During this summer of social-distancing and curtailed travel, getting to know the other-than-human lives around you and the ecosystem in which you live may provide an especially meaningful sense of connection. It is my hope that A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia—an anthology combining natural history information, poetry, and visual art that I had the pleasure of co-editing—can guide readers in such pursuits. So, here are some new materials to help with digging into and building off the literary field guide and the feature on it Southern Humanities Review published last year. All of the poems referenced appear in the book. A selection of the poems is available on SHR’s Features page.

The creative writing prompts use published poets’ contributions to the anthology as starting points for your own poems. The ideas for nature observation can help those of you who may not usually look to the natural world for inspiration find poetic possibilities in your surroundings. The ideas for discussing A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia’s content can aid in teaching the poems to students, or engaging your own mind with the text.

Thanks to you readers, my co-editors at SHR and of the anthology, the Masters students at Auburn University who I have studied the book alongside, and the many poets and artists who contributed their work. (And to the diversity of species we writers may aspire to reflect, in some small part, in our art.) I’m glad so many of us can come together, in writing, at least.

—Rose McLarney

Follow these prompts to draft your own poems. Choose a plant, animal, or other life form as your subject. Then, choose a prompt and read the poem from A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia it references.

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  • Write a charm for a species and its protection, as Anna Lena Philips Bell does for the American Chestnut (pg. 17). If you need a fresh perspective on your language, try putting words from a draft of your poem in a drivel generator such as the one Philips Bell used and then revising.
  • Address a poem to a species, as if speaking to your subject as Susan O’Dell Underwood does in her poem for the American Caterpillar Fungi (pg. 185). 
  • Write in imperative phrases, as if you are making commands or wishes, addressing them either to the species you have chosen or a force acting upon it as Lesley Wheeler does in her poem for the Black Walnut (pg. 25).
  • Write a poem in which, while describing a plant or animal, you are also speaking about your own feelings as Michael McFee does in his poem for the Catawba Rhododendron (pg. 36). 
  • Write a poem that is devoted entirely to an element of the natural world, and is not a clear metaphor for yourself or human conditions, like Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s poem for the Smallmouth Bass (pg.151). 
  • Revise a poem you’ve written about a member of another species by trying to replace all the anthropomorphizing words (words that attribute human feeling and behavior to nonhuman beings). Is it possible to do so? Does this exercise help you better observe your subject, or is creating parallels between it and humans necessary to make the poem emotionally engaging? 
  • Follow instructions for writing a Golden Shovel, a poetic form composed of repeated lines recently invented by Terrance Hayes, and the form used by Glenis Redmond in her poem for American Ginseng (pg. 20). 
  • Try writing about the same subject that appears in your Golden Shovel in a sonnet, as L. Lamar Wilson does in his poem for the Eastern Whip-Poor-Will (pg. 90). Then address that subject in a prose poem, like Kevin McIlvoy’s for the Mottled Sculpin (pg. 145), or in another form, such as an epistolary poem. (McIlvoy’s poem, with its ending, “Respectfully, The Author,” is epistolary, meaning it is a poem that is written as if it is a letter or diary entry.)Do the different forms lead you to discover different angles on/language for the material?
  • Design a form for a poem that reflects the subject species’ movements, as seen in the shifting lines of Mary Oliver’s poem for the American Black Bear (pg. 59). When you read the poem, take note of how Landon Godfrey’s illustration of the bear, with a raised paw, suggests movement with its lines (pg. 61).
  • Try to spell out an animal’s sounds in the letters of the English language, as Shauna M. Morgan does for the calls of the Black-Throated Blue Warbler (pg. 85). Do these sounds suggest ideas for alliteration, consonance, rhymes, refrains, or other musical elements you might incorporate when describing the animal in human speech?
  • Incorporate research and quotations in a poem. You might use the various common names of a species, as Sandra Meek does in her poem for the Bloodroot (pg. 27) or interweave facts about human history, as Sean Hill’s poem for the Lake Sturgeon does (pg. 142).
  • Has your poem incorporating research or another draft turned into a lengthy piece?  Try to revise and distill it into a just a few lines. See Rebecca Gayle Howell’s poem for the Wild Turkey for a model (pg.104). Then, assess and take the best parts from each version of the poem for another revision.
  • Admit highways, stores, brand names, and other aspects of the contemporary world into your realistic nature poem, as Adrian Blevins does in her poem for the Gray Fox (pg. 68). How does the species about which you are writing have to engage with these things? How does acknowledging them in your poem affect your tone?
  • In addition to doing research, keep asking questions about the species that is the focus of a poem, as Holly Haworth does in her poem for the Chucky Madtom (pg. 137). Admit what you don’t know within the text.
  • Defy elegy as you write; environmental poems don’t all have to be about what’s lost. See Laura-Gray Street’s poem for the Eastern Newt for inspiration (pg. 121).
  • Study your favorite poem and figure out what makes it effective. Consider the sounds, images, stanzas, line breaks, title, conclusion, statements, implications—every element—and choose at least one to try emulating.
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Start by finding a leaf and applying each exercise to it. Later, you can think of ways to adapt these approaches to observing mammals, birds, fish, invertebrates, and fungi you choose from a field guide to your region. Some notes you make will be useful in identifying species. Many of them will provide new vocabulary and specific imagery, and may suggest metaphors to enrich your creative writing. 
 
These ideas are informed by and indebted to The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling by John Muir Laws.


​Make Comparisons
A leaf by itself can seem like, well, just a leaf. But, if you compare one kind of leaf to another, differences you might not otherwise note will become apparent. You may see that one is glossy in contrast to another, or more furred. One may be single and the other composite, one ovoid and the other heart- or fan-shaped. Or, what shapes are you reminded of by the leaf’s outline? In addition to the criteria typically used in keying species, write down your own descriptive terms. Collect as many adjectives as possible.

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Measure and Count
If you say that a leaf is “big,” this may suggest different sizes to different people, the information isn’t precise enough to identify species, and it’s not the most original wording to use in creative writing either. However, measuring how many millimeters long a specimen is, or how many spines or spots it has, will give you the information needed to compose a much fuller description. Make at least two precise observations about a leaf or the leaves on a single tree by measuring and counting. 
 
Then, think of other things you could measure, count, and get to know (such as how many leaves really do fall on a square foot of your yard in a day in October, when you might say there were “millions”). 




Use All of Your Senses
We tend to rely most heavily on our vision, but there are many ways of sensing the natural world, and descriptions can be made of more than visual images. Take note of the smell and feel of your leaf, and maybe even its taste. When you draft a poem using this information, also explore other forms of knowledge such as memory associated with the smell, or imagine the circumstances that may have caused the species to evolve with the traits it has. 



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Revisit Your Subject
Just as commitment to revision is essential to writing great poetry, going back to a plant you have seen in one place or time at another site or in a different season is a part of really becoming familiar with it. Find a species that lives in your yard in a second location. How does it seem (and do you feel) familiar or strange here? Or, return to a particular plant in a nearby park over a series of days or weeks, looking closely enough to note new details and changes at each visit

In discussions of nature poems, or ecopoetry, or whatever term may be used to refer to writing that includes representations of nonhuman life forms, questions about the human presence and perspective in the work almost always arise. (Whether a poem calls attention to environmental destruction, romanticizes natures, or interrogates the limitations of the speaker, the touch of its human creator remains.) So, though there are many elements of the finely crafted poems in A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia that merit close study, this vein of inquiry seems like a good starting point. The following notes, which ask about how poets have positioned themselves or their speakers in poems about other species, are intended to invite you and your students to relate to the texts, and then, hopefully, continue and broaden your examinations. The particular discussions from which these materials draw were with Hannah Bruner, Cris Bangert, Rietta Bolus, Calista Malone, and Kerri Green, Auburn University Masters students and fine teachers themselves.


The perspectives of a number of the poems in A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia stay aligned with those of nonhuman life forms. One example is the poem for the American Bullfrog by Ellen Bryant Voigt (pg.111), which describes the life of the character “frog” throughout. Yet, these poems still relate to human conditions. Can you see how Voigt’s frog particularly speaks to women’s experiences, even though no human is mentioned in the text? How about in Irene McKinney’s poem for Ironweed (pg. 41)?
 
 
Some poems in the anthology are environments shared by the subject species and humans who speak to the reader in first person, such as the poem for the Tulip Poplar by Melissa Range (pg. 51) and the poem for the Northern Long Eared Bat by Rajiv Mohabir (pg. 74). What sort of personality does Range’s “I,” with its strong, idiomatic voice, assert? Mohabir’s question-asking “I” also appears in its poem’s first line, but does it give a different sense of itself?
 
 
Other poems are in second person, such as the poem for the Blue Crayfish by Bianca Lynne Spriggs (pg. 160) and the poem for the Black Walnut by Lesley Wheeler (pg. 25). The “you” Spriggs’ poem addresses seems mostly to be the crayfish she praises. Yet: Are there ways in which Spriggs may be suggesting likenesses between the behaviors of this invertebrate and certain people she knows? Are there poems in the book in which you feel the “you” addressed is actually the poet herself? 
 
 
Still other poems refer to both “you” and “we,” such as Rita Mae Reese’s poem for the Deer Mouse (pg. 62), or shift from perspective of “I” to “us,” as in the case of Justin Gardiner’s poem for the Carolina Gorge Moss (pg. 33). When choosing these pronouns, what might the speakers be hoping—for themselves, or for all the members our ecosystems? 
 
 
Though Gardiner’s poem speaks of an “us,” it is about a moss few people have ever seen, and a man’s reflections on his solitude. Glenis Redmond’s poem for American Ginseng (pg. 20) is about a plant that has long been sought for its medicinal qualities and speaks about a “we” that seems to be a large community with a shared heritage. Reflect on how human’s historic relationships with other species—whether people have, for instance, found them rare, beautiful, edible, weedy, or useless—may affect the tones of contemporary poets’ who write about them, or the metaphors the species are now used to make.
 
 
Many of the poems mentioned include questions, as does Molly McCully Brown’s for the Black Carpenter Ant (pg. 158). However, the question that opens the poem is posed without a question mark, and, by the end of the poem, the speaker is no longer describing a “she,” but issuing commands to “you.” What do these shifts accomplish? What are some instances in other poems in which shifts in grammar or other arguably small craft details shift readers’ perspectives in larger ways?