan wreck and oil
spill in the Bay Area. His linked, looped form bends across the pages
like lapping waves:

fog, error, radar
                failed :: the container ship hit 
                              the bridge tower hard ::

                                              its hull split, spilled fifty eight 
                                                            thousand gallons of bunker

                                                                                                       fuel oil :: November  
                                                                                         7th, 2007 ::
                                                                         the next day it hurt

                                                           the eyes to walk dockside, wind 
                                              bringing the sting of petrol ::

The first three words—fog, error, radar—in this linked form are linked
also by assonance and consonance, the o in fog connecting to the o in
error, the r in error to the r’s in radar. The line is harsh sounding, with
more accented than unaccented syllables, and seems to predict the
action that will happen in the lines that follow.

Teare records the wreck, but then pauses to focus on a single bird
performing an action so common as to normally be overlooked:
preening. Only now the bird is coated in oil, “gesture gently carrying / toxins
from feather to beak, // from outside to in.” This is a move he will make
constantly throughout the collection, the macroview to the micro
moment, the documentarian to the lyric poet, how what we do to the
outside of our world affects the insides of animal bodies, plant bodies,
and our bodies—and by extension, our minds. His is a poetics of
keen and encompassing awareness. Teare’s concern is with both the
surface and what’s beneath, the layers of people that have dwelled in
these places, the “land Coast Miwok // once camped on to fish / peak
salmon runs,” and the ecological webs of the species that inhabit these
spaces, both native and not, “the American / goldfinch husking invasive
/ thistle seed for feed // the large paradox writ small.”

The arc of the book moves from habitats on the West Coast to landscapes
on the East Coast, while splicing in personal details from daily
life. In “Olivine, Quartz, Granite, Carnelian (Johnson, VT),” after the
speaker slips while hiking, the poem slips back and forth between
getting an X-ray in a doctor’s office and the natural surroundings
where the speaker had been walking. He says of the X-ray,

I could’ve looked like that
for hours at my spine,
the molecules locked in

degrading matrices :
where the joints meet up [. . .]

soft tissues unremark
able. It’s weird to be
always incurring off

screen injuries I have
to live with. The process
makes a space in my thought

like I make a space on
the brook’s hard bank : anthro
pogenic nonpoint source

pollutant, my urine
a potent effluent
of medicines I need

& pesticides I don’t,
a pharmacopeia
of harm for riverine

species. I close my eyes.
Rain on leaf litter sounds
like storm wind high above

& the brook thrown downhill
by its own force, the world
coalescing briefly

Teare navigates connections between place and self, and somatic
experience and language, while highlighting the human-made toxins
ubiquitous in our bodies and the environment. His line breaks isolate the
individual components, like when he describes the spine’s “molecules
locked in,” then breaks before the next image, “degraded matrices.”
Or a few lines later when he writes: “medicines I need // & pesticides
I don’t.” The break between “need // & pesticides” describes both the
necessary and unwanted substances in the speaker’s body, but even
those needed “medicines” contribute to the “pharmacopeia / of harm
for riverine // species.” The break between “riverine” and “species”
emphasizes both the river as an entity in its own right and the “species”
that reside there. As the lines accumulate and cascade, like the “brook
thrown downhill / by its own force,” the pervasive intertwining of body,
toxin, and environment is foregrounded. The depth of meaning Teare
creates with his line work is all the more notable because of the syllabic
restrictions in the form.

In the book’s title poem, and final poem, Teare uses the word
“gender” or “genders” to be both record and performance of the world’s
end. He writes:

I keep thinking about 
the man who asks me 
to visit his doomstead 
which seems kinky 
for a first date
what’s the safeword 
for men with genders
built for the world’s end 
men with weaponized 
genders hoarding solar 
power & canned goods 
bottled water genders 
tending small vegetable 
gardens out back

The doomstead men whose “genders” are “built for the world’s end”
collide with other genders, as in “today’s gender is rain / it touches
everything / with its little silver / epistemology.” Gender is both a way
of knowing and a way of being in the world, for humans, other species,
and the world itself. Teare specifically implicates the doomstead men
but implicitly implicates all genders all humans perform on a daily
basis in the ongoing destruction of the natural world. And he reminds
us that when we’re gone, the world’s gender—the earth’s stratigraphic
layers—will remember it all.

Similar to Teare’s work in Doomstead Days, Myung Mi Kim in her most
recent book, Civil Bound, uses place—such as the Panama Canal or the
Great Lakes—as a fulcrum to write about environmental destruction.
In this book-length poem, she labors with fragmentation, juxtaposition,
nonnarrative structures, and sparse but dense phrasing to examine
issues of colonization and power. She ties language to destruction
both in the mechanized, militarized, and monetized language of the
oppressor/destroyer (“fifteen to a stretcher and fiber optics dissemination
of warheads limbic accentual”) and in the erased, broken, replaced
language of the oppressed or displaced, including some passages in
vertical columns of text.

In those passages, Kim presents an English-language text—for example,
an 1886 report from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs—vertically
on the page, in slim one-letter columns that read from top to
bottom rather than from left to right. The reader, as in Harrison’s “Birds
of the North Sea” poem, is forced into an uncomfortable and unfamiliar
reading experience, trying to interpret what at first looks like random
rows of letters. Is this how someone used to reading a language in vertical
columns might feel when they first try to read English horizontally
from left to right?

The experience gains more power when we consider the content of
the text: “there is not an indian pupil / whose tuition is paid by the unit /
ed states government who is permi / tted to study any other language
t / han our own vernacular the langua / ge of the greatest most powerful
an / d enterprising nationalities unde / r the sun.” Kim’s mastery of
experimental poetics allows her to represent her themes through formal
choices that operate beneath traditional grammatical structures. This
syntactical resistance challenges the familiar paradigms of Western
dominance and traditional notions of progress and exposes the oppression
and devaluing of certain peoples and the destruction of the natural
world. Or as Kim puts it, the dominant culture’s “hemispheric lust.”

By puzzling over her phrases and their juxtaposition, we can begin
to assemble a web of connections that gains coherence and meaning
as we move through the text. In the book’s opening sequence, in lines
spread out on the page, Kim writes,

corruption balked before alms


boulders, mechanical parts, or persons


pledged to asunder 

[page break]

humble rules for eyes and fingers 

errant convalescence


by arms and legs fettered 

by the wallets of tongues


taught to make coffins for each other.

Her list “boulders, mechanical parts, or persons” contains one geological
element, then something mechanized, and finally “persons,” which
has an archaic or legal tone, making it seem removed from the idea
of an actual person, which the consonance of “parts” and “persons”
further reinforces. The composition of the list emphasizes that some
destruction is at work here, involving the earth, machinery, and people,
and the words corruption and asunder give this passage a feeling of state
sanctioned or corporate decimation. The subsequent lines are even
more violent, the body emphasized only in its parts: “humble rules
for eyes and fingers” and “wallets of tongues.” “Tongues,” a speech
making organ, here is monetized, and in that sense, may refer back to
“corruption,” the powerful setting the rules for the humble. The final
line quoted here, “taught to make coffins for each other,” calls to mind
those killed during the construction of the Panama Canal and other
destructive projects, even as the unnamed people act collectively to
bury one another.

Throughout the text Kim splices animal or nature images with
language about speech or the senses. On one page in the book “| |
prolapsed sensorium” is the lone phrase. An entire sensory apparatus
has slipped out of place or is bulging out. The following page includes
“a wreath of warblers,” more lyrical then many of Kim’s lines, and at
the bottom of the page, “pronunciation key for suffering   / abrә’
g¯aSH(ә)n/.” The “prolapsed sensorium” encompasses both these other
images—warblers are in decline and are migratory by nature. Abrogation,
the repeal of a right or a law, often leads to suffering, a concept
that comes into focus on the next page: “all newcomers must newcomers
must cinder wages smell of camphor and plaster // dust residual
projectile decibel atrophy preceding sunlight if // the chronoscope
chronometer coroner if hands // were woven burnholes.” With an emphasis
on “newcomers,” the poem scrutinizes forced emigration and
immigration, including the physical hardships, pain, and psychological
dismemberment that refugees experience.

In her examination of the lived bodily experiences of disempowered
people, Kim also juxtaposes elements of the natural and the human, as
in “between ribs what might be shale // ramshackle peony / meridian
bit in the mouth” and “accept of these waters // lava tubes 
tulips  feast days.” The ribs, human or animal, contain shale, either
from being buried or from a shale-made weapon. Ramshackle, typically
used to describe a dwelling or structure, surprisingly precedes peony.
Similarly, meridian, a geographical term, is “bit in the mouth,” as in
to bite, signifying a forced move and the forced acquisition of a new
language, or as in a bit, used to control a horse’s mouth. Only, this bit,
or new language, controls a human mouth. Finally, “feast days,” cultural
and human, follows two natural items in a list. Kim’s purposeful
ambiguity and discourse splicing perform the interconnections and
blurred boundaries between nature, human, and culture that persist
and morph in the midst of oppression and displacement. Her repetition
of accept in the book’s final pages seems to signify an internalization of
these connected truths.

Rather than charting the “willed geography” of colonial powers, as in
Civil Bound, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s book Colonize Me maps
an inner geography shaped by some of the same forces Kim contends
with—but Kingsley’s approach is narrative and personal. In a sort of
invocation at the beginning of the book he addresses lineage:

From Nippon refugee 
who America caged.
From Onondaga son 
who America imprisoned
[. . .] From Rust Belt trailers.
[. . .] From PA to LA to MIA to out here in West Baltimore.

As this litany emphasizes, these poems grapple with family, history,
fatherhood, class, adolescence, and what it means to be an American
who isn’t White.

In America, race and class often determine which bodies are valued
and by extension which places are cared for, and which are exploited
and left to fall apart. In “Our Broke Ass Ladder of Opportunity or The
Block Boy Anthem” Kingsley writes:

                  Streets raised me
  I’ve heard old heads in the complex 
  say. It ain’t true:
                                                      tenant reality was complex
                       colonies               a project 
  after-project
                                       of stair             wells
  our city’s stray
                                                                       spine
                                                                                  of carpet
                                                                                                                steps

        & clawed doors
                                       that apartment                                                        hole 
                                                  of families in infinite                             cells
  far behind.

The poem works and wends its way down the page, repeating words
and shifting their definitions, letting white space create emphasis and
multiple interpretations. Kingsley starts with the words of elders in the
apartment building, “old heads in the complex,” but then the meaning
of complex becomes multiple, thanks to a line break: “tenant reality was
complex / colonies,” which refers to both the building and the intense
and stressful reality of living there. The word colonies calls to mind
colonialism as well as the communities the residents build.

Kingsley does the same deft work with “a project / after-project,”
bringing up associations with government-subsidized housing, but also
a “project” as something planned, and in this case an “after-project,”
something not finished, made from “stair  wells,” “spine / of carpet,”
“clawed doors,” “hole(s),” and “cells.” These “complexes” are planned
to house people and then forget about them—a project—which relates
back to the internment camps and boarding schools endured by those
in Kingsley’s invocation.

Kingsley narrows in on specific bodies without value, those of men
of color, for instance, as in “I Can’t Close My Eyes Without Seeing Jason
Pero’s Body”:

Jason Pero is in his front yard making the best
of our Bad River Reservation, turning porch boughs

into a drum set, each stick cracking stained wood. 
He imagines making it all the way to high school

drumline. & here comes that cop with report
“of a man carrying a knife.” & here is Jason drumming.

& here there will be no justice for death, no video 
evidence of Jason’s dying. Just this one that plays out

endlessly in my head.

Anaphora creates a sense of foreboding: “& here is Jason drumming,”
“& here comes that cop,” “& here there will be no justice for death, no
video / evidence of Jason’s dying.” Kingsley doesn’t show how Jason
dies; instead, in his anaphoric list he writes of the justice that will not
come for his death. The only “evidence” in the video is in the speaker’s
head. The lack of justice for Brown and Black men is a familiar story
in both our deep and recent national history. Trayvon Martin, Freddie
Gray, Eric Garner. This poem has particular relevance for spring 2020,
when we’ve seen how video evidence of the death of a man, George
Floyd, at the hands of police can stir people to action. But it remains to
be seen whether such proof of injustice inevitably will lead to justice.

In“‘Ohigiw´ e” Kingsley shows the interactions of lineages within the
space of his body:

Praise the Iroquois ceremony for the dead they burn corpses
the elevated selves of wind antlered manes the pollen-blown those 
whose hair find fertile earth & when we incinerate my mother
I think on this singing of familial silence into ode 
to my male pattern after pattern
the baldness of a barren scalp fire tumbles what is 
left of my matrilineage, Onondaga
& Japanese accursed in both cultures baldness 
understood as a blight of the White Man
this contamination of my genetic cost interlopes 
the tether once-taught by mother earth

I appreciate how he makes the “White Man” the genetic interloper in
this story—inheriting some “White Man’s” male-pattern baldness—
and admire how he twists the racist trope of a Native person scalping
a White man into something new and profound, the “White Man” in
his genetics scalping him, as he watches what’s left of his mother burn
away, his grief compounded by the loss of culture. As I read these
poems, I kept returning to his book title, Colonize Me, and contemplating
how it interacted with the poems. To me, the title is both an
invitation and a provocation: here are my parts—my insides, my history,
what I am made of—and yet the sum of these parts is something that
cannot or will not be colonized.

Writing place in the twenty-first century is an act undertaken alongside
many layers—of history, habitation, strata, culture, and colonial and
industrial violence. Harrison’s immersive North Sea focus is specific,
historical, and lyrical; Teare makes overt the toxicity in places where we
walk and live and in our own bodies, while concurrently investigating
the industrial and colonial forces that are shaping this anthropogenic
world. Kim breaks colonization, displacement, and industrialization
into their painful parts: mouths, boulders, coffins; and Kingsley’s familial
narratives transcend the personal to expose many of America’s
most significant racial problems. Perhaps translating the complexity
of place into language is one way to begin to comprehend where we’ve
been and the parts we each play now, with a deeper understanding of
the world as it really is.

Read more from Issue 17.2.