Grab a copy of Orion, a national magazine of nature and culture, this month to read five Street Roots poets — Bronwyn Carver, Daniel Cox, Randy Humphreys, George McCarthy and Michone Nettles. Here is an excerpt:
Not long before I met him, Daniel was living homeless near where the Portland Timbers play soccer, but for the six years I’ve known him, he’s lived in an apartment blocks from our newspaper office. He writes poems built of stacked observation, symmetrical lines, close-up details, and widening shots that create a different kind of symmetry, that of the rich (they) and the poor (we):
Last House on the Block
The bell was replaced by a speaker.
Vagrants sleep on the doorsteps.
The inside is beautiful, the outside is ancient.
They spare no expense, with all its adornments and gilded objects,
but we the poor keep being the poor.
Cox’s tiny poems remind me a bit of a Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos, who I first read in “Against Forgetting,” an anthology of poetry of witness edited by poet Carolyn Forche. She described poetry of witness in this way: “Regardless of the apparent ‘subject matter,’ these poems bear the trace of extremity within them, and are, as such, evidence of what occurred.”
That framework can be extended to writing while homeless — an experience of societal abandonment, one’s body weathered by elements. Such traces show up variously, but one way is how this poetry collides with nature poetry and fills it with evidence of inequality. After all, it is the trees people live among, and the cracks of sidewalks caulked with crud and seedlings, and the rain that presses into tarped tents, and the squirrels and blue jays and rats. Weather is not small talk but rather, bodily—it’s common for homelessness to chip away at one’s body parts: toes, feet, legs are amputated when people endure repeated freezes. People die in extreme heat. Their lungs take in the smoke of forest fires.
“It is just me and I am broken,” writes Bronwyn Carver. Carver has managed to hold on to her hillside camp in a neighborhood north of downtown for several years without the city displacing her. The city of Portland hires contractors—and sometimes deploys police—to displace camps, actions commonly referred to as “sweeps.” On average, the city sweeps about a hundred camps a week. Most people move a few blocks away; after all, they have to lug possessions and maintain any resources they’ve tracked down nearby. Carver, who is also a journalist, fought back when the city “posted” her camp—court challenges and rulings have led to a process where the city staples up a lime green sheet of paper declaring their intention to remove a camp—by digging into ordinances and writing an article about it. She succeeded.
Carver dips into her Celtic roots, building a magic that surrounds her near-constant contact with urban nature. In some poems, she wakes to faeries, the trees becoming giants as she sleeps on pine needles. Carver depicts a connection to nonhuman nature in contrast to the human systems that impose draconian policies targeting the poorest people in society. In “Cannot Sweep Nature,” she describes the aftermath of city contractors removing the camp where unhoused people reside.
Cannot Sweep Nature
On a path of freshly turned dirt
from the last sweep that came through
mounds of debris and whatnots
hide within trip-traps
Of muddy earth
Yet even though souls
From this place
have been scattered
North south east west
Upside down
One lone daffodil appeared
pushed up through the mud
that is the soil
Bright golden yellow with its almost
Orange trumpet center
proclaiming a hearkening
hearkening for hope
The quick, two-beat words—“whatnots” and “trip-traps”—skid over the traumatic event. Carver is looking for hope in the nonhuman natural world, and she finds it in a “lone daffodil” that “pushes up through the mud / that is soil.” The word lone juxtaposed with daffodil brings a bit of that quintessential Romantic nature poem, Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” But in this case, the daffodil has more resilience than human law. It is striking that Carver transforms—or at least reassigns—mud into soil. To be homeless in the Pacific Northwest means enduring a long rainy season, and thus a great deal of mud. Growth takes place in soil. Mud can still be soil.
Though Carver’s bent toward nature draws from a Romantic tradition, Randy Humphreys’ decidedly does not. After years on the streets, Humphreys began to find his muse in his fear of rats, ever prevalent in his life. He’d jot down his thoughts on scraps of paper that Street Roots staff would type up, and as the poems accumulated, they became his “Rat Saga” series.
From The Rat Saga
The rats sleep during the day
They’re awake, up all night
Tormenting me all night
Keeping me up all night
Getting into all my food
Creeping and crawling through the night
And eventually
I go through the night
Finally I fall asleep in the sunlight
When those rats go to sleep
When the sunlight comes in the morning time
For readers who have never experienced homelessness, Humphreys describes a life populated—and at times overwhelmed—by rats. Rats are active at night, so night becomes his place of terror. He strives to stay vigilant at night, as many unhoused people do to fend off danger. Many people describe turning to methamphetamines to stay up—alert to violence, and also, as the waste pickers of North America, able to wander the streets to collect cans.
Michone Nettles describes a different relationship to night; he strives to sleep so hard that he won’t even perceive nightmares.
My Nature
Although my nature is not to live by day
I cannot tolerate another night like this
So I will wake up
Early tomorrow morning
And do, do, do all day long
Falling asleep exhausted tomorrow
Early evening too tired even for nightmares
Many of Nettles’s poems deal with living in this darkness. The lack of bathrooms, showers, and laundry experienced by people on the streets is evidenced here, as it is so consistently in Carver’s poems. Nettles declares that we “can’t see into the darkness / Without a flash.” Some flashes, such as police sirens, are particularly ominous. From 2017 until 2020, the most recent year studied, more than half of all arrests in Portland are of unhoused people. Without housing, one’s presence is easily criminalized—from trespass to “unwanted person” charges to disorderly conduct.
Many city governments police the poor into hiding—whether by removing tents and possessions in a sweep, as Carver writes about, or citing, arresting, and jailing people. In a recent Portland city council meeting in which the mayor proposed a camp ban that would result in jail time for people who sleep publicly during the day, George McCarthy confronted city council for “criminalizing suffering.”
After he testified, McCarthy took stock of the emotional toll it took. “I still feel homeless,” he told me.
Yet, he is noticing how his life is changing a few months into housing. His experiences of homelessness defamiliarized him with living indoors akin to how the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky described octpahehne, the artistic technique of making strange what one might take for granted. Take grocery shopping.
While homeless, McCarthy gathered food anew every day, whether by grocery shopping or attending meal services because he couldn’t lug perishable food that would attract rats. Now, he marvels, he only has to buy groceries once a week. What is he going to do with all that extra time?
Write, he tells me. I have so much time to write.
Untitled
Just standing in the middle of the street
And I can’t move. I was crossing the parking lot
When the road ahead of me caught fire—
It rose up around like a pop-up book
And fixed me in the center of a compass
Heading near a flat grate like an iron
Waffle . . . watching it burn . . .
My life is an anchor and I drag it behind me . . .
I withdrew beyond the boundaries of my
Fingertips and made my skin my house—hiding
Inside, deep in a sunken maze recording
My life like a stenographer, herding it
Like a sheepdog, embalming it with neglect.
I promised myself that I would bewitch
It all into a book and read it someday
This collection of dead things, my petrified
World—but I dreamed while the paper made its way
Back to wood with the letters nibbled to
Coral by silverfish—and with a great breath
I let it sink—a casual alchemy
Compressing all together with random
Gravity, and homebrewed glues, foundation chalked
With rusted gears, old buckets, Coca-Cola
Signs rot and jam wood and windshield wipers
Oatmeal and venom jacketing rose milk
All cinched up in enameled python gut bags.
Junkyard meat . . . lean swirl of words in gels new
Colors diagram histories crushed around
Eggbeaters, butter churns, and the retreat
Of the waters—herded like llamas, shut up
In cupboards, hushed in escuelitas . . . world
Encrusted with sand, dust in the wind stream
Like lace . . . but there is me and there is that blazing road
Rising up and reaching out . . . meandering
Blending into other places and roads
And as I watched . . . flames cooled to flowers all
Framed by magenta, sunrise, and wild rose
Petals jostled together like eyes flaring
In the wind a stream of banners trailing
Itself . . . so alive and set in the land
Like rivers of fruit and I could feel my
Heartbeat and the living presence of this place
That I would have never seen it was always
Minced in the surroundings but this living fire
Was thick in my mind like sap and I saw
A branch dip down like a liquid tumble
Of festooning bees wearing raspberry sugar . . .
Sitting in the coffee-colored sand . . . thinking
In dull winterlight, in between gray cement
And gray sky I saw a coil of orange
Peel simmering on the pavement like lava . . .
And I trained my eyes to see those steppingstones
Of warmth in orange leather that led my mind
And heart to this fireblast and inside I turned
Over in thick sleep like a melting Dalí
Head climbing its way out of jellied un-time . . .
And now I’m listening to the seabirds
Smelling salt in the air on this desert
That’s becoming a beach—the water is
Giving up her dead and not quite dead:
Cameos of old friends disappeared . . . John’s
Voice following an old man shoplifting
In powder blue pants “. . . but that’s Ensure man
We can’t do nothing about that . . . It’s like
Diapers or medicine . . .” big red growler jug
On Sandy Blvd and long screams that
Orient themselves like bats . . . and the rippling
Warp throughout the land strengthening its voice
And I am pulling out these portmanteaus
And burlap sacks dragging in this flotsam—
I’m reaching in to the puzzle structure
Unpacking it all for I have arrived
I am here rising up and heeling over
Like that ship in bright tropical water
With beards of salt hanging from its joints patterned
In briny seabird prints so much inside—
Blood in daylight, violets and cigarettes
Exit 296B Multnomah Blvd 1/4 mile . . .
And the seep and slosh of chemicals, those
Puddings that were people all up and out
Unlocking and unbinding in the new
Origami of my life you unfold
To create so many things blended into
Butters that I recognize by feel and can
Track by scent—my world coming back—opening
Up around me and inside me and all because
That moment of fire and understanding
Showed me life and transformation in the
Present—when we were all taking one breath
And I realized that life and healing can
Only take place in the sunlight
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This article appears in September 20, 2023.