Our Job Is to Sing: An Interview with David Baker

Alison Deming: I read the poem “Whale Fall” while at my summer home on Grand Manan. This is a commercial fishing island of 2,500 residents. They’ve lost most of their fisheries—for all the reasons we know. Lobstering is the last thing they have and they’re going at it gung-ho. My friends and neighbors are lobstermen and women. The Bay of Fundy is also one of the ground central locations for the North Atlantic right whale, and they’re becoming entangled in the ropes of all the lobster traps in that booming economy. So, I live in a place where my heart is pulled powerfully in the direction of the whales and also in empathy for the fishermen. It’s one of those complicated emotions that I think poetry comes out of, as C.K. Williams spoke about so beautifully. So, I was grateful to you for this poem, because it brought me profoundly back to the whales and to the considerations of individual death and collective death—the collective death of extinctions—in such a beautiful way.

David Baker: I appreciate it.

Alison Deming: Much of your work centers around the apprehension of nature and the amazing distance we’ve come, let’s say, from John Clare to this era of ecopoetry. What would you want to tell me about poetry’s role over time in our apprehension of nature?

David Baker: I teach courses in Greek and Latin lyric, so we look at old bucolics and old idylls. And, of course, the whole genre has changed and changed in our lifetimes—say, the last 40 years. Not just from John Clare, who is one of my favorite poets. I adore John Clare, though I don’t think he ever wrote one completely, terrifically finished poem. He’s got thousands of poems. Even in my own writing I seem to have moved from being something like a nature poet to something like an environmental poet to something like an ecopoet. It really is just a matter of intentionality. I don’t want all of my poems to be about alarm and peril and awfulness, though I feel that almost all the time.

There are poems that simply take place in the natural world. I think of those as nature poems, where the site of the poem is whatever nature is. I don’t even know what that is because I don’t know what that’s not. Plutonium is natural. A city, a vast city, is a habitat, and there’s a way to talk about any kind of habitat as a natural thing. To me the nature poem is the one that takes place in whatever it is we think nature is. I think of the environmental poem as the poem that may be more about the subject matter than the site where nature is the thing that the poem is thinking about or singing about. Not just, here I am in the trees, but let’s talk about how the trees work. What’s a leaf? How do the trees take in water, and how do they do photosynthesis?

I think a further category—not just where nature is the site or nature is the subject, but where it is the entire circumstance of the poem, the conundrum, the disaster, the responsibility, the culpability we have for that world—that to me is an ecopoem. A poem that seeks to speak in behalf of or in conjunction with the circumstance of nature. I think about these things only after the fact, after having fumbled through a lot of poems and written a lot of different poems where the teacher in me or the critic in me finds it useful to sort through the different typologies of these literary forms. I don’t think about it that much when I write the poem.

Alison Deming: I love your definition of the ecopoem as taking in the entire circumstance and culpability. That seems to me to be a really useful definition.

David Baker: Oh, I’m glad because I see the term a lot. I’ve used it in recognizing other people. People use it sometimes in reading my poems, and I have tried to figure out what that actually might mean.

Alison Deming: You have the beautiful poem “Turner’s Clouds for Plumly” in the book, and your friendship with Stanley Plumly is so important. It comes through in your poems in such a wonderful heartful and artful way. There’s grief that informs this book. For Plumly. And your father. But in this poem “Whale Fall,” the grief plays through the whales, the sixth great extinction, and then your illness. And this last is an essential element of the poem.

It is really interesting to me that animals bring our crimes against back to us. We think we can hide them out there, and then all this evidence you bring us about the whales with the plastics and ropes and all the stuff in their bodies shows us that our apprehension of nature in this age has to be one of grief—as well as, holy cow, it’s wondrous out there and stupefyingly beautiful. We don’t know what to do with our climate grief, but I like to hypothesize that our experience of personal grief might be helpful to us. I wonder how you think of those two kinds of grief.

David Baker: It’s a poem that sees something in a microscopic personal lens and something in a massive or global or cosmic lens. I want to have a kind of extended reach in this book and in this poem. The only way for me to think about the extended reach—millennia of time or a global landscape—is to think about first of all the particular things. When I started this poem, I started to write about whales—having lived my whole life in the Midwest completely landlocked. And decided that if I am a citizen of this natural world and a citizen of this globe then I’m connected to everything. My landscape is ocean and a glacier in Iceland, as well as the woods in central Ohio where I live.

So, I started to take more notes. I have hundreds of pages of notes about whales and plastiglomerates and the whale fall and what happens in the oceans and fishing, and I just wasn’t happy with the poem that I was writing. At the same time, I was trying to think about writing a poem about my illness. We didn’t even know what it was 25 years ago when I first got sick—something called M.E. I began to take notes for that, too. I’ve never written about it very much in poetry. It dawned on me at some point that this had to be one poem and that it had to move from a hummingbird in my backyard, which is one of the totem animals in this poem, to this one whale dying in the deep part of the ocean where it can actually go through those three stages of whale fall before it reaches the bottom. I was thinking about that very hard.

Grief, yes, it’s in the writing about my own illness. The purpose was to try to write about grief without writing about pity. That’s a difficult thing. And also trying to write about the remarkably awful damages that we’ve done to the oceans and to the environment without as much blame as a recitation of detail. What do we find in the stomach of a whale? What is marine snow? How does the whale dissolve and become reinhabited as it sinks into the deeper and deeper parts of the ocean?

I wrote a book of poems called Scavenger Loop about farming in the Midwest and about my mother. And about the important women in my family. Whale Fall ended up being about my father in some way and my very dear friends, Stanley Plumly, and William Merwin, who shows up in this book as well. So, there’s this personal grief that follows through the whole book, and I think gives some of the harmony to “Whale Fall,” which could be a really overwhelming poem. Everything about it is huge. The whale is huge. The oceans are huge, the damage is huge. How do we make that particularized in such a way so that the poem can be a poem and not just a massive account of something or journalistic report.

Alison Deming: Even though you click in some journalistic reports as part of your evidence.

David Baker: It seems to me the lyric poem has to have a capability to tell news, to be documentary, to rely on facts and figures and details and accuracies, as well as express the emotive part of a lyric.

There has to be room in the art form for the discordant, the disharmonic, the facts and figures of things, the documentation of things, and it’s our job as lyric poets to continue to wrestle with how to make that poetry.

Alison Deming: You include science and mathematical formulas. You have that in “Scavenger Loop” too, similar types of rhetorical structures that pastiche into the poem. I love scientific diction—its music is just stunning. I’m really interested in how you dance with the lyric potentiality of scientific diction and how you move from there to mathematics.

David Baker: Just making it up as I go. I have a real fondness for a kind of pure lyric. I love beautiful, plain singing lyric poems. There’s Clare again. But if that’s all a poem can do, it’s nothing but wallpaper. There has to be room in the art form for the discordant, the disharmonic, the facts and figures of things, the documentation of things, and it’s our job as lyric poets to continue to wrestle with how to make that poetry. That’s one of the things at work in this poem. I hope those things happen in the context of something like a large song. I think of this poem as sort of symphonic. I want all the instruments in the band to be playing and not just the violin. I want the kazoo, and I want the trombones, and I want the organ. All these different intonations and kinds of accompanying music to be part of this big melody. 

Alison Deming: For my money this is moving within an area of interest in contemporary poetic form. What can the poem take in? How much can it take in? Someone else we both love, A.R. Ammons, in Garbage took everything in the poem—but it was formally one gesture.

David Baker: I love that poem.

Alison Deming: I love that poem too. It’s an aggregate—couplets strung along with the colons. It held its form and didn’t need to do anything different. This leads organically to my next area of questions which have to do with form. I’m really interested in long poems. I like to write them myself. I’m always very anxious about starting poems and ending poems. And the long poems just keep going. Don’t worry about it for a while. But I’m interested in all the formal questions of the long poem, and this poem, as compared to say an Ammons poem like Garbage, keeps reinventing its formal gestures from the incorporation of prose and documentary to the last section that becomes a polyvocal, fragmentary set of gestures. It’s becoming a plastiglomerate in that last section. I’m really interested in what guided your formal decisions in the poem. How did you know where you were going?

David Baker: I just trusted the process. I’m an old musician. That’s what I was before I was poet, and I think of music as highly mathematical. So much in music is mathematic. The relationship between one note and another is a matter of harmonies. The tempo, the velocity, the pitch of the song is mathematics. I think of this poem too as mathematical. The first thing I thought was, okay, I’m gonna have three sections—the first, the fourth, and the seventh—that are descriptive of the three parts of whale fall. Those are the sections where the whale falls, and I’m gonna make those sections descend. They’re gonna fall. It’s something that silly. Though if you take those sections, 1 and 4, and recombine the couplets, you’ll see they’re all ten syllable lines that are pulled apart.

Alison Deming: They’re like arpeggios. The chords are torn apart. That’s cool.

David Baker: Section 1 goes down, section 4 goes down, but section 7, which is the third stage of the whale fall, is, in my mind, where this body hits the bottom and spreads laterally. This whale is now a cosmos of billions of little bitty things that orbit it, float around it, and it never quite gets to the bottom. It just sort of settles and dissolves, and I wanted that last section to be like that. The falling apart of the syntax and of the body and of the material.

So, I thought, okay, section 2 is a memory section. Childhood. There’s a storm in the grade school. Kids are being told to take shelter under their desks. Those couplets are in ten syllable lines and throughout most of the poem the couplets rhyme. Just barely rhyme; or rhyme will reach through a couple of couplets. So that form is there. And then in section 3 the form alternates between single lines and couplets, though some of couplets are taken apart. And again the couplets sometimes rhyme. There’s really a lot of fatherhood in these sections. My daughter was one year old when I first got sick, and it’s about being a dad and having an infant. This is Section 3. And 6 has to do with medical testing and the medical facts and figures and guesswork and reporting of this illness. So, it’s actually organized, though it seems scattered.

Alison Deming: And struggling for the language for naming within the illness, as you do when you talk about the natural world.

David Baker: That’s right. And the doctors struggling to find out what the illness was. I was tested for everything and diagnosed with so many things over the course of the first six or eight months before a young doctor said, I know what this is. Let’s do some more tests and figure it out. So, the poem goes from lateral to horizontal, from the oceans to the backyard and to fatherhood and those kinds of really basic aspects of the narrative.

Does that answer the question a little bit?

Alison Deming: I think it does. It’s always a mystery to me what guides the formal decisions of a poem. I like so much in your poetry that your range of formal strategies will go from sonnet in iambic pentameter to busted up fragmented stuff, and I find that really appealing and interesting. I see it in a lot of younger poets too. No, I don’t have to choose between whether I want to be this or that. There’s a menu of opportunities for me formally, and I would like to play with all of it. I see you doing that.

David Baker: It’s a lucky time in contemporary poetry. When I start drafts of poems, I start in syllabics, but then I take them apart sometimes, which is partly what happened in this one. I like the counting of things. My dad was a surveyor and map maker, and he also taught me numbers and measurement. But’s a lucky time in American poetry now, compared to say 30 or 40 years ago, when it wasn’t automatic if someone writes something in a traditional form that’s a conservative gesture and if somebody does something in an experimental form or a dissolved form that’s automatically adventurous. Some of the most boring poems I know right now look like they are adventurous, and some of the most stirring are formal. So those terms don’t really associate anymore, and I really do like that.

Alison Deming: I agree. I’m very grateful we’re in this time because that was so rigid and programmatic, it was kind of authoritarian in its own way, which didn’t make sense at all in poetry.

David Baker: If you look at the end of sections 1 and 2 and 4 and 5 of the book itself, there’s a little italicized untitled poem. Those are also ten syllables. If you rejoin those individual lines, they are all syllabic. Those again I took apart a little bit. I took the titles out. I spread the lines out a little bit. At the end of each of these sections I’m imagining those little poems serve as echoes. There’s an echolocation poem in the book about hummingbirds, and whales again, and something sending a song out across a great distance, hoping that somebody might hear it and answer. Which is what you do when you write a poem. Those little things at the end of each of these sections serve as that section’s echo—it’s the bounce back of the poems that happen in the section. But again those had to dissolve, I had to take them apart.

Alison Deming: So, you have formal challenges that are part of unifying things in a big sprawling poem. I thought one of the unifying elements in this poem—it shows up in some of these italicized echoes—is this sensation of falling. It’s the whale fall, of course. It’s seeds falling in the air. And then it’s the poet floating in his illness: “all, sifting down, / through the aphotic zone.” First, the sensation referring to the whale fall, but that same diction comes in speaking about the illness, your mind and body floating in this undefined condition. And then there are these moments, that I think are marvelous. I was calling them voltas, juxtapositions, or examples of productive ambiguity in a poem. Moments like on page 53 where for the first time we see carbon sequestration. The whale fall isn’t only about dissolution and death. It is also about a protective thing that is happening because this matter is taking so long to disappear. And then when that italicized line comes in there, I jumped out of my poet chair.

Wikipedia: ‘… carbon transported as marine snow into the aphotic zone by the
biological pump can remain out of contact… for more than a thousand years.’

A blue jay lands in the fringe tree. Sudden downfall of petals.

It’s the falling, the floating, again, but it’s beautiful. Just as aspects of the whale fall become beautiful, when we think of carbon sequestration. So, there are those moments when you’re conflating domains, and you’re making leaps from domain to domain, but the sensation may be the same. You do that in the play about the stages. I think you’re talking about the stages of whale fall, then, oops, no, we’re talking of the disease. These are productive little voltas, moments that ask the reader to pay attention.

David Baker: “Pay attention kids. Are you ready for math?”

Alison Deming: Exactly. I love it when that line comes up. “Hear the warning it’s too late. Flatfish. Time for math again, kids—” We know it’s the duck and cover, we know it’s the father with the infant, the man with illness, we know it’s the world. You build things in a way that these little turns are making very productive use of ambiguity. I have William Empson’s book Seven Types of Ambiguity. Could never get through it. I imagine you might have.

What we do about it is tell the story, what we do about it is name the names, what we do about it is account for what we have done to the whales, what we’re doing to the oceans, what happens in the body, what the doctors tell us.

David Baker: I was not thinking about ambiguity. It must be something else. The blue jay line, a lot of lines like that—they’re almost haiku. I think of them this way. I’m trying to write a great big piece that has a lot of turns, like you say voltas, a lot of different subject matter. And I’m using those little isolated images instead of rhetorical transitions: “and now we’ll look at this” or “however there’s this.” They are a moment, a quick movement to another subject. They act as adhesive or they act as a kind of image as transition. I thought about that quite a lot.  There’s one at the end of section 6. There’s all this thinking about the photons and the illness and then out the window there’s a cicada bug hanging.

Alison Deming: Here is another one that’s an interesting move of that sort. You can see the poet’s mind at work. Section 4 ends with the image of whale fall particulate:

snowfall, orbital,
in this new galaxy

             of darkness;
             borne, like seed floats down…

Then Section 5 begins:

I’ve been silent a long time now.
You know I am serious about the whales.

You don’t know this. I floated there in stillness,
in white sheets. White boughs breaking.

That sensation is bringing us into the illness. That’s another way of not being instructive but inviting the reader in.

David Baker: It’s not being directive so much as just being observant.

Alison Deming: I also wanted to ask about your intentions for the sort of dissolution that happens in the last section. You’ve got couplets in this sort of polyvocal, fragmented simultaneity. The inability to apprehend danger.

David Baker:  The couplets are more spread out. There’s more space, as this body is more and more evacuated. The whale. And the lines are as long I could possibly get them on the page. A kind of settling. Landing on the bottom and moving laterally instead of horizontally, as it was earlier. All of those floating narratives happen at once. They interrupt each other and become a single kind of syntactical thing.

Alison Deming:  Yes. They’ve been juxtaposing and interrupting each other, and here you have to create the aggregate compound, even if it can’t have the clarity of some of the other sections. It’s not possible. I really like these two moments in this last section where you insist upon quieting some of the voices that want to come in the poem. “Shh. Close your eyes—” I guess speaking to the poem, speaking to the child. Then again “shh” after the bracketed demand “[what do we do about it]” which is what we always hear as ecopoets. Well, okay, that’s an interesting poem, but just tell me what to do. Here again it’s the father, giving comfort, saying shh.

David Baker: The father talking to the baby, trying to get her to go to sleep. And you’re right. Something like this aggregate voice now that is shushing the one who wants the answer about this, which is why those things are in brackets and why that voice again goes shh. What we do about it is tell the story, what we do about it is name the names, what we do about it is account for what we have done to the whales, what we’re doing to the oceans, what happens in the body, what the doctors tell us. Those are the things the poem is supposed to be about, to report what it’s like to be alive and not so much to give us a thematic answer. What we do about it is what we’ve just done.

Alison Deming: Right. The poem is doing the doing here. 

David Baker: The last little sentence: “It takes your life.” And the doing of that takes your whole life.

Alison Deming: It’s interesting after we’ve had the polyvocality and fragments to end with the flat statement. It’s how the poem begins. “One dies.” There is an ambiguity to that as well.

David Baker: I hope so.

Alison Deming: That verb “takes”…

David Baker: That’s the cost.

Alison Deming: That’s the cost, but then it takes your whole life to understand this harm, this danger, and what we are in our place now. And, of course, for the whale, the sea takes life.

David Baker: What I hope is that it’s not vague at all. It’s multiple. Without a solution.

Alison Deming: Right. That’s what Empson was saying about ambiguity. It’s not vague. It gives voice to complex emotions that can’t be clearly stated. How hard was it to end the poem? You had the three stages of the whale fall and so this formal gesture mirroring the form of the whale. Was the ending difficult?

David Baker: Yes, it was. I knew there’d be these three falling sections. I didn’t know how many mid sections. I thought there might be two instead of four. This took me months and months and months and months, and I don’t know how many drafts. Once I figured out those three sections, and once I knew that the third section had to be the thing getting to the bottom, I knew it would be pulled apart. But I didn’t have the material to pull it apart yet, until I had the other sections to know what has to be echoed, what has to be remembered, in that final section. And then it took forever to get all of the apparatus of those lines together. What’s going to be in italic? What’s going to be in brackets? How much do I take out of the sentence, out of syntax? A lot of these statements were a lot more coherent. I really was a kind of scavenger just looking for the good stuff. And then it would be fun to just hear what I imagined that voice to sound like. I knew the final couple of lines had to be really dissolved, but I wanted that little bitty bit of iambic dimeter at the end. I didn’t know it would be dimeter, but I knew it had to be brief the way the poem began.

We are a kind of virus that feeds on the world, that self-replicates, that spreads, that’s contagious, and that has the capabilities sometimes of providing healing as well as destruction.

Alison Deming: Yeah. “It takes a life.” Boom. It’s quietly percussive. One more question. This is my thought about the illness—the chronic fatigue, M.E. (myalgic encephalomyelitis), and all the different acronyms. Yes, it’s about the narrator’s sense of vulnerability and the dissolution that’s going on in him. But it occurred to me after two or three readings that this is an autoimmune disease in which the body is attacking itself. That is precisely what we are doing to the earth. And it occurs to me that is metonymic of the whole Earth situation with human beings, and I think a lot of people may miss that. I missed it for a little while and then it took me really down to another depth.

David Baker: I had that in mind all along. It’s the thing I did not want to say. That we are viral. We are a kind of virus that feeds on the world, that self-replicates, that spreads, that’s contagious, and that has the capabilities sometimes of providing healing as well as destruction. I had that in mind, yes.

Alison Deming: I’m glad to hear it, because you can extrapolate to say that our particular pathological relationship with the natural world is something that could be healed, and one can believe that it can be healed, just as you can believe that you can get the best of this particular syndrome. There is a matter of belief in the poem. “I can’t believe I’m getting it again.” There’s this matter of what we believe that shapes our reality to some extent. There are always unopened doors in a poem, and, because of the context in which I approached the poem, I wondered about the moment when commercial fishing is mentioned and then “(human appetite).” I get that, but what I bring to it is my neighbors and knowing that lobster fishing is the last thing they have after the decline of other fisheries. And I hate what they’re doing to the oceans and the lobsters and all the adjacent and mutually dependent species. And yet they have a life based on the dignity of work; they’re almost the last hunter-gatherers. Granted they have fancy-pants equipment, but they are living a life that is profoundly meaningful in a way that we can’t understand who don’t work on the sea, where their lives are imperiled every single day by the forces of nature when they go out on the sea. So my empathy for the fishermen is out of scale to what it should be as a person of environmental thinking. That was the only place I wondered what you might have done if you opened it up so that fishing became more than emblematic of human appetite.

David Baker: The bad guy in that narrative is not the fishermen. The bad guy is the humongous population of the human being. So over-populated, and therefore we so over-eat and over-farm. I wrote a similar poem, “Scavenger Loop,” that tries to deal with this as well. Some of my family were farmers. But farming now often consists of corporate megafarms and remarkable amounts of chemicals that destroy the very thing that the farmers do. Grow. The same is true of the fishermen. The fishing industry is not the bad guy. The corporate side of the fishing industry, because of the massive size of our population, is the accountable thing. There were family farms, and they don’t exist now. It’s thousands and thousands of acres owned by—name a corporation. But your question is really well taken, and I have to think about it more.

Alison Deming: I want to wind up. I’m so grateful for your time. Is there anything else you want to say about where you think poetry can go, what you think poetry can do at this time of such peril and urgency? What’s our role as poets who want to have some agency at this time?

David Baker: I’ll say similarly I’m really grateful to you for letting me talk and for reading this poem with the kind of attention that a poet dreams of. That’s the kind of conversation and the kind of depth that we really hope to have. And I really do appreciate it. Thank you.

What our job is? Our job is to sing. That’s what poetry does. That’s why we have it. And to sing about things we don’t otherwise know how to sing about. To sing in language. What the song is about, that’s a really interesting question that we were talking about earlier. If it’s only about the safe and beautiful thing, then that song is trivial. Our job is to figure out how to sing, how to find shape and artfulness and formal rigor, about things that are sometimes really not artful, like a dead whale, like chemicals, like disease. One of the little lights that went off in my mind, when I was writing this poem—the other way to say that word is dis-ease. So, our job is to continue to find new songs and to continue to remember to write about not just the beautiful things but the impossible-to-talk-about things, the political things, the things that we normally don’t think of as art or poetry. Gun control, for instance. That’s the very thing we need to be doing in poetry.

Alison Deming: That’s great. Thank you. I love it. Kim Stanley Robinson, sci-fi writer and beyond, said this wonderful thing recently in an article. He said the role of the arts and humanities is “to aim science.” There are so many situations in which the science is brilliant, but if it is aimed only at serving the multinational corporations and military industry complex, we’re going down the dumper fast. Poetry has a role to play in humanizing science.

David Baker: I like that very much. It’s also up to us not to be satisfied with those categories, like this is science and this is art. Those aren’t necessarily fixed and hard and fast categories, those are just rhetorical types. We can apply something like scientific method or evolutionary method in the making of a lyric poem.

Alison Deming: What’s next for you?

David Baker: I’m working on new poems. And I’ll mention the new “Nature’s Nature” ecopoetry folio in Kenyon Review, which is in its ninth year. That’ll be the July issue. The paperback edition of Whale Fall will be out from W.W. Norton in Winter 2024.