Summon an image of an American home: Odds are there’s a green grass lawn in front of it. Was this what Walt Whitman sang of in Leaves of Grass? Or was it the native grassland of the prairies, now disappearing under the onslaught of Poa pratensis, Kentucky bluegrass? In Christopher Kondrich’s new collection of poems, Tread Upon, a blade of grass is the beginning of a book-length sequence about the devaluation of the living world, from BP’s invention of the concept of the carbon footprint to the tiny bodies of bats exploding near wind turbines, from the coal ash belched into the Cape Fear River to voiceless Western pond turtles searching for water in a drought. “We belittle the grass when we think it grows / everywhere. It doesn’t. It grows here and here and here,” Kondrich writes. “Even one blade is a place.”
Christopher Kondrich is the author of the previous collections Contrapuntal and Valuing, which won the National Poetry Series and was named a best book of 2019 by Library Journal. His poems have appeared widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He is currently Visiting Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Maryland.
Go beyond the episode:
- Christopher Kondrich’s Tread Upon(opens in new tab)
- Watch Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba(opens in new tab) (1964)
Read selections from the collection:
- “There are empty spaces we make …”(opens in new tab)
- “Floodwaters carry coal ash into the Cape Fear River …”(opens in new tab)
- “I side with myself. I touch my face …”(opens in new tab)
- “We belittle the grass when we think it grows …”(opens in new tab)
- “The fantasy of chaining myself to a redwood …”(opens in new tab)
Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Subscribe: iTunes/Apple(opens in new tab) • Amazon(opens in new tab) • Google(opens in new tab) • Acast(opens in new tab) • Pandora(opens in new tab)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!
