Camille Dungy
Visiting Poet
The title poem of Camille Dungy’s Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2017) dares its reader to resist a connection between incremental—yet vast—changes to Yellowstone’s ecosystem following a reintroduction of gray wolves and Dungy’s thoughts on motherhood: “Don’t / you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this / life born from one hungry animal, this whole / new landscape.” The author of four collections of poetry and a book of essays, Dungy has also written extensively about the invisibility of African-American authors in the historically white-dominated field of nature writing; in 2009, she edited the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009), asserting that without the perspective of writers of color, nature writing becomes less a conversation than a monologue. Camille Dungy has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and Yaddo, and recently won a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Colorado and is a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.
Select Poems
Between raindrops,
space, certainly,
but we call it all rain.
I hang in the undrenched intervals,
while Callie is sleeping,
my old self necessary
and imperceptible as air.
From TROPHIC CASCADE (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2017)
in her sleep
in the passenger seat
at the wheel
slipped on ice
pulled under the pond
by the hands of a stranger
by the hands of a lover
by her own hands
her heart
due to complications
surrounded by family
after long illness
we don’t yet know why
we didn’t know it would happen
this soon
From TROPHIC CASCADE (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2017)
Does she sleep through the night?
I hate to wake you so early,
but I had to tell you
this dream.
There were only seven trees left in the world
and the largest grew in your backyard.
From TROPHIC CASCADE (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2017)