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Steeped in the Waters,
the Land, the Love

By Kai Coggin

Poets Laureate on Place: A Prose Series

The lens through which I navigated the world zoomed into these more-than-human elements living and breathing and growing all around me.
 

In this series curated by Currents editor Leonora Simonovis, current poets laureate write about what it means, in the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, “to become native to place.” Each of them explores the deep connections they have created with land and people, stressing the fact that belonging is a reciprocal process, not a given right. Three poets laureate start the series over the next three months:

I’m sipping some licorice tea this morning, steeped in a mug of 4,000-year-old geothermal hot springs water that fell as rain during the same era that the Great Pyramids of Egypt were being built. How is this a thing? Well, during the Tectonic Orogeny—or mountain-building event—300 million years ago, the zigzag mountain range of the ancient Ouachita Mountains chain were formed, creating folds and faults in the very specific rock layers found here. These tectonic continental collisions shifted the ancient oceanic rock layers northward, creating vertical porous “pipelines” of sandstone, chert, and shale in the folds and fractures, beside a denser rock called Arkansas novaculite, made up of quartz crystals.

Rainwater seeps through the porous routes down, down, down to 8,000 feet below the surface, heating up as it gets closer to the Earth’s core. The water travels down for 4,000 years until it hits the Alpha fault line, which pushes the water back up toward the surface for another 400 years. This water finally comes bubbling out at 143° Fahrenheit from 47 natural springs at base of Hot Springs Mountain. Eight hundred fifty thousand gallons of this magical, and once purported to be healing, water reaches the surface every day in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas. Remarkable, right?    

I was named the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, Arkansas by mayoral proclamation in February 2023 after ten years working as a poet, author, and teaching artist in the city and across the state. Since 2019, I’ve also been the host and curator of the longest-running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country, Wednesday Night Poetry (WNP). This Hot Springs legacy, started by poet Bud Kenny, has never missed a single Wednesday since its inception on February 1, 1989. The week of this writing will be 1,834 weeks in a row. I expanded it virtually on Facebook (from March 2020 through 2023) into a community of thousands of poets all across the globe, steering it week after week, creating a poetic archive through the greatest paradigm shift in our collective consciousness, the COVID pandemic. Today, WNP exists mostly back in the quaint little coffeeshop, Kollective Coffee+Tea, in historic downtown Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas. 

I live here—I teach, write, speak, and hold safe space for others, especially BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth. My wife Joann and I moved here from Houston, Texas, in 2012 with our two Fu dogs, Genghis and Layla. We wanted to move away from city life—the housing market had just crashed and the energy in such a big city like Houston felt abysmal and suffocating. And we wanted nature. Well, I was very much afraid of nature, but I was (and still am) so in love, so I followed where my wife’s heart was pointing us: here.

The universe found us a 15-acre plot of land at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by a humble range of mountains and forest. In our backyard, there’s a 20-foot-deep, spring-fed pond that stays cold all year long—clear, and perfectly swimmable. When we moved here I was pretty afraid of nature, but I learned to see that was only because I was not exposed to it; I was born in Bangkok, Thailand, and raised in Houston, two very concrete jungles.

Find me in the woods talking to a frog or cooing over the unbelievable beauty of a triceratops beetle.

Over the years, my wife and I have shaped this land with our hearts and hands, cutting down trees which we’ve used for firewood in winters, widening the spaces into gentle grasses, an orchard of fruit trees, vegetable and pollinator gardens. We’ve cut paths and trails in and through the forest, and six years ago we even dug and shaped a beautiful koi pond—I precariously dragged big boulders from all around the land on a small metal dolly to the lip of the water’s edge. Our koi are fat and happy, our dogs run free, and year after year, this natural world has become more and more healing for the many traumas I’ve held inside me.

Something shifted during the pandemic, too—probably for many people—something deeper in terms of being bound almost spiritually to place. This little paradise that we created together became our isolation helm when the world shutdown. The wild growing things, the gardens, the wildflowers, bees and butterflies, bluebirds and mosses, the mycelium network pulsing underfoot, the night fox, quick chipmunks, raccoons, squirrels, mother deer and her fawns—they all became an even deeper part of who I am, my wild family. The lens through which I navigated the world zoomed into these more-than-human elements living and breathing and growing all around me. I started to shift in the deepest parts of my consciousness. I became insatiably curious. I magnified, with eyes and heart, the smallest of creatures and quietly observed them, turning my attentiveness as a poet into a practice of meeting everything with a sense of intimate wonder.

When the world reopened, I decided to follow (again) in my wife’s footprints and began my training to become a Certified Master Naturalist. She had begun her studies six years prior. When I started that deep learning, that field study, it completely shifted the way in which I viewed the world—my nerd tendencies and curiosities had a place to go. Also, as a poet, this deep and specific learning of the many names and taxonomies of so many different species of plants, animals, birds, trees, flowers—it was like a whole new language! Find me in the woods talking to a frog or cooing over the unbelievable beauty of a triceratops beetle.

I’ve become who I am here, fully seated in my soul’s purpose and power. In this place, steeped in these ancient waters. Among these millions of acres of national forest and zigzag mountains. I planted the seed of my creative heart and vision here in this rocky soil, and something bloomed that I never would’ve imagined possible.

  

  

Kai CogginKai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, and author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdomsreleased on Earth Day 2024 with Harbor Editions. She is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE grant fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest-running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Coggin was awarded the 2023 Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service, and the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award for Arts in Education. She was twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year. Her poetry has been nominated six times for the Pushcart Prize and awarded Best of the Net in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, Cultural WeeklyAbout Place Journal, and elsewhere. Coggin is editor-at-large at SWIMM and associate editor at The Rise Up Reviewand serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. 

Her Poet Laureate civic project SHARING TREE SPACE involves partnering with Hot Springs National Park rangers to take BIPOC and LGBTQ+ high school students on educational hikes focusing on specific natural world elements and writing poetry in the wild with them. The mission of this project is to engage them with the natural world, to facilitate community, and for marginalized youth to be seen, respected, held, and heard in their own personal authentic voices and valid experiences, thus combating societal and legislative erasures.

Coggin lives with her wife in a peaceful valley, where they tend to wild ones and each other.

Read Kai Coggin’s poem “In the Path of Totality, Umbral Illumination,” published in Terrain.org.

Header photo by Niwat panket, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Kai Coggin by Jeff Fuller-Freeman.