When I started writing poetry, really reading and trying to write “good” poetry (you know, trying to be better than song lyrics) I was eight years old. And I mostly wrote environmental/anti-nuclear war poetry with images of mushroom clouds and “boys in green raincoats.” I’m not sure exactly where this environmental stuff came from – possibly from living in the back yard of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (where they made and processed nuclear weapons) and possibly from reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Swiftly Tilting Planet (about averting nuclear war with time travel!) at an impressionable age.
But, as things went on, and I was chided by professors for trying to obviously to “say something” in our work, etc, the environmental stuff sort of dropped out of my writing. But suddenly, it is back.
It started with writing about Japan, and how Japanese anime is really created out of the shadow of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear blasts, and then about my father’s work as a high-tech cleanup consultant at various nuclear sites (including Oak Ridge and Fernald in Ohio.) It turns out I knew at a pretty young age that nuclear waste wasn’t easy to contain, protect people from, and certainly the term “Clean up” is awfully optimistic when you’re talking about radioactive waste with a multimillion-year half-life.
Now with my new book I’m writing about this again, more personally – like being exposed to cancer risks (did you know that folks within a ten-mile downwind area of Oak Ridge have a 53% risk of getting cancer, whereas most Americans have about a 5% chance at any given time? This was in my recent research, probably not available even ten years ago to people looking for explanations…) It’s a recurring theme in the short stories of Hakuri Murakami, people who get sick for vague reasons, an undercurrent of paranoia about genetics/the body.
The whole mythology of the X-Men and Heroes has been so fascinating to me, because it challenges us to think of the upside of things like mutagenics. I did a bit of research on PAI-1 deficiency, my own personal genetic mutation, and it seems that although the downside is pretty rough (it acts much like hemophilia) the upside is that studies in mice show that PAI-1 deficiency might have a protective effect against some tumors, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Although it has a negative effect in gram-negative pneumonia-catching (which could explain why I spent a few years having pneumonia all the time until I got an pneumonia vaccine.)
Anyway, I’m thinking more about how to incorporate my brain and heart into my poetry – keeping the work interesting artisticly and linguistically, but somehow also having a passionate message. Few poems that are explictly political are spectacular. But there’s got to be a balance. Trying not to write something because you are afraid it might be lame is not an excuse to not write something more ambitious socially.
I wasn’t afraid to write about feminist stuff – violence against women et al, and no one has really smacked me on the head about the content of my first book (although I do get the annoying student questions like “Why are you so angry at men?” occasionally. ) And I don’t want to be afraid to write about this enviro-stuff either. I understand it and I’m interested in it. Is that enough?