Poetic Conversations: Between Horror and The Soil’s Plenitude ~ On Petra Kuppers’ “Diver Beneath The Street”

In her seminal book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Petra Kuppers’ new collection of poetry, Diver Beneath the Street positions her as a poet laureate of the wounded world’s layers. For the marrow of these poems, she digs down into the microbial crust beneath our feet and soars on air’s molecular currents. She wraps her arms around the joy of the natural spaces where she’s grown her life, while lamenting that the Earth must bear witness to, and scars of humanity’s most craven impulses. I often think of my default emotional state as being on a fault line between terror and boundless gratitude. As Kuppers so achingly phrases it, all Americans live, “between horror and the soil’s plenitude” (xiii).

Kuppers is a poet who relies on the image more than the narrative. So it makes sense that an image would be so central to ground, illuminate, and braid the collection’s themes. Each of the six sections of Diver Beneath the Street open with the same photograph that gives the book its cover image: an x-ray of Kuppers’ lungs during her diagnosis with COVID. The image being repeated forces the reader to consider fissures, wounds, and the closeness of death. But without written context, it also functions as a Rorschach test. I saw a topographical map, a leafless tree, a cluster of dried riverbeds. So, too, does Kuppers intertwine several major thematic concerns: nature’s gifts, the porous boundaries between the world and human body, environmental degradation, and the media fascination with the deaths of (certain) women as they relate to a place.

Kuppers grapples with her own joy against a landscape deteriorating because of the climate crisis, and also the specific neighborhood that had been the hunting grounds during the unsolved Michigan Murders. Kuppers describes living a few houses from where one of the victims’ bodies was found. She terms this “a disease of home” (20) and while she is more distinctly aware of the deaths that took place on her home soil, this disease is something all Americans must rectify with as we exist on stolen land built by enslaved people.

Kuppers draws attention to the publicity around the murders of white women alongside the silence around how Indigenous displacement has destroyed the same area over centuries. “Road divider wild plant feelings: grass kneels down,” she writes in her poem “Regeneration” (9). “Grass feels pressure when a line of policemen tramp.” Kuppers has the astounding, unnerving ability to create a shadowy world. But maybe it doesn’t need to be created. Maybe our daily lives are overlaid over a dark forest we wish not to see, as in fairy tales.

One can see the dichotomy of man-made sprawl and the murders of women in the opening of her poem, Michigan Murders (12).

“Every ten years, another field succumbs to a street name.

In the large city, a house dies quietly, then the next.

Ypsilanti night terrors. Women on a thumb. Women on

the dump. Women down the basement stairs. Women

in the laundry room.”

How deftly she moves from the destruction of her environment to the destruction of human life. These things are bound together in ways most people refuse to contemplate. The poem closes:

“The motorist climbs out of her car. Something caught/her eye, she says. Something winked out

there./Remember me. Remember her./The dial ray returns, glints off a shard of glass by the side/of the road, off the muted sign,/bulbs burned out, hits/the seeds of garden flowers, rows upon rows, before the/tiny cellar window” (14)

I believe there are a hundred thousand Americas inside America — Kuppers invites me into hers. I am so grateful to get to see this world she creates with all its decomposition and its attendant growth.

The leaps of association and possibility that Kuppers weaves like transparent spider silk between the grounding, if terrible thematic planets of her subject matter allow for a wide world of images. In a section from “Tunnels” (39), a long poem that comprises the book’s entire third section: “She rattles hollow spirit anchor/arms wide. Low quake tsunami/fire press granite grind bones/contort till they flare into/cathedral ship. In the dry, dust/falls moth peacock scales.” She overturns words readers will think they know the full beauty of like desert stones, holding them up to her own light until seen anew.

The natural world is not a passive, lifeless backdrop. It is a beloved collaborator, witness, and victim of our worst impulses. But it is also a partner in sickness and in health, as in the gorgeous, “Dear White Pine in My Garden” (53) where she thanks the tree whose sap helped alleviate her COVID symptoms and situates its ancient history as a help mate.

“You lodge, a mini tree, in DNA passed down through my maternal line, farm women with hands in faraway soil where what was wrapped in muslin, sunk into tea kettle and boiled all day between Napoleon’s soldiers, long treks to silk factories, hoot of titanic engines on briny seas, mirrored itself in a New Country, there grew wild and tall.

We gather you now, new flu with old expectorants, ballast for the graveyards

of our living rooms.”

This poem also introduces an epigraph Kuppers uses throughout several poems in the book’s second half. She positions the poem’s setting by stating it was written “upon drifting” in a certain location. This repeated verb use invites readers into how Kuppers would have us move through the world of the poems. I am fascinated by this gentle guidance, though I had some difficulty understanding Kuppers’ linguistic shifts. I am a person who struggles with the speed of my own thoughts in the face of stillness, meditation, or the vastness of the beyond human. But I felt explicitly told to let go of my mind’s vice grip on narrative with the aid of these two words. A place can, but does not always necessarily have, a story that humans can readily enter into. Poems need movement, but what happens when a poem does not rely on forward propulsion but a different tenor of direction? Kuppers asks that her readers drift.

Kuppers is at home in disorientation, both from trauma and violence and from drifting amidst beauty. She does not have any desire to hold her reader’s hand through the tumult. In the notes, she refers to “swimming with Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck” as a text alongside this one. I will be swimming with and in Kuppers’ poetry as I attempt to tap into new landscapes in my work. I aim to let go of the concrete, and to use language as sound to tunnel and drift — without fearing lack of knowledge of where a poem might lead me.

.

Dear White Pine in My Garden
upon drifting in my backyard in Ypsilanti, Michigan

Thank you for the delicious syrup.

Your five-bundled fascicles cleave the alveoli of my lungs.

Lances stir mucus, leave vitamin C in the brew.

At the farthest ends of my arterial capillaries, slick whiff of aroma lenses a
molecule through the membrane’s barn door.

You lodge, a mini tree, in DNA passed down through my maternal line, farm women with hands in faraway soil where what was wrapped in muslin, sunk into tea kettle and boiled all day between Napoleon’s soldiers, long treks to silk factories, hoot of titanic engines on briny seas, mirrored itself in a New Country, there grew wild and tall.

We gather you now, new flu with old expectorants, ballast for the graveyards of our living rooms.

Galleons come to a standstill, oak timber decays into ribs on our beaches.
Dear pine, your soft wood smoothed the midship’s deck, salted and sugared.

You dissolved first, fibers rent by sea birds.

Leached-out needles make for compost row.

Acidic, you bite the land back, long for the sea, channel stuckness into flow.

Protect us, dear pine, let me root here, back bowed, hands flat.

by Petra Kuppers

Diver Beneath The Street — at Wayne State University Press site

Diver Beneath the Street by Petra Kuppers was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.