Stephen Cramer
Stigma & Style
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
My mother used to manage a greenhouse and the grounds of a college in upstate New York. When I was a kid, she used to cut bird of paradise stalks, and I’d ride them around as though they were horses. She showed me how, by squeezing their sides, snap dragons could be made to “talk.” But mostly I loved being around the foreign nomenclature of the natural world: foxglove beardtongue, trailing arbutus, rough vines of cinquefoil.
When I was in sixth grade, my mother brought home a video tape of the poet Stanley Kunitz from the college’s library. I’d never heard poetry spoken before, and the effect was practically dizzying. He read one of his favorite pieces to read aloud, the poem about his garden in Provincetown entitled, “The Round.”
I rewound the video and watched it over and over. I mouthed the words with Kunitz. Then I spoke them out loud, with his particular accent and intonation. Gradually I memorized the poem. I realized—though I don’t know if I could’ve articulated it then—that there’s a certain intimacy in speaking poems aloud. It’s more than just vocalizing a poet’s sentiments, but a physical connection, the way you shape your mouth to their words, moving your muscles in same sequence as they once did.
So I started writing.
I still have my first manuscript of poems, Herons and Solomon’s Seal, stashed in our basement, my first attempt to articulate my place among my mother’s horticultural world and Kunitz’s literary world.
STEPHEN CRAMER’s first book of poems, Shiva’s Drum, was selected for the National Poetry Series and published by University of Illinois Press. Bone Music, his sixth, won the Louise Bogan Award and was published by Trio House Press. His most recent is The Disintegration Loops. He is the editor of Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, African American Review, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Vermont and lives with his wife and daughter in Burlington.