More-than-human: A Poem & Interview from Miranda Lynn Barnes

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 Miranda Lynn Barnes, a poet from the US now living in the UK. She is the author of two pamphlets: Blue Dot Aubade, published in 2020 with V. Press, and Formulations, a chapbook of newly-created poetic forms based in chemistry co-authored with chemist and poet Stephen Paul Wren (Small Press/Tangent Books, 2022).

---

The Sibyl of the Fireflies Watches from an Elm

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

---

Glyn F. Edwards: The Sibyl at Cumae was an oracle famed for her nine prophetic books, which seems to have influenced the structure of this poem. How else did the myth shape ‘The Sybil of the Fireflies Watches from an Elm’?

Miranda Lynn Barnes: When I read about the Sibyl of Cumae, what really stuck with me was the image of this powerful female figure reduced to only her voice, a husk inside a glass jar hanging on a tree. At the end of the Sibyl’s thousand years, this is how she is shown to us in myth (as well as Eliot’s The Waste Land). I was angry for her, felt compassion for her, wanted to know her more. I wondered about her perspective, how she might observe the world and what the vantage point of hanging from a tree branch might allow her to see. I wanted to bring her into the present era, and hear what she had to say, particularly in the context of what is happening to our world.

The Stygian Elm features within the myth of the Sibyl and where she appears in Virgil’s Aeneid. Aeneas requests that the Sibyl guides him through the underworld to speak to his father. On the journey, they encounter the elm positioned near the famed River Styx, on which ‘vain’ or ‘empty’ dreams hang. The elm is often this transitional space between life and death, which is also the space the voice of the Sibyl is holding in my poem.

And of course we are all familiar with Dutch elm disease becoming introduced to Europe, North America, and New Zealand, which decimated the population of native elms that didn’t have any natural resistance. What is devastating about the elm’s defence mechanism is that the very method by which it tries to stop the fungus, plugging its own xylem, kills the tree because it cannot feed its upper branches anymore and starves. This did remind me of the way the Sibyl, fending off Apollo’s bargaining for her virginity in exchange for eternal life, asked instead for ‘as many years as the grains of sand she held’, and when she refused his advances, was punished to shrivel slowly and die without eternal youth.

Glyn: The title implies the Sybil herself is the ‘voice’ of the poem, ‘captive’ and ‘captivated’ by the ‘little child’ in their yard or garden. In this reversal of common poetry, the more-than-human narrates the human. Does it empower you as a writer to consider human behaviour from an original perspective?

Miranda: I am not sure if I had considered empowerment in the process before, but it’s really interesting to think about. I think allowing the Sibyl’s voice to embody different aspects of nature was something that evolved naturally and felt right, because of how Sibyl’s cave is described as ‘a hundred mouths with as many voices rushing out’. This otherworldly, multivocal capacity, along with Sibyl’s becoming only a ‘wandering’ voice nearing her end, felt like something that could move into and possess the phenomena of nature that are already speaking to us, but we won’t hear, or don’t often hear well enough.

I think there is a freedom in considering human behaviour from the more-than-human perspective. The process removes the constraints of our daily reality and maybe in a way it also links us back with nature, as part of it. Putting on this eye, and this voice, I can view the human as an animal figure, as something maybe still a little wild and made of the wild, but I can also be more honest about what the human is and does. The perspective in this poem, in particular, means I can more… objectively(?) consider both the awe and reverence the child has towards the fireflies, the nature around her, but also the cruelty and destruction she is enacting. There is an opportunity to acknowledge duality and contradiction. There is mourning, but not condemnation.

Glyn: Many people’s relationship with the natural world exists somewhere between the images expressed in the lines ‘blessed by their light / their favour’ and having to ‘mourn the slowed blinking’. Is this poem a celebration of the fireflies, of youth, or an elegy for bodies that must ‘float like ash’?

Miranda: ‘The Sibyl of the Fireflies’ definitely feels elegiac to me and there are multiple things being mourned in the poem. As the Sibyl is well on her way at this point to becoming nothing but a voice, she is mourning the loss of her own life in this slow drifting away, ‘like ash’, even as the child she observes is only near the start of hers. But beyond this dynamic between the two characters in the poem, there is a larger mourning taking place.

The poem is part of a series towards a collection I am working on, with concerns of environment and ecology as a substantial influence. Extinction, drought, and climate change weave in throughout poems that focus on trees, tree rings, woodlands and forests as a central subject, as well as a river. The Sibyl also draws in the feminine, as within this collection-in-progress, a parallel is distinctly drawn between femicide and ecological destruction.

At this point in time, we are witnessing not just climate collapse, but the deeply calloused exploitation of the world’s resources, on an unhinged level, even as we’re being shown what will happen if we do not care better for our world and change the way we are living. The Sibyl’s prophecies were not valued in her time, until it was too late. But she herself was also preyed upon and abused by Apollo, who punished her for not giving her body to him as he wished. There is a very porous line between the abuse and exploitation of the natural world and the abuse of the feminine, to me. Another mythological figure that plays a role alongside the Sibyl is Daphne, who was turned into a tree to prevent being raped. Repeatedly the feminine is an object to be conquered and possessed, as are the ‘commodities’ of nature – neither are seen as autonomous, powerful, and worthy of respect.

It calls to mind Mary Midgley’s writing on the damage done by rhetorical shifts in science during the period of the Enlightenment, where violent, hostile language surrounding nature was accepted as scientific because it was dominant and conquering towards a nature that should be tamed and civilised (Science and Poetry, 2001), not least Bacon’s appeal to ‘bind her [Nature] to your service and make her your slave’. This was in direct retort to more wholistic views of science that advocated love and respect of nature, the scientist operating as harmonious element, and not least, the traditional view of nature as feminine. This shift in accepted scientific language, and an increasingly imperialist attitude towards nature, was no accident and has resulted in centuries of damage to the world, rooted in misogyny.

Glyn: You co-authored a chapbook recently. Did this involve working on individual poems in multiple voices, or on separate poems on similar themes?

Miranda: This is a really interesting question. In Formulations, written with chemist and poet Stephen Paul Wren, each poem was written in a form created from a specific organic molecule present in nature, as the project’s focus was on the chemistry of plants. While we worked very closely together on the project as a whole, our poems were written individually. The collaboration mainly took place in the creation of the forms and the overall project. So in Formulations we worked separately on our individual poems with similar themes, where each poem had it’s own ‘voice’ and approach, depending on the poem itself.

But a commission I worked on with Caleb Parkin when he was Bristol City Poet was to write a collaborative poem about the moon for Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon exhibit in the Bristol Cathedral (2021). We created a twelve-part poem entitled ‘Almanac of Lunar Songs’ that considered the various names given to monthly full moons around the world, but also how the full moon impacts and interacts with different life forms. In writing the piece, we alternated months and chose the life forms we wanted to write about and celebrate, which allowed a sort of interweaving of voice. The piece had a distinct ecological focus, as well, and allowed a dialogue between the human and the more-than-human.

In the collection in progress, the voice of the Sibyl shifts and moves through lenses of the natural world: fireflies, trees and plant life, seasons, and wildfires, and there are opportunities for the ‘hamadryads’, or spirits, of the trees within the collection to add their voices, also. The execution of voice within the poems is an important tool, creating a tapestry of voices all part of a cohesive whole.

Glyn: (follow on question) Given that Oracles would speak in the voice of a Spirit , and Sybils would voice the Spirit as their own voice, did you find your poetic voices began to overlap, echo or even imitate one another?

Miranda: I do think there were overlaps and echoes that emerged in Formulations as the collaboration progressed, with an intriguing element of that coming from how the forms were constructed and the features of the plants that were the source of the molecules. What I loved most was looking back and seeing, at the end of writing the chapbook, where some of those unexpected synchronicities emerged.

In my work with Caleb, I think there was an echoing and an overlapping for that piece, particularly because of the interjections of the moon names throughout. When we read the work in performance, one of us would read our section, and where the moon names are, the other person would speak them, almost as interjections. There was also a shared reverence and praise for the natural phenomena being written about, which was a unifying factor in the piece.

Within my current work, I do already see that happening between the poems of the Sibyl, Daphne, and my own ‘voice’, as well as the imagined voices of women who have experienced femicide. Though each are unique, and I hear them as distinct voices and entities in my mind while I am writing them, there is a communality that develops, an almost choral sensibility. Which does remind me of being in a forest, in a downpour or listening to the wind in the branches.