Chrysalis with John Fiege

The tires of your car have a chemical in them, called 6PPD, that slows tire degradation by binding with oxygen and ozone that could break down the rubber. But these same reactions that protect the rubber are also creating a new chemical, called 6PPD-quinone, which scientists just found in 2020 to be highly toxic to aquatic organisms. 6PPD is in essentially every tire made since the 1960s, and aquatic ecosystems around the world, particularly in dense urban areas, are in danger. Coho salmon is particularly susceptible to the toxin, and salmon populations in the Seattle area have been decimated by stormwater runoff containing the tiny particles that wear off tires as they speed down the road. Now that the science is clear, the search is on to find a substitute for 6PPD; but for many years to come, the pollutants will continue to shed from our tires and into our waterways. How to stop the stormwater from getting to the salmon and other aquatic organisms is one of the many ways that the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance is advocating for the ecological health of Puget Sound and other waterways in the Seattle area. Sean Dixon leads these efforts as the executive director of the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, which is part of the worldwide network of waterkeepers. I discuss with Sean the work he’s doing in Seattle but also the waterkeeper movement more broadly and the importance of organized, community-engaged action to protect waterways and the diverse ecosystems that depend on them across the planet. This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Projects series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms. Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word! Sean Dixon As Executive Director of Puget Soundkeeper, Sean works with the entire Soundkeeper staff team, board, and network of community partners, volunteers, and advocates to drive clean water progress across the Puget Sound and its watershed. As an attorney, entrepreneur, and environmental advocate, Sean has worked for years defending communities and ecosystems from pollution, supporting sustainable fisheries, pushing for climate adaptation and mitigation, and fighting for innovative approaches to solving the myriad threats facing our oceans, coasts, and waterways. Before moving to the PNW, Sean worked as an attorney at Hudson Riverkeeper, a local sustainable seafood fishmonger, and, most recently, as Chief of Staff for the Region 1 (New England) office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Sean currently serves as the Publications Officer for the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, and holds an LL.M. in Climate Change Law and a J.D. in Environmental Law from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, in White Plains, NY, a master’s degree from the Yale School of the Environment, and a B.A. in Marine Biology and Oceanography from Boston University. Recommended Readings & Media Credits This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Isabella Nurt, Amy Cavanaugh, Arthur Koenig, Kate Fair, and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnfiege.substack.com

There is a line in Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s poem, “When the Animals Leave this Place,” that I find haunting: “They said no one belongs here.” She’s writing about land that used to flood cyclically but that settlers used for farms and pastures, against the advice of Indigenous elders and without regard for the seasonality of the rain. Embedded in these six words—“They said no one belongs here”—is the history of conquest and colonialism in America and the mentality of the control of nature, which, to this day, dominates our societal relationship to nature. The forces of nature and history and a deep knowledge of the land burst forth from Allison’s poem, along with a spirited and iconic crew of animals. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the author or editor of eighteen books and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Her most recent book, Look at This Blue, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms. Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word! Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is a widely-acclaimed poet, editor, and activist. She was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas and spent her formative years in three separate locations: North Carolina, Canada, and the Great Plains. Initially dropping out of high school to work fields in order to support herself, Coke completed her GED at age 16 before enrolling in courses at North Carolina State University. She went on to receive an AFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award, she is now a distinguished professor at the University of California at Riverside. Outside of these duties, she works with underserved incarcerated youth and serves on multiple literary and editorial boards. Hedge Coke has authored six full-length books of poetry, her first of which (Dog Road Woman) won the 1998 American Book Award. 2022's Look at This Blue was a National Book Award Finalist. More broadly, her works have achieved wide and extensive acclaim. In addition to these collections, she has written ten poetry anthologies and an immensely evocative and powerful memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival, which discusses her upbringing, her story-cultural heritage, and the tumultuous experiences that have helped inform her identity, perspective, and journey. "When the Animals Leave this Place" By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Underneath ice caps, once glacial peaks deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend. Free creatures camouflaged as waves and waves receding far from plains pulling upward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains. On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir, high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plains up where headwaters reside. Droplets pound, listen. Hoofed and pawed mammals pawing and hoofing themselves up, up. Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers, trailed by salamanders—mud puppies. Plunging through currents, above concrete and steel man-made barriers these populations of plains, prairies, forests flee in such frenzy, popping splash dance, pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads— the breath of life in muddy ponds, still lakes. Liquid beads slide on windshield glass along cracked and shattered pane, spider-like with webs and prisms. “Look, there, the rainbow touched the ground both ends down!” Full arch seven colors showered, heed what Indigenous know, why long ago, they said no one belongs here, surrounding them, that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearby not fertile to crops and domestic graze. The old ones said, “When the animals leave this place the waters will come again. This power is beyond the strength of man. The river will return with its greatest force.” No one can stop her. She was meant to be this way. Snakes in honor, do not intrude. The rainbow tied with red and green like that on petal rose, though only momentarily. Colors disappear like print photographs fade. They mix with charcoal surrounding. A flurry of fowl follow like strands, maidenhair falls, from blackened clouds above swarming inward covering the basin and raising sky. Darkness hangs over the hills appear as black water crests, blackness varying shades. The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge . Main gravel crossroads and back back roads slicken to mud, clay. Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls. Frogs chug throaty songs. The frogs only part of immense choir heralding the downpour, the falling oceans. Over the train trestle, suspension bridge with current so slick everything slides off in sheets. Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds, somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl, walking whiskers to higher waters. Waters above, below the choir calling it forth. Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels. They dance toward the rain crest, the approaching storm beckoning, inviting, summoning. A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain past the strength of sunlight. The frog chorus sings refrain, melody drumming thunder, evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes. Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, or white birch woods rise, tower over, quaking aspen stand against storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing pasture, meadow, hills, mountain. Sounds erupt. Gathering clouds converge, push, pull, push, pull forcing lightning back and forth shaping windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants from stratocumulus media. As if they are a living cloud chamber, As if they exist only in the heavens. Air swells with dampness. It has begun. In 1993, Cid Corman selected "When the Animals Leave This Place" for the Charlie and Thelma Willis Memorial Editor's Choice Award (Abiko Quarterly, Kyoto, Japan) and Ed Friedman pressed it in The World, Poetry Project at St. Mark's. "When the Animals Leave This Place" is in Blood Run, Salt Publishing London & Cambridge, UK 2006, US/Global 2007. Poem reprinted courtesy of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. Recommended Readings & Media Credits This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnfiege.substack.com

I love beautiful pictures of animals surrounded by their natural habitats. It’s exhilarating to see idyllic environments and the animals so amazingly well-adapted to live in them. It’s also comforting to know those places still exist, despite what we’re doing to the planet. But there’s a danger in that exhilaration and comfort: these animals appear to live in a world so separate from our own, and at the same time, we might be lulled into thinking that this other world and these habitats are safe. Kara Maria’s paintings take a very different approach to representing animals. Her work features extinct, endangered, and invasive species, but they all float in abstract worlds, popping with color and soaked in the impact of humans on their lives. Kara’s work is captivating. It’s also an alarm sounding about the dire threat that Earth’s biodiversity faces in the age of humans. Her paintings of animals bring the biodiversity crisis to our front doorstep and spur us to think about how our actions are at the root of the ecologically devastating changes happening around the world. Kara Maria is based in San Francisco, and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She’s been awarded a number of artist residencies, including the Recology Artist in Residence Program at the San Francisco Recycling and Transfer Center, which we talk about in this episode. This episode is part of the Chrysalis Artists series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms. Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word! Kara Maria Kara Maria makes paintings and works on paper that reflect on Earth’s biodiversity crisis and the place of endangered species in our increasingly unstable environment. Borrowing from the broad vocabulary of contemporary painting, Maria blends geometric shapes, vivid hues, and abstract marks with representational elements. Her recent work features miniature portraits of disappearing animals, focusing attention on the alarming rate of extinction now being caused by human activity. Maria received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows throughout the United States at venues including the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA; the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and the Katonah Museum of Art in New York. Her work has received critical attention in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Art in America. In addition, Maria has been selected for many awards and honors, including a grant from Artadia, New York, NY; an Eisner Prize in Art from UC Berkeley; and the Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Montalvo Arts Center, Recology Artist in Residence Program, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and at the de Young’s Artist Studio. Maria’s work appears in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation); the San Jose Museum of Art; and the Cantor Center at Stanford University; among others. Recommended Readings & Media Credits This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Arthur Koenig and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker. If you enjoyed my conversation with Kara, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnfiege.substack.com

Before I read Brian Teare’s poem, “Doomstead Days,” I had never heard of a doomstead. It’s a clever portmanteau, combining homestead with doomsday: an alternative universe where the homestead is a preparation for the climate apocalypse. The poem Brian weaves around his encounter with this word is a lyrical romp through our connection to land, water, and each other. Water flows, gender is fluid, and the rigid binaries of our imaginations dissolve. Brian’s exploration of the doomstead unearths some vital questions about ecological crisis. How do we respond? How are we, as a society, fleeing to our doomsteads and hiding, waiting for disaster, hoping to survive? What does it look like for us to leave our doomsteads, engage the problems directly, and find collective solutions? Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and seven books of poetry, including, Doomstead Days, which won the Four Quartets Prize. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including fellowships from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pew. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. He’s also an editor and publisher and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. At over 1300 words, this poem is much longer than the others we’ve featured in our Poets series, but it’s worth it. This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms. Brian Teare A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Doomstead Days By Brian Teare today’s gender is rain it touches everything with its little silver epistemology mottled like a brook trout with a hundred spots white as bark scars on this slim trunk thrust up from one sidewalk square the four square feet of open ground given a street tree twiggy perimeter continually clipped by parking or car door or passing trash truck that snaps an actual branch I find haunting the little plot its winged achenes auto-rotate down to it’s not that I don’t like a wide sidewalk or the 45 bus that grinds right by but if organisms didn’t insist on forms of resistance they’d be dead of anthropocentric technomechanical systems whose grids restrict the living through perpetual stress that elicits intense physical response like an animal panic hitting the psoas with cramps or root fungus sunk in the maple’s allotment of city property as tolerably wide as the migraine that begins at the base of my skull & pinches with breadth calipers my temples until the feel of flay arrays the dura’s surface inside the bones inside the head the healer holds in her hands & says the occiput is shut flat & irks the nerves that thread through its unappeasable shunt into the spine I see a white light I keep thinking about the way long drought dries out topsoil so deep beneath its surface the first hard rain wreaks flood taking the good dirt with it the way today’s wet excess escapes its four square feet of exposed root & rivers out a flex of sediment alluvial over the civic cement of the anthropocene in currents a supple rippled velvet dun as Wissahickon creek in fall’s brief season of redd & spawn when brook trout in chill quick shallows once dug into gravel to let nested eggs mix with milt & turn pearls translucent as raw unpolished quartz each white eyed ova flawed by a black fleck my eyes close over at the height of migraine fertile error waiting with incipient tail ready to propel it deeper into nausea until the healer halts its hatching & calms neuralgia between the heels of her hands pressing the occiput back open into the natural curve the bones forget the way the banks of the Wissahickon have forgotten rapids rinsing schist shaded by hemlock that kept the brook trout cold each patterned aspect of habitat lost first to dams & mills & industry runoff & plots of flax Germantown planted for paper & cloth made with water’s power & hauled out of the precipitous gorge up rough narrow roads south to the city port before adelgids took the crucial dark from under hemlocks sun heating the rocky creek down steep rills to the lower Schuylkill wide in its final miles dammed at Fairmount for two centuries of coal silt & dredge fabric dye & sewage that gave rise to typhus & refinery spills that gave rise to fire rinsed by this gender that remembers current’s circuit anadromous shad & striped bass leaving the Atlantic heading upriver shedding saltwater for fresh in runs whose numbers turned the green river silver if color counts as epistemology spring sun on the backs of a thousand shad is a form of knowing local to another century & the duller color of ours is the way the word gender remembers it once meant to f**k beget or give birth sibling to generate & engender all fertile at the root & continuous as falling water molecules smoothing the sparkling gnarl of Wissahickon schist until its surface mirrors their force the fuel element & fundament alike derive thriving from being at its biggest when it’s kinetic energy headed toward intensity everything’s body connected by this totally elastic materiality I feel as ecstatic wide dilation when the shut skull gives up resistance to the healer’s hands & the occiput opens its bones my mind’s eye goes okay I’m awake now rowdy with trout psoas relaxed my body’s a conduit it roars with water passing from past to present through pipes & riparian ecotones alike all of my fluids pollutants cycling back into my own watershed toxins & heavy metals bonded to blood stored in liver & fat C8 glyphosate mercury & lead it’s awkward okay I keep thinking about the man who asks me to visit his doomstead which seems kinky for a first date what’s the safeword for men with genders built for the world’s end men with weaponized genders hoarding solar power & canned goods bottled water genders tending small vegetable gardens out back behind the chickens concrete genders sealed in lead their doors secured from inside with thick steel bars fringe libertarian endtimes genders hetero girlie camo gun calendars apocalyptic tits pinned on brick walls by lone bunks so the men can cross out each day once civil society ends with a pathetic snivel like please help doomstead men live doomstead days already sealed in extreme fiction as if there were ever a way to stay safely self-contained by which I mean the anthropocene is its own gender biospheric in scale its persistent flux from fossil record to Antarctic ice core so uncontainable we all exhibit it with a local sense of personal chosen expression strategic or contingent like fertility medicalized tracked managed or casual happy f*****g without a condom risky given the odds leveraged against us & the blameless microbes seeking homes in our nooks & tubes so I don’t visit his doomstead a psychic structure I feel in my head as blocked thought I watch play out in the Schuylkill where it pools wide shallow with silt above Fairmount dam I stand on the bank & know I’m not supposed to posit an analogy between the river & my body but courtesy of this dam the city siphons its water into me another human intervention diverting its path each of my cells a little prison the river sits in so we’re related on a molecular level so intimate I think I can say it wants speed & movement free enough to jump the strained relation to human needs it serves without relief without the hands that hold my bones & tend my fascia that remember a different posture without blockage or pain a model for undoing harm done by capital empowered to frack during record drought millions of gallons of toxic wastewater injected into earth or kept in open ponds prone & porous in western counties where river otters have rebounded after last being spotted in the Allegheny in 1899 otters are raucous & chirp chitter chuckle & grumble when wrestling together or sliding on ice playful biophony rivers have missed for a whole century like brook trout rooting in loose cool gravel or the plash of insects fallen from hemlocks the intact eastern riverine biome one serious mess of sound enmeshed in sound enmeshed in biotic patterns as heavy as traffic when the weekend weather is nice & I ride the early 27 bus to the Wissahickon it’s not that I don’t like the city it’s just if biodiversity is a measure of health a city is by definition sick with people & built structures crowding out other lives though I love signs species persist this sidewalk moss probably bryum argentum native to guano-covered seabird rookeries this fertile gingko stinking up the street with stone fruits crushed underfoot this nameless fern in a downpipe drain so modest in scale like the simple songs of house sparrows everywhere though this chubby one is hustling a fallen everything bagel of seeds & crumbs & it’s not that I don’t like people either our sociality genitals & smells interesting diction surprising privacies revealed at parties bars & in bedrooms our genders in acts various & wet as thought product of dissolved salts washing our brains in rich cognition that falters without water which can’t be taken by the head in the hands & held in the hopes of healing its body is too vast its mind boundless by definition the world is awake be careful my dears it is the gender that remembers everything Copyright Credit: Brian Teare, "Doomstead Days" from Doomstead Days. Copyright © 2019 by Brian Teare. Reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books. Recommended Media Nightboat Books Link To Complete Poem Credits This episode was researched by Elena Cebulash and edited by Sarah Westrich and Mo Armstrong. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnfiege.substack.com

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