Contributor’s Marginalia: Corrie Williamson on “Springtime makes us want things” by Keetje Kuipers

I have spent many years slinking nervously away from political poems or poems of blatant social commentary, and frankly I still do, but these days, I find myself balancing a fear of the finger-pointing didacticism that many overtly political poems fall prey to and which fails to appeal to me as a reader – with my desire for poems to be a serious part of the conversation about the issues we must talk compassionately about if we hope to see them dealt with wisely.

For this reason, I was drawn immediately to the piece that opens up the latest issue of 32 Poems: Keetje Kuipers’ “Springtime makes us want things.” The poem is operating in that exact space I have been craving – between entering the arena with its tiny fist of text raised high, while also remaining poetic, compressed, slipping its knife into my ribs so deftly I almost don’t notice.

The poem is ultimately a meditation on American hunger for oil, on our willingness to take what we want without examining the consequences, but it’s so darn gentle about it. Everyone and everything in the poem is wanting something, as the title implies, beginning with the old woman who walks the speaker’s street each day, who wants only “not to be hit / by a car,” which seems perfectly reasonable. But then:

The oil slicking Galveston

          Bay wants to dress the feathers
of migrating birds in purple-black

          sheen – make them all into crows,
dead crows.

In April of 2014, two ships in the Galveston Bay collided and spilled nearly 170,000 gallons of oil into the bay during peak migration, as birds returned from their southern winter sojourns. I love how Kuipers evokes this seasonality here, of natural cycles against the unnaturalness of this damage, so effortlessly.

And don’t I want things, too?

          My daughter to press her mouth
to my breast and release me from

          my own swelling sweetness.

Seamlessly, naturally, the poem gives us three generations of women: the old woman hoping passively to avoid death by automobile; the child accepting her mother’s milk; and the speaker in the middle, who must be the one to question her responsibility in all of this, as both giver and taker.

She observes the fertility, the sexuality, of spring with its “pollen-sprayed streets, every branch gushing / at the tips” and though she claims, “I don’t think about / what rumbles in the engine, why / I’m so glad to burn it all up” the beauty of the poem is that, of course, she does think about, and puts forward her own complicity. And she asks me to, as well, without blame or demand.

I can’t help but hear this poem talking to the too-little-loved and still-so-timely Robinson Jeffers – his “Shine, Perishing Republic,” poems in particular, which tell us, “Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and / decadence; and home to the mother,” and which, perhaps a bit more directly than Kuipers, admonish, “The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love / of freedom with contempt of luxury.”

I’m grateful to Kuipers’ stark, compressed, yet touching and modest lyric, for making me want more like it.