11/10/2023 0 Comments Hold my head up you remind me who i amWhen the sunlight comes in the morning timeįor readers who have never experienced homelessness, Humphreys describes a life populated-and at times overwhelmed-by rats. He’d jot down his thoughts on scraps of paper that Street Roots staff would type up, and as the poems accumulated, they became his “Rat Saga” series. After years on the streets, Humphreys began to find his muse in his fear of rats, ever prevalent in his life. Though Carver’s bent toward nature draws from a Romantic tradition, Randy Humphreys’ decidedly does not. To be homeless in the Pacific Northwest means enduring a long rainy season, and thus a great deal of mud. It is striking that Carver transforms-or at least reassigns-mud into soil. Carver is looking for hope in the nonhuman natural world, and she finds it in a “lone daffodil” that “pushes up through the mud / that is soil.” The word lone juxtaposed with daffodil brings a bit of that quintessential Romantic nature poem, Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” But in this case, the daffodil has more resilience than human law. The quick, two-beat words-“whatnots” and “trip-traps”-skid over the traumatic event. In “Cannot Sweep Nature,” she describes the aftermath of city contractors removing the camp where unhoused people reside. Carver depicts a connection to nonhuman nature in contrast to the human systems that impose draconian policies targeting the poorest people in society. In some poems, she wakes to faeries, the trees becoming giants as she sleeps on pine needles. She succeeded.Ĭarver dips into her Celtic roots, building a magic that surrounds her near-constant contact with urban nature. Carver, who is also a journalist, fought back when the city “posted” her camp-court challenges and rulings have led to a process where the city staples up a lime green sheet of paper declaring their intention to remove a camp-by digging into ordinances and writing an article about it. Most people move a few blocks away after all, they have to lug possessions and maintain any resources they’ve tracked down nearby. The city of Portland hires contractors-and sometimes deploys police-to displace camps, actions commonly referred to as “sweeps.” On average, the city sweeps about a hundred camps a week. Carver has managed to hold on to her hillside camp in a neighborhood north of downtown for several years without the city displacing her. “It is just me and I am broken,” writes Bronwyn Carver. Their lungs take in the smoke of forest fires. Weather is not small talk but rather, bodily-it’s common for homelessness to chip away at one’s body parts: toes, feet, legs are amputated when people endure repeated freezes. After all, it is the trees people live among, and the cracks of sidewalks caulked with crud and seedlings, and the rain that presses into tarped tents, and the squirrels and blue jays and rats. Such traces show up variously, but one way is how this poetry collides with nature poetry and fills it with evidence of inequality. That framework can be extended to writing while homeless - an experience of societal abandonment, one’s body weathered by elements. She described poetry of witness in this way: “Regardless of the apparent ‘subject matter,’ these poems bear the trace of extremity within them, and are, as such, evidence of what occurred.” They spare no expense, with all its adornments and gilded objects,Ĭox’s tiny poems remind me a bit of a Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos, who I first read in “Against Forgetting,” an anthology of poetry of witness edited by poet Carolyn Forche. The inside is beautiful, the outside is ancient. He writes poems built of stacked observation, symmetrical lines, close-up details, and widening shots that create a different kind of symmetry, that of the rich (they) and the poor (we): Last House on the Block Not long before I met him, Daniel was living homeless near where the Portland Timbers play soccer, but for the six years I’ve known him, he’s lived in an apartment blocks from our newspaper office. Grab a copy of Orion, a national magazine of nature and culture, this month to read five Street Roots poets - Bronwyn Carver, Daniel Cox, Randy Humphreys, George McCarthy and Michone Nettles.
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