Tag Archives: Robin Gow

Hominid animals

Reading Frans de Waal’s books always gets me thinking about the use of anthropomorphism/personification in poems. When I was studying and first learning about poems, the general thinking from critics seemed to be to treat anthropomorphism, and even personification, as a “no-no” in contemporary poetry. We were not to make trees or grasses or wolves “humanized”–which does make a kind of sense; instead, we were told to observe and describe what we saw with less of a reflection on whether the non-human thing bore resemblance to human things.

For example, the bee was not to love the flower or the hive, nor the ostrich to love a fellow ostrich. A willow shouldn’t sway like a dancer. It should sway like a willow in the wind. There was science behind all this, maybe Skinner’s science but still; and there is Nagel’s bat: how can a person imagine being a bat the way a bat experiences being a bat? I’m not going into reductive materialism here, don’t worry. Just trying to provide some context outside of poetry to suggest there may be forces behind the trend away from anthropomorphism, some of which are valid.

I have always been tempted to title a book The Personification of Everything.

Now science is fairly certain that emotions preceded “rational intelligence” as life evolved and that animals possess traits and behaviors that aren’t so fundamentally different from ours; we are hominid animals. I would add that, as reflective hominids who employ language for reasons beyond basic information, human beings make connections (metaphor, simile, parallelism…) and can observe the “others” in our environs as not always so unlike ourselves. Or dream of inhabiting the lives of those others, or imagine telling stories from those vastly strange (to us) points of view.

So I’m coming around to appreciating anthropomorphism and personification as dwelling in the realm of the imagination that is not the domain of philosopher or scientist. After all, writers have been taking other perspectives on stories for quite some time, especially during the past century. Ophelia’s perspective (Hamlet), Persephone’s (The Odyssey)…Kazim Ali re-writing Icarus’ story (Sky Ward, 2013). Why not, then, write poems using the perspective of the spotted lanternfly, as Robin Gow has done?

One of my favorite short stories by Ursula Le Guin, “Direction of the Road,” takes the perspective of an oak tree. It is about the relativity of time and motion, but one thing the piece brings home–without any preaching–is that human lives are comparatively brief and, dare I add, not as important in the scheme of things as we may believe. Once we can accept that possibility, maybe we can more gently embrace the world and the things of the world.

Alien

Last week I attended a local book festival that offered a day of independent and small press books (Easton Book Festival) and came away with Lanternfly August by Robin Gow. The poems fascinate me on a number of levels, especially as I love poetry that interconnects with science–biology in particular–and with the diverse experiences that make up a human life.

But first, some context or references. Gow hails from eastern PA, from a rural area north of me, and now lives in Allentown. This region of Pennsylvania was port-of-entry for the spotted lanternfly, a recent scourge for gardeners and landscapers, that made its way from Asia–where it feeds on Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven). Well, in fact, it did not “make its way” here; it was brought here, inadvertently I assume, through global trade and human intervention. It isn’t the lanternfly’s fault that it is an invasive species. It is human beings’ fault. What if we were to view the lanternfly from other perspectives? What metaphors might it offer us, particularly about being alien, the Other? This is one way to read Gow’s collection.

Gow, who is not yet 30, identifies as an “autistic bisexual genderqueer person” but says they didn’t come out until college. Life in rural Pennsylvania as a person with autism and a sense of being different in terms of mind and gender? There have to be feelings of alienation, or of feeling like an alien. Gow also writes for YA readers, where compassionate understanding of how it feels to be part of, or left out of, peer groups matters; in the lanternfly poems, readers get a sense of empathy even for this damaging leafhopper. That amazes me, and I appreciate it deeply.

When the bugs first appeared, I read as much as I could about how to discourage them from our trees, how to trap them and what their various stages (egg masses, instars) looked like. Mostly I was bent on eradication, with a bit of resignation in the mix–see this post from 2018. After we got them reasonably under control here, they began to move north and west, just as the brown marmorated stinkbugs did shortly after their arrival in 1998. Both insects feed on sap or fruit. They are foreign to our shores but find much to suck upon here and have damaged fruit crops and trees. Although some people find them beautiful–they are much prettier in flight than at rest, brightly translucent red with the sun behind their wings, and their second instar stage resembles ladybugs–they have gained the reputation of being a Bad Bug. Gow writes:

When I called you “host” I meant,
“I love you in a ruinous way.”

That’s from the poem “Third Instar.” In the poem “First Instar,” the speaker wonders how long before “this becomes wreckage? I don’t even know yet what I am.” The creature could be some type of cryptid, developing into something no one can explain or understand. Society offers solutions that don’t necessarily work–ways to eradicate the insect demonstrated on TikTok, laid out on government websites, posted on Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s pages. Also the inquiry, in “Home Remedies,” of totally re-imagining one’s body: “Have you tried becoming a different species? Have you really given mammals a try yet?” Wry humor, of a bleak but wildly intelligent sort, pervades many of these pieces. In “Stop the Spread” (pandemic/plague allusion definitely intended):

...I cannot stop myself
from lanterflying: verb meaning to exist ardently
despite not belonging. How did I become so contagious?
Spores, like fireworks, floated from my gills.

I’m not really writing a review here, just sharing my enthusiasm; otherwise I’d have written about the varieties of form/text/layout Gow employs and the structure of the collection, and much more. Anyway, this is the reason I love going to conferences, seminars, readings, small press, and literary events–always something new to me to explore and learn from. Gow’s poems have helped me to develop a kind of compassion for “alien invasives.” The parallels to how society treats its Others–those aliens and distraught foreigners (not colonizers) arrive almost inescapably from the collection. That those who do not fit in nonetheless have value and need appreciation and respect comes through as given. There’s deep heart in these poems.

A bit of awe from me to this poet. (I happen to be reading about awe right now, which may figure in my next post). To find out more about Robin Gow: They have a website with a daily poetry blog at https://robingow.com/dailypoetry/, definitely worth checking out, and their books are listed there.