the stars on my ceiling

Process Notes:

I chose to rework the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, as this is perhaps the most influential piece of legislation that details the relationship that man should have with the environment. The act is known for implementing an impact report, which prevents projects from causing a certain amount of harm to the environment. In my environmental classes, we learned that this is both the first and the most critical piece of federal environmental legislation, but it also sets a tone for how man should view himself in relationship to the environment. In reading the legislation, it becomes clear that the policy is meant to reinforce this idea that man is meant to conquer the environment. I was particularly inspired by Layli Long Soldier’s use of space and lines in her poems and so I tried to apply such techniques in my poem. Instead of completely rewriting the legislation, I chose to leave in the original text and write the poem around it. I thought it was especially important that the reader see what the text was meant to achieve and the poem is meant to represent the true intentions and results of the policy. I chose to bold the line “overall welfare and development of man” because that line highlights the intents of both the legislation and the poem. This relates to my final project as I am looking at the ways in which man has manipulated the environment, particularly water for his own benefit. Through reworking NEPA, I was able to better understand how the US views and uses the environment.

           I found Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas to a be a fascinating and unusual compilation of poems. I found it difficult to understand the cohesive narrative in Part I, but perhaps that was the point of that section. It seemed to be a collection of descriptions, each a little bit more jarring than the last. I really appreciated how she used space and the format of the poem to convey the feeling of the poem. In mixing up how the poems were displayed, she also used a number of different poetry writing styles. Through using mixed methods, she was able to achieve a narrative that constantly keeps you on your toes and having to reassess what each new poem means in the larger picture.

           Part II was the most powerful section of the text as Layli Long Soldier reclaimed Barack Obama’s Congressional Resolution of Apology to the Native Americans. Her choice of using whereas statements to tie the first narrative together was extremely interesting because whereas statements are intended to set up the problem before presenting the legislation. She is using some of her own life experiences and the trials of an indigenous person to set up how the US government has wronged her people. I found it really moving when she took the words from the resolution and redacted the negative ones, showing that choice placement of a few buzzwords was really what the resolution was about. In the resolutions section, she chose a few key words to highlight such as “boundaries” and “this land,” showing reclamation of the words that should be her own, but have been turned against her.

Water Map: The Path of Water

Process Notes:

           The map I created represents the path from the Great Lakes region to the Atlantic Ocean. I cut out each of the Great Lakes and traced the rivers that would that would connect and lead them to the ocean. This relates to my final project as I aim to show that everything is connected, especially bodies of water. I want to look at the journey a fish might take after being displaced from its ecosystem. I chose the method of collage because I could integrate both accurate depiction and of the lakes as well as my own interpretation of the waterways connecting them together. I also included the legend to show the differentiation between freshwater and saltwater. I attempted to use the sense of taste to depict the difference between the two. I was particularly inspired by Denis Wood’s work in creating nontraditional maps. His work made me think about how everything is connected and geographical landmarks have different meanings to both people and animals. I tried to incorporate both human senses and uses of the waterways as well as the ways that the water and marine life might travel. The only thing that I couldn’t depict, but wanted to, was how rain would affect the system. Given that everything is connected, the water cycle could bring water from the ocean to the Great Lakes and vice versa. I couldn’t figure how to include rain for this map, but it is something that I will be thinking about for my final project.

“You should have seen it.”

 “The bag crosses the street. The bag takes flight.”

 “It was like flying.”

 A gust of wind pushes the plastic up higher and higher. The bag lifts its wings dipping down into the water.

 The plastic disrupts the glint of the sun the lake.

 And the lake moves to swallow the bag whole.

 Each new piece of plastic is a lethal injection into the bloodstream of Life.

 How could I not be dramatic? When the situation is this dire.

 One bag might poison the edge of the lake.

 But eight million metric tons of plastic a year will change worlds.

 Entire ecosystems will disappear before we realize we’re not alone.

 Why do we focus our efforts so far away when there are plenty of undiscovered aliens below the surface?

 And while we’re looking up

             The water is rising

                       The people are moving

 Push and pull

           Ebb and flow

 We forget the power of water. We forget the essentiality of water, until we take that first sip after our throat runs dry. We forget the strength of water, until it takes the form of disaster and comes crashing towards us.  We forget the unity of water, until what happens in one ocean is felt in the other. We forget the purity of water until the rains come and wash the past away.  We forget the fluidity of water, until one toxin poisons the body.

 The ocean groans with each new bag ingested.

 When will we listen?

 When the next sip of water catches plastic in our throat.

   Process Notes

             The idea of the plastic came to me when I was sitting with some friends and their bag flew away. One friend tried to run after it, but the wind carried the bag higher and higher. As my other friend was recounting the story, she said each of the quotations used at the beginning of the poem. And I thought about where the bag would go and what path it might take. My thoughts settled on the lake, as it was likely that the bag would get washed away with the tide. I then tried to trace the impact of environmental harm onto water. The result was tracing how the impacts on water will indeed affect humans. I plan on focusing on large bodies of water for my final project, particularly Lake Michigan and the Atlantic Ocean. The environmental concern that I am trying to highlight is how water is often overlooked as an essential, yet can also be replenished in the never-ending cycle. My aim is to connect the plastic bag to the bodies of water and show how we are poisoning our life source with each piece of waste that ends up in the ocean. I am trying to use the fear of an impending doom, the same way that DeLillo makes his characters fear death. The satire that DeLillo lends to a normally dark topic makes it almost comical, but it’s the fear of something coming that I am trying to imitate.

The Life of a Seed

 Once upon a time in a land that used to be covered in lush green jungle, untouched by human hand, there was a seed. And this seed was a normal seed. There was nothing special about the seed except it had no past, no family, no heritage. The seed was born out of a lab, at the will of a man dressed in white playing God. From stainless steel to soil, the seed had one purpose in life, to grow and to change. And days passed and the seed grew from sapling to tree, from flowers to fruit. And the seed having no other family could only hope and wish that its offspring would meet a different Fate. And all of the seed’s vanities came to fruition; the sweet yellow rind grew to be identical to each of its kin. And nothing was unique about this banana and so it was permitted to leave its manmade home and experience the world. And this sweet yellow fruit had no sense of anything different from this tree on this farm. The banana is different from you and I, it cannot speak, it cannot listen, and so it did not see when Fate came and plucked the ripened seed from its sheltered safe haven. And Fate took the banana further than most humans travel in their lifetime, traveling the same route that many bananas had traveled before it, a reminder that nothing was special about the banana’s travels or its destination. And the banana was shuffled along with thousands of its kind, an image that the seed could never have imagined. And the bunches of bananas fell out the truck and onto the shelf of a small store in the southside Chicago on a snowy April morning. Somehow this tiny seed manufactured in a place far, far away ended up as a ripe fruit on the plate of a college student in another world altogether.

 Working Notes:

 I tried my hand at a piece that is part flash fiction and part poetry. My attempt was to trace the roots of a banana that I bought from Hyde Park Produce. Most bananas are grown in Ecuador, but the seeds are often produced in a lab to create the most aesthetically pleasing bananas. I tried to trace the path of the seed and the journey that the seed makes to get from the soil to fruit. I attempted to write in a prose that was similar to Upton Sinclair’s writing in The Jungle, in which he has long drawn out descriptions of a single scene. Additionally, this was my first attempt at a long form paragraph style of poetry, and so I attempted to trace the life of the seed in such a way. I think I did a pretty good job for my first time writing in this style, but I am worried about conveying everything that I am thinking and translating it into a cohesive story that makes sense to the reader. I tend to get too in my head and forget to read my work from an outside perspective and I tried to focus on that in this piece, though I am not entirely sure that I succeeded in this mission.