Tag: poetry

Ep. 47 – Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil on writing love letters to nature

In 2020, poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil published her first nonfiction book, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments. In the book’s thirty dazzling essays, Nezhukumatathil weaves love stories about being a daughter, a partner, a mother, and a teacher with reverence for wild animals and plants and what they give us – their ability to expand our imagination and empathy, to connect us to others, to unearth memories, to break our habits of thinking, to teach us lessons big and small, and — perhaps most of all — to simply leave us gobsmacked, humbled, and thrilled to remember that creatures like narwhals and newts exist in this world.

“Wonder is contagious. Awe and astonishment is contagious. I think this book has served as an invitation for people to say, ‘God, I remember this!’ or ‘I did this with fireflies’ or ‘did you ever see this kind of firefly?” … And oftentimes, the most heartwarming stories involve siblings or parents who aren’t around anymore, that they hadn’t even thought of a particular outdoor memory of them for so long. I just feel so grateful that for whatever reason, my book has served as a spark or conduit to get them thinking.” – Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Photo by Caroline Beffa)

At a time when reflection on the natural world is often defined by despair and loss,  Nezhukamatathil’s work is exuberant and full of contagious joy for the beauty and kinship that the world still offers us. The daughter of a Filipina mother and a Malayali Indian father, Nezhukamatathil writes about the human and non-human organisms  she has learned from and who have shaped her. The peacocks that she fell madly in love with as eight-year-old on her first trip to India, and then proudly drew in class in small town Iowa, only to be reprimanded by her teacher for not drawing an “American” animal. The beloved and lost pet cockatiel, Chico, that her parents spent hours frantically searching for, and eventually found safe and sound on the tip-top of the persimmon tree. The superb bird of paradise whose spectacular courtship moves parallel the ebullient synchronicity of the dance floor  at her wedding when the DJ played the “Macarena.” The fireflies that remind her of summer nights with her parents and sister in their Oldsmobile. 

Continue reading Ep. 47 – Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil on writing love letters to nature

Ep. 8 – Charles Siebert on translating nature’s symphony

The early twentieth century bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll studied the private worlds of animals, and the perceptual differences and similarities between our worlds. Uexküll used a musical metaphor to explain his idea that each organism has a distinct, subjective and all-consuming life-world. To Uexküll, in the words of Dorion Sagan, “Organisms are instruments in a sort of celestial music show of which we hear only strains.” In his view, as Sagan writes, the multitude of earth’s organisms — a word derived from the Greek word, organon, for “instrument” — formed a many-membered orchestra of extraordinary richness.

“Our human gaze has been misdirected,” says journalist and poet Charles Siebert. “We look heavenward for deliverance when deliverance comes from looking down and back into the biology from whence we came and that great symphony  we’re part of.”
(Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)

Once, while attending a symphony by Gustav Mahler and sitting beside a young man absorbed in following along the score, Uexküll wondered if it is “the task of biology to write the score of nature.” “Each voice of a person or instrument is a being for itself, but one which melts into a higher form through point and counterpoint with other voices, which from then grows further, gaining richness and beauty in order to bring forward to us the composer’s soul,” he wrote. “Reading the score,” the young man sitting beside him told Uexküll, “one can follow the growth and branching off of the individual voices that, like the columns of a cathedral, bear the weight of the all-encompassing dome. Only in this way does one get a glance into the many-membered form of the performed artwork.” Our guest on this episode has devoted his career to observing and writing these interplaying “scores” of natures, the stories of animals, through prose and poetry. His work has allowed millions of readers to hear and appreciate anew strains of non-human animals in nature’s symphony.

“Words are all we have… We’re stuck with words, but there’s a way to manipulate them and use them to free our thoughts and our thinking rather than build cages,” Siebert says. The windowsill in Siebert’s office hosts a menagerie of animal figurines. Each represents an animal he’s written about, and many represent creatures that we are at risk of losing forever. (Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)
Continue reading Ep. 8 – Charles Siebert on translating nature’s symphony