"The Way We Learn to Look" A conversation between Nick Flynn, Brenda Hillman, Dorianne Laux, Fred Marchant, Laura Mullen, and Patricia Smith        About a month after the Deep Water Horizon explosion, the editors of this magazine, Gulf Coast, asked me if I would write something about the ongoing disaster.        I’d been online a few times in the days and then weeks after the explosion, watched the “live feed”—but I had no sense how big what I was seeing actually was. And neither did anyone else, as the number of barrels gushing forth each hour, each day, kept changing, depending on who was asked.        After wrestling with it for a month or so, it became clear that the idea of writing something by myself felt impossible, felt lonely. So I thought to ask for help from some friends.        I first thought to ask a pal who is a marine biologist at Boston University, Les Kaufman, who has studied the coral reefs in the Gulf for decades now, often using the oil rigs as diving platform. Les said early on that the damage would be essentially unseen, much of it hidden from sight. I thought of asking another pal at The Center for Land Use Interpretation—Matt Coolidge—who is involved in a long-term project, based in Houston, called Texas Oil.        Then I heard Dorianne read her poem “The Lyre” (yes, it does sound like the liar), and it became instantly clear that the question of how we, as poets, wrestle with these larger political realities would give this conversation a focus.        Little did I know. As Dorianne says, “This was my entryway.”        This is our entryway.                                        —Nick Flynn “the verbs and nouns that nobody wants to use” Fred Marchant: One of my first thoughts about it all was how totally misleading and dishonest the word “spill” was. Here was something that seemed to sound—finally—like the wicked understatement it actually is. This thing happening underwater was not like spilling milk from the cat’s saucer. As many noted, this was a bleed, a wound, something that had its cousins in human bodies suffering in the aftermath of violence. Laura Mullen: A part of the work of the poet is to protect the language, not as in police, but to be the caretaker of language, this magical invention for communicating shared feeling and thought. A “spill” implies a limited amount of material. When a water main breaks, for instance, you do not call the plumber to say you have a “spill.” When we were heading toward “the junk shot,” that mad collection of random refuse became referred to as “Loss Prevention Material.” Sheen is “a soft luster on a surface”—the word is being used appropriately only in this sense: the word is being used to shine us all on. It's nice to know BP’s got some creative writers on the payroll? FM: As I can easily be a little too lazy with my diction, I probably will still use the word “spill” in casual conversation, but its inadequacy as a metaphor is now clearly etched into my mind. The “spill” makes this thing sound more innocent than it actually is. George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” comes to mind: here’s another euphemism that takes barbarity and makes it seem or feel more tolerable. The “innocence” of the word “spill” is a political construct or artifact. I don’t yet have the exact word for what this event is, but it is more than a spill, is closer to a bleed and a wound, and is certainly representative of a deep violation of our compact with each other and our compact with life on the planet. Patricia Smith: What was it George Carlin once said? “Smug, greedy, well-fed white men have invented a language to conceal their sins.”        Meanwhile poets (and I’ll speak primarily of the poet here, because that’s where my breath is rooted) must … confront everything we’d much rather turn away from. I suppose I thought of Carlin because he was always on to those slimy little games we play with language, purportedly to protect ourselves. Remember his stinging diatribe on the pitiful evolution of the hard-hitting term “shell shock”? It became “battle fatigue” (notice the syllables softening), then “operational exhaustion” (are humans even involved?) and now it’s “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Sounds like something that can be remedied with a once-a-week over-the-counter tablet and a stiff drink.        A “sheen” is a hard, surface beauty. A sheen is something that can be both admired and mourned, looking as if it can be skimmed off with minimal effort. You can look into the sheen of something and see yourself. It doesn’t seem permanent. A sheen always suggests the sun.        And a “spill” is something that happens and stops. If you spill milk, it splashes, then spreads lazily, but it doesn’t keep spilling. There’s a bottom to the carton or glass. For the language we need, I suggest that we, once again, look to children. In the seat behind me on a flight home today from Minnesota, an earnest big sister explained the situation in the Gulf to her rapt sibling: “The earth has been sick for a long, long time, and now it’s throwing up. And because it’s been sick for a long time it’s gonna throw up forever.” Hey, works for me. Brenda Hillman: I am very glad we’re focused on language, on individual words, on the language of reportage, since that is where writers can start. The moment “sheen” was mentioned, I was reminded of the look of the birds, the damaged life, the subcategories of futility, the half-thoughts, half-emotions (ecotions) that will swim toward a swirl of commitment.        I’ve been dancing a stick dance with the word “stem” in “stem the crisis”—“stem the flow” of oil, “stem the spill” … “stem the bleeding” of financial markets, the pleasure in its form, that it is a verb and a noun of somewhat odd roots/stems (indo-European roots are never called stems—why not?). Stem, as in to stop or delay, seems to come from Middle English and before that, from Norse stemma, of Germanic origin, and other verb-stems, are related—stemn, stefn—the ‘original’ stem stemming from stā meaning “to stand…” The stopping and the standing are in the same place, the same syllable. The noun (as in “stalk of a plant, most above ground but occasionally subterranean, supporting a fruit, flower, or leaf” or a “long and thin supportive or main section of something” or “the slender part of a wineglass between the base and the bowl”) is also “the root or main part of a noun, adjective, or other word, to which inflections or formative elements are added”—wait. Is the stem the root and is stopping standing? Oil is made of old stems from the Triassic, so really, we have to stem the stems—does language stem from itself in the stā, the ordinary first syllable?        As part of one’s activism, [we should] call on the so-called liberal media to examine the use of such terms as ‘spill,’ to interrogate stems and surges.... PS: Strange that I became a poet, since I was raised not to trust language or, for that matter, anything I was seeing. I was raised by a woman who was convinced that the moon landing was staged in an Arizona desert. Growing up on the west side of Chicago—the part of town everyone told you to stay away from—language was used not so much to communicate, but to keep us in our place. The “national insurance” my parents paid every week was nothing but a white, outstretched hand. Our “modern urban development” was a slum, plain and simple. I learned early that soft language almost always hid hard edges.        So I don’t look at the pretty pictures, or even the murky shots of the underwater spew. I look beneath everything I hear. That’s where I find the verbs and nouns that nobody wants to use. FM: I think I have heard folks refer to the Deep Water Horizon explosion as another Ground Zero. And of course the Twin Towers are now permanently etched in as Ground Zeroes. But where do the Ground Zero metaphors come from if not the repressed nuclear anxiety that undergirds our country. What a hidden reservoir of fear that is. Is it too much a stretch to imagine that now-capped fountain of oil rising in a roiling cloud as yet another mushroom shape in the back of our minds?        And then there is the deep truth—I can hear it in all of us—of wanting like crazy to avoid the casual eloquence that even as it represents and portrays atrocity diminishes it and makes it more manageable by virtue of the very language used to condemn it. We are not talking here about the consolations of poetry or art. PS: When Katrina turned human, it turned ugly. Suddenly, here was a segment of the population—black, neglected and soulful—up front and center, wailing from rooftops, clutching wailing toddlers, hefting scrawled placards with variations of the same accusation: “America Has Forgotten Us.” At first, we marveled at images of the bitch storm in all its ferocity and wondered at the force it must have taken to snap a tree exactly in half. We looked in awe at peeled rooftops and flattened city blocks. But the bloated body spiraling in murky water was quite another matter (although note my use of the unabashedly poetic word “spiraling”). So was the nappy-headed, bulbous mama balancing her life—and her three, four or five squalling kids—on the down side of a sloped and slippery roof, the “looters,” Ethel Freeman left to die in her wheelchair, all those refugees (that’s what they were called, remember?) and evacuees (that’s what they were called, remember?) with their meager televised possessions and all their plaintive double negatives. LM: As I think about responding to the disaster in the Gulf, I’m interested in disrupting—because I’m wary of—a way of talking about poetry (I think of it as AWP talk) that seems to protect the privilege of the well-trained writer, keeping certain gates in place, while making claims for something essential and universal: open to everyone, innocent, flowing like rain or like a wild mountain stream (pure snowmelt), maybe channeled (further down, further down) by money and education but still somehow untouched. Like we all have the same water/rights…. PS: Ironically, the only people speaking of the Gulf regurgitation (say it a few times—you’ll get used to it) using the grim murderous language it deserves are those who believe it to be a harbinger of the apocalypse. The doomsday blogosphere is on the case, revved up by this telling passage in Revelations: “The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed....” Thousands of reverent reactionaries have no time for spill, sheen and nuance. The great mountain, ablaze? That’s the oil rig! Ships? Those must be the fishing vessels! The blood? Why, crude oil looks just like blood! LM: I see the cinderblocks of Fred’s garage and the bright TV set in Patricia’s family room five years ago, I see Brenda in her representative’s office and imagine Dorianne across the table from her mother, in smoke-thickened air that heavily shifts. And I realize I’m imagining: “seeing” what I have never seen in fact, making it up, my mind seizing—through the words—on cinderblocks I have seen, murky ponds I’ve passed, beaches I’ve walked on myself to (already looking ahead at the next sentence) “get the picture” and go on from that. It’s a complicated mixture: your words, my memory, or my memory of images associated with the understanding I have of your words…. To read the rest of the roundtable, please purchase the issue here.