Béatrice Szymkowiak’s first full-length book, B/RDS, winner of the 2023 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, is a collection of ecopoetic erasures. Inspired by the literal erasure of more than 400 bird species, the collection uses and erases the text of J.J. Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-1838) By erasing his writings, her attempt to break what she calls the “archival cage” comes with the knowledge that Audubon’s infamy and desire to possess the birds he drew— mangling them into the shapes he wanted— is just one part of a larger narrative that places humans in a hierarchy separate and above nature.
Prose poems that mark Szymkowiak’s own migrations during the COVID-19 pandemic are spliced in to serve as a mirror to both her erasures and to humanity’s fate being inextricably connected to that of other beings.
In this conversation, where I was able to catch up with a poet who I first met in 2019, we reminisce and discuss the weight of J.J. Audubon’s legacy, eco-anxiety, what it’s like to persist in poetry, and our mutual desperation for humanity to acknowledge and embrace its place as not just an influence on but a part of the natural world.
sami h. tripp: I’ve heard some of your poems before this book that had to do with birds. I feel like I remember one about tweeting and Twitter?
Béatrice Szymkowiak: Oh yes! Yes, I did a more experimental poem that included QR Codes. It’s called “The Last Spring.” It was published in Petrichor.
ht: So, B/RDS! What brought this collection together?
Szymkowiak: One of the triggers was an article in Nature, published in 2018, that explained we had lost—in North America—3 billion birds since the 1970s. That represents about a third of the population of birds. And, as we have heard, the population of birds is steadily decreasing in many continents. My interest in birds also resides in the fact that they are beings present on all continents. If you think about it … even in Antarctica! So everyone has experiential knowledge of birds. At that time too, I was taking a class on intertextual works of poetry. So all that, plus my interest in the 19th century, came together and I started writing poems with Birds of America. And then it grew bigger than just a few poems, it became a whole project!
ht: Yeah, I mean that’s a lot to work with, right? Like that’s very heavy, but also literally so many birds.
Szymkowiak: Yes. Actually Birds of America wasn’t published all at once. First it was the plates, the drawings. People subscribed and they were getting a few at a time. Then Audubon wrote the ornithological biography that went with the drawings. I worked with that text––I could use it, because it’s in the public domain. I pasted it, bird by bird, in a Word document. It filled about 1000 pages!
ht: Wow. I didn’t realize that Birds of North America was kind of like an anthology or collection. I can “guess” why the title of your book is B/RDS. But can we talk about the slash instead of the “I”? That slash comes up a lot in your poems.
Szymkowiak: So, the cover is one of the drawings from Birds of America. It is an Arctic Tern, and what I wanted for the cover, was that the bird appeared already departed or escaping. In the same way the slash enacts that erasure and escape, the disappearance of birds from the sky, but also the escape from Audubon’s cage. What I really like about slashes, like strikethrough, is that they paradoxically make erasure visible. They say: something was there and is not anymore. So that’s why they became, I think, more and more important to the collection. They also reminded me of wings. Slashes have multiple layers of significance in B/RDS.
ht: On the note of making the erasure visible, I listened to your Woodland Pattern reading when you and fellow poet Brenda Cardenas were celebrating the releases of your books. You described your process as a “chopping” rather than like, erasure or strikethrough or blackout. And you’ve already explained using the slash to make it more visible. But the idea of chopping is also much more violent.
Szymkowiak: Exactly. And that’s the point. Erasure is a very violent act, and a writer shouldn’t start doing erasure poetry without strong ethics and carefulness. I used the word “chop” because to me it spoke more to the undiscerned, brutal killings of birds and, also, I think, chopping adds or implies somehow a carving out. As I was chopping, I was exposing something hidden behind, and perhaps, I was liberating the birds too. There is something rougher about chopping that reminds us of the violence of erasure.
ht: So, with “chopping” is the kind of nuance between violence and exposure. Which ties perfectly into the description of a cage. Cause if someone is trapped in like, a building—the building has collapsed—you’re not going to gently move all these bricks and wood and all that stuff. You’re going to chop until you can get somebody out.
Szymkowiak: Yes, exactly.
ht: So almost like you need a bit of violence to make things move.
Szymkowiak: Yes, perhaps. I also wanted to really convey to the reader the vehemence, the violence, that lies behind the text of Birds of America. The recent “controversy” about Audubon actually was prompted by the realization that Audubon had a very active part in the imperial settler-colonial project. He had very racist racial perspectives, and had very questionable approaches to the more-than-human world. It's true, his art is beautiful, but we should not forget what lies behind it. And I wanted to convey that to the reader.
ht: Yeah. I mean, knowing about his legacy … and now I know that he also butchered these birds in order to capture their essence, to have them. He’s explicit about this. But he’s also, you know, influential. Like you said, his art is beautiful, and we can even say it’s important. So, can you talk a little bit more about what it was like working with material like that? What were the difficulties or surprises in the text? Really, anything just kind of describing what it’s like working with some really difficult material.
Szymkowiak: Yes, it was very challenging.
What was very challenging about working on this project was to be in proximity and dealing constantly with Audubon’s work, when I do not share his view about fellow humans, neither his approach to the more-than-human world. It felt very oppressive at some point and the constraint that I gave myself, of following the word order of the text, put even more pressure. At the end … I just wanted to escape the cage too, and I perhaps wrote some of the most beautiful poems of the collection at that point.I was just like, “I need to get out of Audubon.”
ht: For sure. And I think you having that feeling of being trapped as well, that lends to the interconnectedness, the ecology of this book. In one of the earlier pre-poems, “Along Shallow and Grassy Shores,” I took the “would-be poet” in it to be you. But, also, me? Maybe even Audubon. So this idea about our places in time and nature, their interchangeability and maybe even instability, comes through right away in your book.
Szymkowiak: Exactly. And through this remark, you’ve pointed out something very important in this book: the pronouns. The “I” only appears a few times in the book, and is very questionable.
I chose the “we” as a lyrical pronoun in the collection because I wanted to speak to the web of life. The prose poem at the beginning of the book tells the reader that the “we” is an experiment, an attempt at an ecological pronoun. However, it also tells the reader that it is a “we” aware of its own fallacies, shortcomings, and faults. What was interesting about the “we” as an ecological pronoun, was that “we” is a murky pronoun. You never really know who “we” is. Who is the speaker? Who does it include? Who does it exclude? When we speak, the “we” is very uncertain. It conveys an idea of collectivity, but it’s very uncertain, unstable. I found it so interesting to explore the “we.”
ht: I think the other pronouns, the “I” and “you,” are only in the poems that are your own words, right?
Szymkowiak: Yes, with the exception of two erasure poems using the pronoun ”I,” but the “I” in these two poems is very reprehensible and dishonest.
ht: And again, that just lends to like the ecology of the book, right? Like, obviously, the ecology of the text, birds, humans, natural history, and how they all intertwine, but also of the text itself. So, on the note of the poems which are not erasures, these are your own words inspired by the erasure. Did you intend to do a series, or was it more that it sort of happened, then kept happening? Sometimes I feel like poems take on a life of their own, and then they just keep coming.
Szymkowiak: I actually intended these poems. I wanted to have some poems that would be different in their form and that would trace the link between past and the present. So I wrote these prose poems, but at first they were constituting a sixth chapter. I was already thinking of them as migratory poems; they had the title extracted from one of the erasure poems, but they were all compiled at the end of the collection. Then at some point, I decided to incorporate them within the five chapters. I think it gave more texture and complexity to the collection, but also it really enacted more of the entanglement of space, time, and beings, that is, for me, ecology. If that makes sense!
ht: Because so many people think, “Oh, it’s just the relationships between nature over there, how they relate to each other.” We—people—are often taken out of the equation. But that’s not how it works.
Szymkowiak: No, indeed, humanity and nature are not separate. B/RDS was greatly influenced by the work of eco-philosopher Timothy Morton, who wrote Dark Ecology, and uses the term “mesh” to speak about the entanglement of all earthly beings. I really like this term, as it speaks so well for the entanglement of all beings on earth, all of us. We cannot think of ourselves separate from nature anymore. We are part of nature. Thinking otherwise is damaging. If humanity doesn’t reach that ecological awareness, I don’t see how we will be able to surmount the present environmental crisis.
ht: On your website, you have syllabi from courses you’ve taught. The one that stood out to me most was the one for Catapult, “Eco-poetics In a Time of Environmental Crisis.” You discuss eco-anxiety, which is becoming more and more common. And I just want to talk a bit more on the importance of art, and arts place in a time that is, you know, scary. How that’s often when art is needed most. But sometimes it can be difficult to find that beauty. Maybe it’s not beauty. Does art need to be beautiful? Do you know what I mean?
Szymkowiak: I think art holds the power to shift and multiply perspectives, which the world desperately needs right now. Single-mindedness is dangerous. What I love about poetry in particular, is its capacity of subversion, of dissent, against ideas but also against language itself, as language and ideas are intertwined. I really appreciate dissent and subversion in poetry, humility too.
ht: Humility. That’s going to give me a lot to think about.
Szymkowiak: That’s perhaps why I wrote the poem “Along Shallow and Grassy Shores.” It was a wink to François Villon, who was both a villain and a poet in fifteenth century France. Villon knew not to take himself seriously. That was my intent behind this poem.
ht: It’s the part I love about poetry. It can be interpreted any sort of way, but the writer obviously had an intention in writing it.
Szymkowiak: And then it has a life of its own once it’s in the world.
ht: Right! On the note of putting out a message that can be interpreted in a different way, or even misinterpreted, your book has something I haven’t run into very often. The foreword, but also an introduction and these two epigraphic poems, including “Along Shallow and Grassy Shores.” There’s also the coda at the end. I personally think having these things, like these explanations, are really nice because that increases access. It makes work more easily … not necessarily digestible, but … maybe I’ll just say the same word, accessible. I also think it’s kind of an act of protecting one’s art and one’s message, and so would it be fair to say that there were some specific themes, like those we’ve talked about—that interconnectedness and interchangeability, instability—but also emotions and elements that you wanted to make sure readers got out of your collection, or that you felt they had to get?
Szymkowiak: Yes, I think it was important for me to tell the reader that it was an erasure of Audubon’s work, because of who Audubon was. I wanted to make sure readers knew my position, and that the collection was questioning and dismantling Audubon’s work, and through it, the discourse of natural history and other disconnected approaches to the more-than-human world. I really didn’t want the reader to be misguided when they came to B/RDS. It wasn’t going to be, you know, the beautiful birds drawn by Audubon. It was going to be a critique of it.
ht: It’s almost like a trigger warning, right? Like “this is not going to be pretty. It may be disturbing, but it’s here.”
Szymkowiak: At first, I was going to put the preface explaining the background and process of B/RDS at the end of the collection. But then, I really thought about it and decided to put it at the beginning. At the time, there was talk about the Audubon Society and its name, about who Audubon really was. So, I wanted to make sure that the readers knew my opinion and perspective about Audubon. I wanted them to understand that Audubon was very active in the imperial colonial project and that this was linked to how he approached the more-than-human world as well.
ht: I mean, that’s why there are so many modern movements around speciesism, right? Like the way we treat some animals better than others is an ecological issue. The most charismatic animals are the ones that get the most funding but not necessarily the ones that need the most help. Cherry-picking conservation.
Szymkowiak: Yes, and I think the idea of nature has been used a lot to serve racist, misogynist ideas and actions too.
ht: And if we’re going back to Audubon’s time—and earlier—the idea of wilderness was something to be feared, sinful even.
Szymkowiak: There was this idea of the “civilized” and the “uncivilized” associated with nature. And that idea was used to justify very despicable acts. Nature was an idea, either associated with something bad, either idolized.
ht: Right, there’s enough controversy just with our natural parks, how they are indigenous lands but they are denied access to their own land. We’re obviously talking about very difficult, complex, and long-running subjects. Like this is a deep history. So how do you, specifically, approach working with difficult material? Whether it be something like eco-anxiety. I know that makes me very anxious. So how do you approach it?
Szymkowiak: My experience is that difficult material or subject matter, because they are challenging, can be very generative. I find that a methodical approach, or specific rules or constraints, can help diffuse some of the emotional hindrances that might come up with difficult material or matter. For B/RDS, the word order constraint helped take away some of the emotional toll and became a source of creativity.
ht: Yeah, honestly when I dig into the heavy stuff it can feel kind of hopeless sometimes. At your Woodland Pattern reading, you call the coda “a monument to what we’re losing now.” I think that’s true of the book as a whole. But that last line, “a chattering unsettles flocks after flocks.” I interpreted the flocks, or at least some of them, to be human. Our human social groups, our communities. And the idea that this is unsettling is a necessary step to making real change.
Szymkowiak: You know, I think you point something out that I really worked through. I tried to eliminate as much as I could the very strong markers of avian bodies, keeping only wings and claws, because they can somehow be related to humans. I really tried to scale down any markers of avian body to really put emphasis on the fact that there is correlation between the “we” as humans and the “we” as birds. I blurred the lines between human and avian bodies. The voices—we don’t always know who they are in the book, and it becomes less and less clear who is really speaking throughout the collection. I wanted a ghostly voice. I didn’t want the reader to know exactly who’s speaking. And the flocks, the flocks can be birds, but also many other beings.
ht: It doesn’t have to be human; it doesn’t have to be bird.
Szymkowiak: No, and that’s the environment as a whole. It’s all the beings we’re losing now.
ht: I just want to say thank you for this book. It’s giving new things each time I look at another poem. Like, for that first poem in section one. It ends with claws resembling a human nail. I’m looking at it, and I’m like, “Well, it could be a human nail, like fingernails, but also like hammer and nail.” So, it’s a great image of industry and false progress. It’s just kind of wild how much you’re able to fit and say in a single word. And that’s the beauty of poetry, right? You just keep getting more out of it.
Szymkowiak: Yes, I do feel that with poetry—I often say, the poem happens outside of itself. The collision, the collusion of words triggers the poem. Then the words meet another reader, they trigger something different, another poem, each time.
ht: I think with ecopoetry, in particular—the idea of something happening outside of itself lends itself well to ecopoetry. So then your collection is not just a monument honoring what we’ve lost, but also this call to awareness, a call to action. It’s that unsettling to get you moving, to move you both emotionally and physically. Like, “Let’s go! Let’s get this figured out.”
Szymkowiak: Yes, I wanted, really, to stir the mind of the reader and make them experience the entanglement of life, the mesh. I wanted them to understand that we are a part of it. The birds are part of us, in some ways too, and we are part of them too. The forest is also part of us and we are part of it. We are all very entangled and we cannot think ourselves outside of that.
ht: Going back to what we said about idealizing nature, like romanticizing it—I think poets in general tend to be guilty of that. We use birds a lot but metaphorically or symbolically, right? So when we talk about birds, we’re not actually talking about birds. But B/RDS definitely forced me to move through the book a little slower than maybe I would other collections. I’m looking really closely and I’m seeing the birds as birds; flesh and blood, feather and bone birds! They’re their own creature. But then I’m also still putting myself into that “we.” So even though I’m reading this like, “Okay, this is for birds,” it’s also for us. It’s not just the speaker, whoever that is, but also me. The reader becomes part of the book’s ecology. It just keeps giving that, “Hey, don’t forget you’re part of this, too.”
Szymkowiak: Welcome to the mesh!
ht: It’s a difficult lesson to remember it’s not just you. I’m probably speaking as somebody that grew up in the U.S. with that very individualistic culture surrounding me. I’m not sure enough of us have learned this lesson, or realize that it’s a lesson we need to keep learning and unlearning.
Szymkowiak: I do think our society—for us that’s “Western” society—is so wrapped up in capitalism overdrive. It’s hard to think of a way out of it. And it’s all intertwined: capitalism, settler colonialism, patriarchy, racism. All of that is very much intertwined. I think a way to fight this would be to think differently, to think “us.” All of “us.”
ht: So, my next question is taking a step back, outside of the content of the book, to talk about how the book got here. Because this is your first full-length book! I wanted to know what it was like finding out you had won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize, your reaction, and the process of getting it published.
Szymkowiak: It was amazing news! When I received the call, I actually was in France, and it was a very distressing time for me. I was gnawed by doubts, so that came really as a boost of confidence, if you will. I'm so grateful to Monica Youn for seeing my work and to the University of Utah Press for supporting me through the publication of the book. I think I got lucky, too, because there are a lot of people whose work is incredible that doesn’t get picked. I am just very grateful.
ht: We're often told if you haven't had any rejections, you're not doing it right.
Szymkowiak: And I had so many rejections for that book. I was like, you know, “I'm done with poetry,” “Nobody will ever understand what I'm doing or see my work.” I had so many rejections before it was accepted.So, yeah! Patience, perseverance!
ht: Absolutely. To close, I just want to know what’s been inspiring you lately. Are there other projects or pieces that you’re working on that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
Szymkowiak: Yes, I'm working on another collection. I am really at the beginning of it. Its starting point is a question: What happens when the borders we imagined dissolve with climate change? I’m thinking especially of the borders between humans and more-than-humans. That’s a work in progress. It’s going slow, but it’s going. I also started research on wheatfields, as a settler colonial crop, geopolitical weaponry, romanticized space … And finally, I’m working on some nonfiction that circles back to my chapbook, Red Zone. It extends the reflection on the red zones. Red zones are areas of land that are prohibited to the public because there are still ammunitions from World War I and harmful chemicals in the ground. I wrote the chapbook Red Zone as an exploration of the environmental damage caused by war. In those red zones, not much grows. In some, trees have been planted and the landscape looks idyllic, but the soil is full of arsenic and other chemicals. As we see the ravaging of Ukraine right now, I think we need to speak about it. It’s an obliteration of people, land, and other beings.
ht: Yeah, my first thought when you were talking about Red Zone, other than these mines that haven’t exploded yet and are still active, was Chernobyl. The nuclear fallout having these bizarre effects. Evolution happening much faster—like in some birds, actually—just because everything is mutating so fast. And like, it looks so beautiful because things are growing, but if you’re in there too long you still get sick. But your current project sounds really interesting, the concept of borders as a false concept. Like you said, they're man-made. Human made, imagined. And again, this topic feels very necessary. Is there anything else you wanted to share before we end?
Szymkowiak: Just the hope that readers will appreciate the work in B/RDS, and that it will maybe change the way they see the more-than-human world, and experience it.
Béatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017, and obtained a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2022. She is the author of Red Zone (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, as well as the winner of the 2017 OmniDawn Single Poem Broadside Contest, and the recipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her full-length collection B/RDS, published by the University of Utah Press in 2023. Her work also has appeared in magazines including The Berkeley Review, Terrain.org, The Portland Review, OmniVerse, The Southern Humanities Review, and others.
sami h. tripp is a queer hyphenate who is constantly in awe of the ways science and magic braid together. Influenced by their mixed identities, they are working and writing towards reconnection with ancestors past & present. They are privileged to be currently learning, creating, and communing with Yokuts land, and their poetry can be found in Bramble Lit Mag, Blue Heron Review, and Saints and Sinners: New Poetry from the Festival 2023 anthology.
Author photo: Nicole E. Taylor