“If you’re writing nature poetry today, you are engaging in crisis. … What’s the mood of hope, and what’s the emotional palette? Those are big questions, [and] I think humor helps me express doubt of myself,” reflected writer and poet Evelyn Reilly during the Q&A following her reading in the Gund Community Foundation Theater on Tuesday.
William P. Rice Associate Professor of Literature Orchid Tierney introduced the Albany-based writer as a scholar and environmentalist whose poetry aims to “translate the language of science into the language of poetry.” Before she began reading, Reilly told the audience more about her identity as a poet and about the themes of her most recent collection, Having Broken, Are. Discussing the title, Reilly identified it as a poem of its own, explaining that the spaces between “Broken” and “Are” represent the space we all live in and that “melting glaciers and floods and fires and social dislocations are all occurring side by side with our daily lives. As much as this place of being is a place of grief, I also feel that it can be and needs to be, a place of beauty and connection too.”
Opening with the collection’s titular poem, she read, “Grief moves from box to box / Calendars, emoticons / Screen shots / Of a pangolin and a bat / Having become the animal, I am.” It was evident from these first few lines that Reilly’s poetry exists at the intersection of science, animality, nature and humanity. The soothing quality of her voice, combined with her slightly unpredictable meter, made the reading a sensory experience that spoke to Reilly’s skill as a performer of poetry.
When asked in the Q&A about how she finds a poem’s cadence when composing — as a writer who emphasizes the importance of sound in poetry — Reilly said, “Honestly, I have a kind of propulsive rhythm inside me, which I know when I read just comes out, and I don’t know what that is. I think maybe we all do.” She went on to explain that she often composes bits and pieces of poems by ear as she’s writing and editing and that she also practices reading her poems in order to discover rhythms that might not be visible on the page.
The next poem she read, “Sleeping with Trees,” was one of two long serial poems in the collection. The longer piece fully showcased the different rhythms of her work as well as her remarkable ability for writing poems that ramble far and wide — almost affecting a stream of consciousness — yet somehow manage to be tightly woven together internally. It took Reilly eight full minutes to read the poem in its entirety, but its length did not prevent “Sleeping with Trees” from making incisive, cutting observations and eliciting laughter from the audience, sometimes at the same time, as with the line “The slight chill of the word ethics / Why other stories were needed” just a few lines apart from “The notion of the soul as interiority / what crap tonight,” which garnered a hearty collective chuckle.
For the next couple of poems, Reilly turned to her 2009 poetry collection Styrofoam, which she discussed earlier in the day with some of Tierney’s students. “For good reasons, [the students] were a little baffled about how you would read these poems out loud. They’re kind of crazily visual, and I admitted to them that after I wrote it, I was nervous to read [it aloud],” Reilly told the audience. One of these poems, “Bear.Mea(e)t.Polystyrene,” considered how consumerism and the constant consumption of material objects has made nearly any object, even a revered artwork, just another disposable thing. Referencing Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa, Reilly read the lines “Teresa / among altered alters / at www.artnet.bernini/ecstasy.html / which along with everything becomes fuel / for the way things happen / the smell of fumes.” Reading out a website address in the middle of the poem could have come across as silly or amateurish, but in the context of the piece, choices like these reinforced the concerns about the current age that Reilly situates at the forefront of her practice.
Reilly expanded on her practice during the Q&A as she explained what guides her creative process and ideation: “It’s like, if you can find something that you can do, then it grows. … I always ask myself, does this feel alive? I don’t even know how, but if it feels alive, I go with it.”