What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets highlight poetry’s integral role in sustaining our ecological imagination. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
M. W. Jaeggle
Ask me whether what I have done is my life,
and I will say look,
a dowitcher with the head of Janus, one face
revering the wrack line, thumbing with its long bill
what the water has heaved – blanched Pepsi caps,
mummified kelp, sticks sea-eaten and stripped clean.

Ask me whether what I have done is my life,
and whether it has made a difference,
and I will reply – but only to admit that,
like anything committed to the sea, 
maybe I’ll get back to you in the morning.

Notice the other half, the face fixed to the sky,
it hears only the bill nicking shells, tapping lure.
He wants to have a name ready
for the music that will appear when bottle glass,
once shard but now a rounded green, is juggled
between their clicking chopstick beaks.

Ask me whether what I have done is enough,
and I will say let there be the loss that a wrack line records,
if only for how the cold air whistles on a beach,
while we suture 
our broken and partial worlds
with sea grass left behind by the tide,
each in our own way a historian of waves.
from the book WRACK LINE / University of Regina Press
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Cover of Wrack Line
What Sparks Poetry:
M. W. Jaeggle on "Wrack Line"

"To make an abstraction like ecological interdependence feel like lived experience—this is a power unique to poetry. Because it entails the realization that paying attention to wilderness is the same as paying attention to the self (and vice versa), this power is foundational. Like a branch from which an owl perches, poetry supports us as we survey our options, bide time, and go about securing the means for continued life."
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Cover of You Get What You Pay For
"A Conversation with Morgan Parker"

"I also wanted the book to feel like how my mind works. I wanted it to sound like me. That requires moving in and out of seriousness and comedy. There was no way that I was gonna be like, Well, this is serious so I just gotta keep it right there. Yes, a lot of it was intentional in terms of I need to make a joke right now. Other times, it's how my voice would deliver it. Because I'm a poet, and an anthropologist, I observe. That's comedy because often things are funny because they're weird. That's where a lot of the humor comes from, just the humor of humanity."

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