Erin McDonagh spoke with editor Jon Wooding about the revival of Hawk & Whippoorwhill, a journal of poetry about man and nature, and about the reading this week in celebration of the journal's first new issue in forty years.

EM: How did you decide to restart Hawk & Whippoorwill?
JW: Part of it was through Zachary Bos, part through the history, and partly the quirkiness and spirit in which it was started. August Derleth was more famous for his work with his phantasmagoric press, but he also had an appreciation for poetry and literature that dealt with the earnest, physical and sometimes spiritual connection between man and nature. I like poems that explore the relationship between man and his surroundings. I thought it was an important banner to take up, and I thought it better to honor Derleth’s original idea. It’s one of those things where the more I’ve worked on it, the more I’ve grown attached to it…it’s been frustrating, just getting set up and that whole process, but as frustrating as it’s been with life’s little complications, it’s really turned into a little bit of love, because it’s something I believe will succeed, something I want to see succeed. Sometimes we miss nature poetry, but we can get lost in reverie…Some of the best poems and poets are nature poems or poets, and what they’re focusing on is the relationship between man and nature, and that’s something we’ve kind of lost sight of, even in the world of poetry.

EM: What do you think that relationship [between man and nature] entails?
JW: It’s been thought-provoking for me, because we must’ve seen it in the sixties, but now there’s a lot of obvious conflicts and complexities. Even here in Boston, you see the “T” line surrounded by green space [planters] and people trying to bring some touch of nature into urban life. At the same time, you go to a more abstract alley, to advances in sciences where we’re starting to realize the power of genetics and harness that technology – it raises some questions about man’s dependence on nature. Then there’s more classic concerns: man’s going into nature, trying to use Nature to puzzle out meaning for himself and the conflicts in his life, trying to find an analogy and better understand a life we live increasing less in line with nature. So underneath all this concrete, there’s solid earth, and the city is a contrast between the rural and the urban in this way. So I feel like there’s always been a lot of dialogue between those two elements that August Derleth started talking about, and it’s grown deeper and expanded in a couple more areas. I think you don’t see a lot in terms of popular poetry that addresses that. There are meditations on death, which is part of nature, there always have been and there always will be, but that’s not the only sense of nature, and an entire journal of that might be a little bit tedious after awhile. People are exploring more classical pathways but expressing it in new ways. I think we can expose people to a different conception than what’s traditionally thought of as nature poetry; hopefully the Journal will bring forth more poems in this vein.

EM: What kind of new conceptions will come forth?
JW: People are more bringing nature into the city, there are some cosmetic things, in a different way than, say, the Public Garden, which you go into from the city. I think that speaks to a growing sense of the reality of living only in the city, and people need contrast in their lives to be reminded that there’s something else out there; in the same vein, nature makes us happy and gives us something to reflect on…it’s built into us. I think that’s something people will be exploring, and of course more Green concerns, as far as environmental things go. We’re looking to turn the city into a more organic product, and people turn out some pretty interesting projects. Then again, on the scientific side, we have an increasing amount of control over genetics, which raises a lot of questions about our relationship with Nature and our own nature, if we start to mess with genetic codes, whether that line shouldn’t be crossed. We’ve already done a lot to affect the Nature around us; we’ve even affected Nature genetically before now, but now we have increasingly powerful ways to affect those changes, and I don’t know how much will happen. I feel like these are areas that people will start to talk about, important to humanity in general; I’m sure the poetry is out there. Poetry exists wherever there is human thought; wherever an idea exists, there is new opportunity. I think that poetry is the ultimate form of reflection and thought, so I can’t help it that people are already writing poems about these things… But I don’t want to make it sound like we’re only accepting poems that apply to new science and such, because at the same time there’s still people going, hanging out, interacting with nature, putting their own lives into context through interaction with a simple setting, going out into nature and testing themselves – that’s always going to involve poetry. I hope people don’t stop writing pastoral poems.