Arborophobia is Nancy Holmes‘s sixth collection of poetry. She is the editor of Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems and is a poetry editor on The Trumpeter. She creates, supports, and curates eco-themed community-based art projects. Nancy is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna.
Interviewed by Dalyce Joslin
Dalyce Joslin (DJ): Nancy, in the notes at the end of Arborophobia you define the term as “the fear and hatred of trees.” You expand this definition saying that arborophobia is “a tendency of architects, developers, landscapers, agriculturalists, and Western society in general to transform ecosystems by destroying trees and native plants, ostensibly in the name of aesthetics and culture.” Although the shorter definition is specific to trees, the longer definition and, the title itself hint that Arborophobia will address climate change. I was drawn to Arborophobia wanting to know how you might do this. When despairing about with the enormity of the climate crisis, I turn to works like yours, avoiding the news for the reasons previous festival interviewee M.A.C. (Marion) Farrant so poignantly outlines: “the news is always bad and it’s always ‘breaking.’ It’s always breaking our hearts.” Nancy, in Arborophobia, you’ve written about these heartbreaks. You touch on despair, but your poems are not about despair. How do you manage to not give into despair in your writing and in your life?
Nancy Holmes (NH): Gosh. You’ve jumped in with the really hard questions.
DJ: I know. I’m sorry. In my eagerness to learn more about you and Arborophobia I have started with the most burning question I had about the collection. I hope the other questions will seem easier.
NH: A lot of research has been done about the value of art in relation to climate change and changing people’s minds or behaviours. We like to think art speaks to people. There’s all sorts of discourse right now about how we can change the narratives around climate change and behaviour, but some of the most recent research shows that unless the art has hope in it, or some indicator of hope, it’s not going to be effective. In fact, people will blank it out in the same way they do with the news. You become overloaded. You’re in denial. You don’t want to hear that. Am I like that too? Absolutely.
Unless art, narrative or eco-project has hope it’s not going to speak to anybody. In a way, the challenge for writers is how to master your own despair and at least gesture towards hope in some way. I think that’s hard because we tend to be sensitive to the despair. The language is depressing. The images are depressing. Statistics and science are depressing. It’s hard to find enough hope.
One of the things I do at my job at UBC in the Department of Creative Studies is to participate in these big collaborative projects with artists around environmental issues of various kinds. If you can design programs where people feel they are making a difference the uptake is ten times more than trying to get people to realize how bad it is. For many years I worked with a wonderful collaborator at Emily Carr University, Cameron Cartiere. We did all kinds of projects around native pollinators and native bees. Over and over again our message was “you can do these little things and these little things actually help.” So, planting a garden for bees, making sure you have a space in your neighbourhood where bees can live and nest, these encouragements make a huge difference to people.
Recently, I heard an architect interviewed about the heat islands in cities and urban spaces. He said people can mitigate that by planting greenery, shade trees and replanting parks and parking lots. The interviewer commented that these are all small things and asked if they will even make any difference. The architect gave a great answer, one that I am holding onto. The climate crisis is the result of countless millions of small actions that we do all the time, so the only thing that’s going to change its course is countless millions of small actions in response. Wow! That makes me feel hopeful. If I can stop one little action that is harmful to the natural world and do one little action that is good for the natural world, the more people that do that the better.
DJ: It lessens the feelings that you must fix it completely and that you must do it all.
NH: Exactly. You are not responsible for all the C02 emissions in your neighbourhood. That’s where I am. I always have a climate change unit in the courses I teach at the university, even if it’s creative writing. A lot of my poetry is about the natural world. It always has been. I am trying to be the kind of nature poet who’s not just writing about how much you love the natural world, but also about its precarity.
DJ: Thank you. That’s a generous and thoughtful answer to an intense question. Nancy, you don’t use the term climate crisis, but your poetry speaks to it through your intricate descriptions of the world you see before you. For example, in the poem “Tribes of Grasses” you celebrate the “spikelets” and the “spears” as the seeds of grass “that no savannah exists without.” In turn, you create a striking image; the grasses become the “feathers of the earth, that bird of the sun.” In praising their beauty and strength, you allude to their vulnerability and potential loss. In the poem “Ponderosa Pine,” you playfully, yet poignantly, foreground its loss as the Ponderosa pine shouts at the “tree feller,” and “the do-gooders protesting on the hill.” More urgently the Ponderosa cries out that, “time is short.” Do you see these poems building a sense of urgency that you want your reader to absorb, to gain agency from, to act on?
NH: I feel the Ponderosa pine poems are the flip side of the hope. There are two parts in the Ponderosa sequence. It’s polyphonic, a whole collection of voices. Part one is a collection of resentful voices that I hear all the time. I come from a very conservative part of BC, Kelowna. I collected those resentful and angry voices, all those things that make us resist our role in climate change, or the death of trees, or in my case the fires. We have fire after fire after fire every summer. In part two, “Qualms,” the voices are those of guilt, fear of having done wrong, longing for a completely unearned forgiveness and absolution, a whining passive nihilism. You’re right in that what I am trying to do is highlight the dangers to the natural world. In this case the Ponderosa pine poems are about our dangerous attitudes, whether I think I’m guilty. I’m terrible. Please forgive me. I am going to try to be better. Or, alternatively, you guys are such whiners. Climate change is ridiculous. Why are you talking about it all the time? I don’t want to change. I am trying to capture those attitudes all around me. Those voices are probably in me too. The sequence of poems and voices is about looking inside us to see what we are. Every religion in the world tells us that the unrelenting focus on the self, on the human and our own needs and feelings is an intellectual and moral failing. The Ponderosa pine sequences are meant to be a snapshot of our moral failings.
DJ: Thank you for elaborating on that. I want to reread those sections, this time with a deeper understanding and enjoyment of their intent.
NH: I had fun doing those poems.
DJ: Although the title foregrounds the climate crisis, Arborophobia addresses other thought-provoking themes. The five sections (Orb, Arborophobia, Stain, Julian, and Path)weave together representations of the natural world, nostalgia, family, suicide, time, dementia, and aging. You also contrast the mundane lives of women with the spiritual lives of saints, most specifically Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic. Although the sections appear disparate in their titles and subject matter, akin to the poems “Tribes of Grasses” and “Ponderosa Pine,” the connections are evident, though nuanced. Would you talk about the decisions you made putting this collection together, structuring the order of the sections and selecting the sequence of the poems within?
NH: It took a long time to order them. As you noted there were many threads to pull through the collection. At one point, I had all the saint poems together and the Julian poems first. At another point, I had a big collection that wasn’t broken into sections. In the end, like I said earlier about the Ponderosa poems being a snapshot of moral failings, the Julian section is also about the moral failings of human beings but more in relation to love. I thought these two sections around moral failings would be my two anchors, and I would build other sections that speak to moral failure in a slightly different way, the “Stain” section most obviously. Then I decided to bookend the collection with two hopeful sections. Maybe hopeful isn’t the right word, but rather poems that provide some alternate vision, tainted and stained, but possibly more celebratory of life. That’s how I vaguely mapped it in my mind. How successful it is I don’t know. And then I ended up sprinkling the saint poems throughout, because I would think we need a saint poem here. [Nancy laughs]
DJ: Your poems are so finely wrought, and your precise word choices create achingly beautiful images, such as the spears of grass that become “feathers of the earth.” On the back cover of Arborophobia, poet and essayist Tim Lilburn says, “Nancy Holmes carefully picks up sorrows and turns them, delicate, entrancing, in her hand.” Tim continues. “The voice crackles; everywhere in these poems is a mystical or metaphorical sensuality.” Nancy, can you elaborate on your writing process? I know poets rework poems endlessly. How do you know when you have a word, a line, or a poem the exact way you want it? How do you know when a poem is finished?
NH: It is hard. You’re exactly right. I think all poets spend much time rewriting and reworking, and reshaping, and revisiting. I need lots of time. I often start with a couple of lines that strike me, maybe the language or a phrase or an image. I’ll start there and build a poem around it. Then very quickly, I must find a voice, the voice of the poem. That for me is the struggle. What’s the linguistic container? I spend a lot of time refining that. I read it out loud. I know that they are not ready if I am not reading it well, if the voice is not consistent all the way through or it doesn’t have the energy or the tone I want. I spend a lot of time worrying about the voice. You’re fortunate if you have a good reader. This time I had my friend Sharon Thesen who is a wonderful writer with a great sense of voice. She has one of the most interesting voices in Canadian poetry. She also has a great ear and will say things like this stanza doesn’t seem to be in the right order, or this word doesn’t seem natural here. When she says things like that I say, yes, obviously. I was just hiding that from myself.
DJ: Those are remarkable glimpses into your writing process. As we’ve talked about, Arborophobia travels the complexities of loss and grief. In the last section, “Path,” the poem “Ways and Means,” likens this journey to reading “a poem that’s both a baffling and a showing.” That insight speaks to me of respect for your reader, in that poems will always be impenetrable at some level, but your reader will work toward a new awareness. The process makes me think of a goldfish in a murky bowl. You see it and then it swims away and disappears.
NH: Exactly!
DJ: Yes, it makes me wonder what just happened there. I had a moment that promised a new way forward, but I must find that way on my own. Will you elaborate on this relationship with your poetry and your reader?
NH: Maybe poetry is in the tradition of all kinds of metaphorical thinking. A metaphor always shows something. This is this, trying to help you understand something better, but at heart it’s baffling how the two things could possibly be related. Yet, there is a kind of magic to it that’s inexplicable, a mystery. Mystery is inherent in metaphor. Poetry has deep roots in religious language and prayer. They are not meant to be easy, because how can you think and feel your own way into your own experience if someone gives you answers. Poetry is in that tradition of providing tools for vindicating feeling and hopefully they are good tools that mean something to someone else, but they are certainly not meant to be guideposts or paths to enlightenment. I was reading a lot of Julian Norwich as I was writing this book. Her book is called The Showing. She is showing you visions she had when she was very ill, but they are baffling. Her descriptions are vivid, and she says amazing things, but at the same time you are being led to mysterious places. It is interesting that her book is called The Showing and so much of it is about unknowing, moving your way into unknowing through showing. There are so many of her famous phrases, “I it am” or “All shall be well.” Will it? Well, how? But she convinces you there is great wisdom in those kinds of mysteries. I was interested in that spiritual work, that emotional work. Work seems like a bad word. Doing is a better word.