David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence (Driftwood Press). He’s a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi. Find recent poems in Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, & others. His poem “The hurt field” appears in the Summer 2022 issue of Carve.
“Field” is a common term from poetics, but it can also just be a plot of grass. What’s the field here?
I wanted to do a few things with the field/the idea of the field. At its most basic, I wanted it to be a location, a plot of grass which serves as a landscape for the poem. This isn’t strictly true as there’s a street corner and elevator (“no one screams in the elevator” taken from one of Jack Spicer’s letters), but the field is the main landscape. I also wanted to use it as a conceit to explore people, and their very human affects/afflictions, through nature. The field is as much springboard as it is landscape. It’s a springboard to blur human and nature, itself an artificial divide and a boring one at that. I hope troubling this divide makes it more interesting. Formally, I wanted the poem to mirror a field with the final lines serving as a kind of propagation from the main body. This is where the caesuras and the lack of punctuation come in. The lines sprout, twist, grow from the left margin toward the page’s center. I like that they’re somewhat uniform and somewhat uneven. They remind me of a tree line. I should note, too, that I had these ideas before and after writing. They might have been around while writing, but just barely. They were left somewhere at the edge of consciousness. Mostly, I was trying to come up with a good (however we define good) line, image, sentence, fragment.
Moss and goosegrass. These common, everyday plants set the scene to begin the poem, but it also ends with more fantastical vegetative imagery. What are the plants up to?
“What are the plants up to” is the best question I’ve been asked. I don’t know what they’re up to. I wanted to blur/bend/stretch the idea of human and plant. What the people in the poem (speaker, those mentioned by name, Jack Spicer and his proclamation) are up to is what the plants are up to. I wrote shades of alienation and addiction, physical and emotional hunger, begging, an almost satisfaction, religious/cultural ceremony, death, and probably other things I wasn’t aware of. I wrote these as understood by human-turned-nature-turned-human, which is to say I wrote a guess about what these would be like as experienced by, or understood through, the not human. Because it’s a guess it’s also, likely, a failure. I enjoy this particular kind of failure. An imaginative, reaching failure. I think that’s important for heart, mind, and species. Also something like religious/cultural ceremony is already not human. It’s a social projection of ideas, emotions, agreed upon behavior, ritual, etc. So, taking this and filtering it again through the not human is redundant, but it creates skips and fractures I find exciting. I hope the reader does too. Finally, on a banal note, I like plants. I’m a horrible gardener, but enjoy looking at and thinking about plants. I enjoy reading about them and their names. So, including common plants and creating human/plant hybrids is an homage to my leafy friends.
Tell us about one of the people mentioned toward the end.
It seems unfair to mention only one, so I’ll briefly say that they’re all friends who have died. Ryan, Kurt, and Zach were friends from high school. Ronnie was a friend from middle school. Chad, Al, and Ellen were friends in recovery (I’ve been in recovery fourteen years). Stevie and Josh were the younger brothers of two close friends. Ryan is the person I was closest to. I met him in kindergarten, then my family moved a lot, and I met him again when my family moved back to the same town years later. We listened to music, went to parties and shows, drank and did drugs, talked about literature, talked about music, lied. All the dumb things teenagers do. Eventually I ended up many states away working in the stockroom of a Pier1 Imports. He ended up working in the same stockroom. We were sober then. We hauled furniture and filled our mouths with chewing tobacco. We spent holidays together in a halfway house. Ryan was human – wonderful, kind, compassionate, creative, but also deeply, fundamentally, afraid and mean and sick. He died. I didn’t. He shows up in my poems now and I like that. It’s a bit hyperbolic to say he haunts me. I don’t believe that because I don’t believe in ghosts. Memory, though, is a haunting. Sean Bonney’s book Our Death begins with a poem titled “A Riot is a Haunt.” Maybe Ryan’s haunting is a riot of language, though I suspect Sean and Ryan wouldn’t agree.
Does the poem fit into any larger projects you’re working on?
Yes and no. I first drafted this poem two years ago. I’ve revised and tinkered since then, but it stands as an early attempt to move beyond human subjectivity. I’ve continued to explore this via poems (perhaps the only way to explore it). I had a project of incomplete history poems which were doing something similar. They attempted to escape subjectivity via history rather than nature/plant. You can find two of them in DIAGRAM. I wrote a longer incomplete history essay thing. An essay prose poem? I’m working on a manuscript of poems at the moment and am, I think, close to done. It’s of a piece with “The hurt field” and incomplete history poems, though doesn’t include either. It does have a poem titled “Morning with Fog” that’s about an imagined morning run. Trees and woods talk to the runner. There’s alienation and addiction and the poem ends with an image of the runner’s fingers curled around the handle of a coffee mug like a foxglove bloom.