Interview with Gail Entrekin from Canary Magazine
Canary literary magazine is a journal of the environmental crisis; its poems and short prose are elegantly crafted and often portray the intimate relationship a poet/writer has with the changing natural world. It’s a place where beauty, grief, philosophy, and caution converge. Below is my interview with Canary editor Gail Entrekin.
LF: What inspired you to start Canary? You say your mission is “to deepen awareness of the environment and enrich the well-being of the individual and in turn society as a whole.” Describe how you gauge your success and if you have been successful thus far.
GE: I started Canary in 2008 with the idea of having a voice in what stands as good, well-crafted environmental literature and bringing the news of how the environmental crisis is affecting various parts of the world, its habitats and species, in the voices of people living in those places. I think most Canary regular readers are already deeply grieving at the Earth’s terrible losses, but I believe that there are other occasional readers who are just now receiving this news in a visceral way that argument and scientific information have not been able to impart.
LF: I love how you believe “that the literary arts can provide an understanding that humans are part of an integrated system.” What prominent example/literary work comes to mind as evidence of this?
GE: I find examples of this in so many of my favorite poems. Ted Roethke’s incredible villanelle, “The Waking,” expresses the animal-like longings of us human creatures:
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” finds the child Margaret “grieving/over golden grove unleaving,” grieving unknowingly her own mortality with that of the leaves. Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill” equates his childhood innocence and joy with the innocence of the natural world: “As I was young and easy/ under the apple boughs/ about the lilting house/ and happy as the grass was green.”
It’s everywhere, really, once you begin to look for it. There is great comfort for us in recognizing our part in the great green world. Look at Mary Oliver’s “The Wild Geese.”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Or Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Or Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” which I’ll quote in its entirety as it’s so perfectly to the point:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
You see? The great poets all know this: that we are all, as the non-dual philosophies remind us, part of a great cosmic Oneness. None of us is separate or alone.
LF: Do you think literature is more effective than, say, a newspaper article when it comes to getting the message out about climate change? Why or why not?
GE: I think that depends on the reader, of course. But as I said above, I do believe that well-crafted poetry and music and painting can reach people in a deeper place, convey pain and joy and desperation in a way that scientific or factual information alone is unable to convey to many, perhaps most, people. The arts, well wrought, have a way of bypassing our rational analytics and going straight to our emotional identification with the matter at hand. Ellen Bass’ poem about the eggs in the bird’s nest on her patio, the nest she has been watching eagerly, not hatching because the shells have been softened by acid rain and chemical sprays, has a great deal more impact than a sentence stating that certain birds are becoming extinct due to chemicals in the atmosphere.
This is partly because the specific is more emotionally identifiable than the general. This particular dying bird is more upsetting than dying birds in a general way. But also the poet can, if really good at her craft, create the event itself, the emotion itself, in the heart of the listener/reader rather than by just reporting on the event or feeling.
LF: Right. This is empathy at work, which naturally breeds compassion. But what about the flipside of this—I’m talking about the brutality of the natural world. Brutality is an everyday characteristic of the predator-prey world of nature. The coyote needs to kill the bunny to live. As pacifists on the side of compassion and animal rights, how do we reconcile the brutality of nature?
GE: Anyone who is realistic about the actual world we are a part of is keenly aware of the “brutality” of Nature. There is no malice in it. All things need to eat to live, and luckily for us, we are at the top of the food chain. We have, over thousands of years, eliminated or brought into subjugation all those who would have had us for dinner. We are the only animal that kills for pleasure (except possibly for a few domesticated animals like cats, whose instincts to kill food no longer correspond with their need to eat). With great power comes great responsibility. Now it is up to us to protect the less powerful creatures and other living things, of which we are directly a part. We, like all other living things, are made of the substances available on the planet. We share a breathing cycle with plants and trees. How far we have come from the understanding women and men first had that we are animals of Earth!
LF: The bios in Canary are very different from those of other magazines; instead of listing accolades, contributors are asked to list the watershed they reside in. Can you explain why you do this?
GE: I’m so happy that you noticed this! I want to select work based on its message and craft, not on the reputation of its author, so I do not look at cover letters until after I have made selections. By the same token, I feel that what is worth saying about the author in the magazine is not her/his level of “success” but rather where he/she lives on the planet as a relevant framework for considering the subject of the piece.
LF: One of the most famous thinkers of our time, Albert Einstein, said “Look deeply into nature.” What do you think we can learn from nature?
GE: Pretty much everything we really need to know. Wordsworth, in despair at the sense of alienation from Nature he felt all around him, said:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.
This feels, in certain moods right now, very timely. In such an urban world, so many of us feel no connection to the Natural world that we are a part of. This is in part my mission with Canary: to remind readers of that connection and reduce this terrible sense of alienation.
LF: So if we are connected to Nature, we have a sense of peace and stability, and if we’re not connected, well that’s an ingredient for destruction, both on the micro level of the individual and the macro level of the community. To continue with Einstein, here’s one of his famous quotes about the individual and nature:
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Is there evidence that the latter part of this quote is true? Is humankind breaking out of its “prison” and “embracing…the whole of nature” with respect to government policy, manufacturing, community development, etc.?
GE: It is certainly true that this is what we MUST do if we hope to survive and keep the rest of the planet alive with us. I wish I could say that I see humanity trending in this direction, but I’m not certain about that yet. Certainly the U.S. government is not taking up this cause and lately seems to be heading swiftly in the direction of destruction. But many other countries (and many individual U.S. state governments) are taking up the torch our Federal government has tossed aside. And of course hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations all over the world are working tirelessly to reverse the current trend. I do believe, I have to believe, that more and more people are hearing the news of the devastation coming and turning their attention to finding solutions.
The trick, and it’s not an easy one, is to do all that we can to mitigate the coming crisis: in our jobs, our conversations, our correspondence and meetings with influential people, our donations of money and time, our signing of petitions and calling of senators and representatives, while at the same time avoiding a personal sense of panic and depression. We must both put all our efforts into influencing the future while at the same time staying present in the moment. The natural world is still here now. There is a bald eagle nesting by the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge across the Bay. Last week I saw a bobcat hunting ground squirrels while I was on a sojourn up along the Pacific Coast. My friend’s husband has been taking breath-taking photos of barn owls nesting in his neighbors’ tree in Berkeley. There is a local skunk that seems to have a crush on my cat. Squirrels are performing aerial tricks above us all the time.
Work for change. But experience the joy.
Canary literary magazine is a journal of the environmental crisis; its poems and short prose are elegantly crafted and often portray the intimate relationship a poet/writer has with the changing natural world. It’s a place where beauty, grief, philosophy, and caution converge. Below is my interview with Canary editor Gail Entrekin.
LF: What inspired you to start Canary? You say your mission is “to deepen awareness of the environment and enrich the well-being of the individual and in turn society as a whole.” Describe how you gauge your success and if you have been successful thus far.
GE: I started Canary in 2008 with the idea of having a voice in what stands as good, well-crafted environmental literature and bringing the news of how the environmental crisis is affecting various parts of the world, its habitats and species, in the voices of people living in those places. I think most Canary regular readers are already deeply grieving at the Earth’s terrible losses, but I believe that there are other occasional readers who are just now receiving this news in a visceral way that argument and scientific information have not been able to impart.
LF: I love how you believe “that the literary arts can provide an understanding that humans are part of an integrated system.” What prominent example/literary work comes to mind as evidence of this?
GE: I find examples of this in so many of my favorite poems. Ted Roethke’s incredible villanelle, “The Waking,” expresses the animal-like longings of us human creatures:
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” finds the child Margaret “grieving/over golden grove unleaving,” grieving unknowingly her own mortality with that of the leaves. Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill” equates his childhood innocence and joy with the innocence of the natural world: “As I was young and easy/ under the apple boughs/ about the lilting house/ and happy as the grass was green.”
It’s everywhere, really, once you begin to look for it. There is great comfort for us in recognizing our part in the great green world. Look at Mary Oliver’s “The Wild Geese.”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Or Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Or Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” which I’ll quote in its entirety as it’s so perfectly to the point:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
You see? The great poets all know this: that we are all, as the non-dual philosophies remind us, part of a great cosmic Oneness. None of us is separate or alone.
LF: Do you think literature is more effective than, say, a newspaper article when it comes to getting the message out about climate change? Why or why not?
GE: I think that depends on the reader, of course. But as I said above, I do believe that well-crafted poetry and music and painting can reach people in a deeper place, convey pain and joy and desperation in a way that scientific or factual information alone is unable to convey to many, perhaps most, people. The arts, well wrought, have a way of bypassing our rational analytics and going straight to our emotional identification with the matter at hand. Ellen Bass’ poem about the eggs in the bird’s nest on her patio, the nest she has been watching eagerly, not hatching because the shells have been softened by acid rain and chemical sprays, has a great deal more impact than a sentence stating that certain birds are becoming extinct due to chemicals in the atmosphere.
This is partly because the specific is more emotionally identifiable than the general. This particular dying bird is more upsetting than dying birds in a general way. But also the poet can, if really good at her craft, create the event itself, the emotion itself, in the heart of the listener/reader rather than by just reporting on the event or feeling.
LF: Right. This is empathy at work, which naturally breeds compassion. But what about the flipside of this—I’m talking about the brutality of the natural world. Brutality is an everyday characteristic of the predator-prey world of nature. The coyote needs to kill the bunny to live. As pacifists on the side of compassion and animal rights, how do we reconcile the brutality of nature?
GE: Anyone who is realistic about the actual world we are a part of is keenly aware of the “brutality” of Nature. There is no malice in it. All things need to eat to live, and luckily for us, we are at the top of the food chain. We have, over thousands of years, eliminated or brought into subjugation all those who would have had us for dinner. We are the only animal that kills for pleasure (except possibly for a few domesticated animals like cats, whose instincts to kill food no longer correspond with their need to eat). With great power comes great responsibility. Now it is up to us to protect the less powerful creatures and other living things, of which we are directly a part. We, like all other living things, are made of the substances available on the planet. We share a breathing cycle with plants and trees. How far we have come from the understanding women and men first had that we are animals of Earth!
LF: The bios in Canary are very different from those of other magazines; instead of listing accolades, contributors are asked to list the watershed they reside in. Can you explain why you do this?
GE: I’m so happy that you noticed this! I want to select work based on its message and craft, not on the reputation of its author, so I do not look at cover letters until after I have made selections. By the same token, I feel that what is worth saying about the author in the magazine is not her/his level of “success” but rather where he/she lives on the planet as a relevant framework for considering the subject of the piece.
LF: One of the most famous thinkers of our time, Albert Einstein, said “Look deeply into nature.” What do you think we can learn from nature?
GE: Pretty much everything we really need to know. Wordsworth, in despair at the sense of alienation from Nature he felt all around him, said:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.
This feels, in certain moods right now, very timely. In such an urban world, so many of us feel no connection to the Natural world that we are a part of. This is in part my mission with Canary: to remind readers of that connection and reduce this terrible sense of alienation.
LF: So if we are connected to Nature, we have a sense of peace and stability, and if we’re not connected, well that’s an ingredient for destruction, both on the micro level of the individual and the macro level of the community. To continue with Einstein, here’s one of his famous quotes about the individual and nature:
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Is there evidence that the latter part of this quote is true? Is humankind breaking out of its “prison” and “embracing…the whole of nature” with respect to government policy, manufacturing, community development, etc.?
GE: It is certainly true that this is what we MUST do if we hope to survive and keep the rest of the planet alive with us. I wish I could say that I see humanity trending in this direction, but I’m not certain about that yet. Certainly the U.S. government is not taking up this cause and lately seems to be heading swiftly in the direction of destruction. But many other countries (and many individual U.S. state governments) are taking up the torch our Federal government has tossed aside. And of course hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations all over the world are working tirelessly to reverse the current trend. I do believe, I have to believe, that more and more people are hearing the news of the devastation coming and turning their attention to finding solutions.
The trick, and it’s not an easy one, is to do all that we can to mitigate the coming crisis: in our jobs, our conversations, our correspondence and meetings with influential people, our donations of money and time, our signing of petitions and calling of senators and representatives, while at the same time avoiding a personal sense of panic and depression. We must both put all our efforts into influencing the future while at the same time staying present in the moment. The natural world is still here now. There is a bald eagle nesting by the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge across the Bay. Last week I saw a bobcat hunting ground squirrels while I was on a sojourn up along the Pacific Coast. My friend’s husband has been taking breath-taking photos of barn owls nesting in his neighbors’ tree in Berkeley. There is a local skunk that seems to have a crush on my cat. Squirrels are performing aerial tricks above us all the time.
Work for change. But experience the joy.
