More-than-human: A poem and Interview from Suzanne Iuppa

Interview by Glyn F. Edwards

Welcome to a new interview in our series on writing the #MoreThanHuman, a set of interviews with poets and writers on how they approach writing about the environment. The more-than-human is a phrase that seeks to side-step traditional nature-culture dualisms, and draw attention to the unity of all life as a kind of shared commonwealth existing on a fragile planet. It also reminds us humans that there is more to life, that there is more world, than the human; it relocates us in relation to the mystery.

This week’s interview features Suzanne Iuppa who is a conservationist and poet living in the Dyfi Valley, mid Wales. Recent work features in Bad Lilies, berlin lit, Poetry Wales, Finished Creatures and the Gingko Prize Best Poem of Landscape. She is one of five Welsh writers featured in climate futures anthology Gorwelion/Shared Horizons ed. Robert Minhinnick and her artistic practice features in current forestry commission research, examining the significance of trees outside of woodlands.

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The Marriage tree

You can find a Google Doc accessible version of this poem here.

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Glyn F. Edwards: In a speech at my own wedding, I’d intended to talk about a ‘marriage tree’ near to where my wife grew up. The nomenclature so appropriate, the image so emotive that only my human error could have frustrated it – I was too overwhelmed by the occasion to get to the end of my notes. The title here implies it belongs in a wider series – if so, are any of these poems about the more-than-human rooted in human anecdote or experience?

Suzanne Iuppa: Firstly, I am so glad this poem chimed for you, recalling your own wedding day. As a poet, that connection is everything to me. Thanks for sharing!

I do make a lot of poetry studying plants and animals, to riff on human behaviour. My first collection, which I’ve been working on for a few years now, is about the idea of ‘degrowth’, whether it might save all of us… or at least give us a chance to enjoy more equal rights and live wilder at the same time.

We’ve summoned up the phrase ‘more-than-human’, and semantics are important when discussing the intrinsic, irrefutable value of plant and animal communities. But if I anchor a poem about a grouse’s breeding show-down with an image of unpredictable, and very human, desire, it’s because I’ve always experienced life as: we are all in absolute tandem, and humans are not necessarily holding any aces.

In the UK, all of our plant and animal diversity has been cultivated and shaped by human behaviours, over millennia. We stop coppicing in our broadleaved woodland for instance, for fuel and tools; our native wildlife declines steeply. Our physical and emotional resilience declines when we stop working in the wood, as well.  It’s the ‘more-than-the sum-of-us’ situation that inspires me: more relationship, close listening, and sliding into so many emotions– wonder, fear, defiance…

Glyn: The language choices in the poem are very interesting: your neologism ‘spinnowing’ unwound itself, but I had to check the definition of ‘pleached’ to understand the powerful final metaphor; it’s the compound-adjectives ‘mattock-grubbed / gossip-thwacked / bomb-proof’ that I think would make wonderful explaining.

Suzanne: My poems always start with an emotional juxtaposition, and because of my work, I am often outside when my first ideas and lines come. It might be a repeated way I need to move my body, or the tools in my hands…  something someone says to me when I am planting young whips or hedge-laying, for instance.

Like any scientific work, biological conservation has specific terms and words which are very juicy for borrowing for poems.

There is also the crossover to countryside language. This is so beautiful, the Welsh language here in the upper part of the Dyfi Valley. Every time I understand another phrase and build my vocabulary, to be able to be understood, it feels like I am earning the right to expand. I also appreciate that I’m leaving things I don’t need anymore.

I wanted to explore the primacy of family, our chosen family. Trees that grow together this way can be different species, and it’s very striking. The stress is held in the form, finally…. but, anything is truly possible. Anything.

The tree which inspired the poem (along the banks of Afon Leri near Tal-y-Bont) is a surviving, outgrown testament to a blackthorn hedge or thicket barrier to the water. If you have ever, ever worked with blackthorn, using your own hands, the adjectives explain themselves!

(And here’s another word: gauntlets.)

I remember being very excited when I found the scientific term ‘inosculation’ for the epigraph. Sounds like– inoculation. (I wrote ‘The Marriage Tree’ in 2016.)

Glyn: Working for associations such as Climate Cymru and the Forestry Commision, do you ever feel your environmental duties are complicated by your eco-poetics? Or, indeed, that acute environmental concerns affect how you narrate the more-than-human?

Suzanne: Often now, when I am invited as a panellist or advisory member to different environmental agencies, my poetry is also brought up in discussion. This is not about the general public knowing my poems! I am asked about my function as a poet and what this brings to my conservation practice.

I’ve noticed I have been able to hold the attention of public agencies to different approaches, build unlikely alliances more easily and facilitate a more equitable decision-making space because of my artistic practice– in my case– being a poet. Some of this is how I make mental and intuitive connections and some of this how I model this behaviour when I work. I do this to communicate best with others, support them with their needs and build trust.

Being a poet as well as a conservationist is allowing me to make a very positive difference for climate adaptation planning in Wales, because this thematic area is very new, and public bodies realise discontinuity is happening.  So, a regular ‘task-force’ or ‘committee’ approach is not always appropriate: nothing is guaranteed, the process needs to facilitate enquiry and it can be very emotionally-charged. We are all feeling the depth of risk. The poetry of climate risk and other forms of art are not only powerful engagement tools for reframing challenges, but are also valuable as lived experience and real data in the policy-making space. Here, I think of Pacific Islander poets Craig Santos Perez and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, and our own island poet, Ness Owen.

Successful conservation is a result of rigorous research, force of imagination and extreme practicality, and you can say the same for writing poetry. But at core, this is reverence for life.

I attended the Black Poets Masterclass Series The Obsidian Foundation offered last year and I recall Jason Allen-Paisant asking us, “What is the integrity, and purpose of our writing life?” I am very committed to working in the space of climate adaptation and poetry and cross-pollinating– I am going to be throwing everything at it that I can dream up.

Glyn: The blackthorns in this poem co-exist without human intervention, yet the act of writing the poem anthropomorphises them. To what degree do you feel the human is ‘intertwined’ the more-than-human, and how far does that relationship rely on the first-person to intuit more-than-human language?

Suzanne: In any culture around the world you will hear humans giving voice to plants and animals. It’s our imagination making sense of the world– and too, that sense of the ‘superconscious’  we conceive when we don’t divorce ourselves from nature. It’s very interesting to see the rise of ‘we’ as opposed to ‘I’ in ‘eco-poetry’ (again I don’t like the descriptor, but at least we have a common starting point

when discussing). However ‘I’ can hold a place for personal transformation, accountability. And survival, I think. I read a poem like ‘What Would Root’ by Katie Farris and it’s this magical farce– the ‘I’ first slightly harassed, then giving into inexorable change, and relationship–never to leave again– with nature. Again, let’s believe it.  Anything is possible.