"...what counts as nature writing—and who identifies as a nature writer—is beginning to change. In recent years, as the environmental movement has started to grapple with its historical connections to racism and xenophobia, a new generation of poets, essayists, memoirists, and novelists of color is taking up space in a genre that historically has excluded our perspectives. They include Ross Gay, Natalie Diaz, Kim TallBear, Camille Dungy, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, among many others. They have raised their voices in anthologies like The Language of Trees, edited by Katie Holten, and A Darker Wilderness, edited by Erin Sharkey. Books like Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches embody a nature writing that centers the most marginalized and names the violent histories inherent in shaping our relationship to nature. More importantly, they remind us that oppressed people have always partnered with nature when seeking our liberation."
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Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited and compiled by Camille Dungy
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With poetry, you are allowed to have a persona. The speaker of a poem can do things that might operate more in a fictional realm than a nonfictional one. The situation may be factual or it may be fantastical. With a poem, it is possible for both the reader and the writer to really trust that there is a potential for fabrication and distance. And that is not as obviously true when you write in nonfiction.
Camille Dungy, from “Writing a Grove: A Conversation with Poet Laureate Ada Limón” by Camille T. Dungy, Orion Magazine, August 2022
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Poem Revised in a Twelfth-Floor Hotel Room After Seeing a Man in the Building Across the Street Holding What Appeared to be Binoculars // Camille Dungy
The baby sings in her high chair
at the banquet.
I know most people at this table,
but not everyone. The keynote speaker talks
about how to make beauty in today’s world. A woman
we met during cocktails whispers
that she wants a picture of the baby.
Ray would say no.
He thinks he can protect her, but I don’t.
Sure, I say. Go ahead.
The baby sings in her high chair.
An artist at our table doodles a sketch and gives it to me.
“Princess Callie,” reads the caption.
Thanks, I say.
This will go up on her wall.
A man approaches when the keynote is done.
Your daughter is beautiful.
I videotaped her while you ate.
Facebook keeps two copies
of each photograph ever posted on its site,
even if the poster deletes the original.
George Lucas owns the rights to all profits
made from Carrie Fisher’s girlish face.
This is how we’ve dealt with beauty in today’s world.
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I’m often thinking about what vision means, what our expectations for vision mean, but also how differently our lives can be when we correct vision.
Orion Magazine | To Observe that Kind of Devotion: Camille Dungy and Major Jackson
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my lover who lives far by Camille T. Dungy
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🌿 Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille T. Dungy
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
“Black Nature” is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics.
A truly reflective collection of poetry that embraces the beauty, the struggle, and the complicated history of nature and the African American people. With sections titled “Nature, Be With Us” to “Forsaken of the Earth”, this should be on every poetry lovers shelf. These poems have such a powerful impact on how nature is viewed from a non-white lens and they made me consider a type of nature I hadn’t considered before.
Side note: My 3 favorite poems were “The Haunted Oak” by Paul Laurence Dunbar; “the earth is a living thing” by Lucille Clifton; and “Miscarriage in October with Ladybugs” by Amber Flora Thomas.
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Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
of wind down a mountain pass another.
Language by Camille T. Dungy
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nobody gets me like this one essayist im reading for class gets me
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First Fire
Stripped in a flamedance, the bluff backing our houses
quivered in wet-black skin. A shawl of haze tugged tight
around the starkness. We could have choked on August.
Smoke thick in our throats, nearly naked as the earth,
we played bare feet over the heat caught in asphalt.
Could we, green girls, have prepared for this? Yesterday,
we played in sand-carpeted caves. The store we built
sold broken bits of ice plant, empty snail shells, leaves.
Our school’s walls were open sky. We reeled in wonder
from the hills, oblivious to the beckoning
crescendo and to our parent’s hushed communion.
When our bluff swayed into the undulation, we ran
into the still streets of our suburb, feet burning
against a fury that we did not know was change.
CAMILLE T. DUNGY
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Four days ago, the dogwood was a fist
in protest. Now look. Even she unfurls
to the pleasure of the season. Don’t be
ashamed of yourself. Don’t be. This happens
to us all. We have thrown back the blanket.
We’re naked and we’ve grown to love ourselves.
I tell you, do not be ashamed. Who is
more wanton than the dancing crepe myrtle?
Is she ashamed? Why, even the dogwood,
that righteous tree of God’s, is full of lust
exploding into brightness every spring.
Camille T. Dungy, from "What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison"
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"I didn't want you to have this,"
he whispered. If he could not consume my body,
the food he'd given me to eat would have to do.
From "Let Me" by Camille T. Dungy
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I don’t want to be the same person writing the same work, and I don’t want to be the editor choosing the same work over and over again. I want to get out of that eddy and off that river, and go walk in the meadow sometimes. So, we know these five authors? Who are five more? Now ask those five authors who they’re reading. That’s an easy way to start. Ask those five and then the next five and the next five, and soon you’ve got forty-five new people to read.
Camille Dungy, from “Camille Dungy and Major Jackson | To Observe that Kind of Devotion | A conversation”, published in Orion Magazine
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A poem by Camille T. Dungy
After Opening The New York Times I Wonder How to Write a Poem about Love
To love like God can love, sometimes.
Before the kettle boils to a whistle, quiet. Quiet
that is lost on me, waiting as I am
for an alarm. The sort of things I notice:
the bay over redbud blossoms, mountains
over magnolia blooms. There is always something
starting somewhere, and I have lost ambition
to look into the details. Shame fits comfortably
as my best skirt, and what can I do
but walk around in that habit? Turn the page.
Turn another page. This was meant to be
about love. Now there is nothing left but this.
Camille T. Dungy
More poems by Camille T. Dungy are available on the Poetry Foundation site.
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