"I have hundreds of pages of notes about whales and plastiglomerates and the
whale fall and what happens in the oceans and fishing, and I just wasn't happy
with the poem that I was writing. At the same time, I was trying to think about
writing a poem about my illness. We didn't even know what it was 25 years ago
when I first got sick--something called M.E. I began to take notes for that,
too. I've never written about it very much in poetry. It dawned on me at some
point that this had to be one poem and that it had to move from a hummingbird in
my backyard, which is one of the totem animals in this poem, to this one whale
dying in the deep part of the ocean where it can actually go through those three
stages of whale fall before it reaches the bottom. I was thinking about that
very hard. Grief, yes, it's in the writing about my own illness. The purpose was
to try to write about grief without writing about pity. That's a difficult
thing." David Baker is the author of 13 books of poetry, including his most
recent publication, "Whale Fall."
Alison Deming interviews him here about his work that honors both nature and
its woundedness.
