The protocol that poet Naomi Shihab Nye employs to pick up trash on streets isn’t excessively elaborate: Before going on a trash walk—like a walk the rest of us would take, except she picks up trash—she gathers an empty garbage bag, cotton garden gloves, and tongs. These aren’t extra-long tongs with pincers at the end, designed for picking up trash; these are kitchen tongs. “The bending is part of the rhythm to me,” she writes in the introduction to Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow, Feb. 11), her collection of poems about trash. “It’s trash yoga.” It takes a “surprisingly short” amount of time to fill up a bag with trash that belongs to other people, she says.
If she’s not in San Antonio, where she lives, Nye will sometimes grab an extra bag hidden in the trash can in her hotel room; Nye has collected trash in cities across America and around the globe as she travels to teach and read from her work (she is currently the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate for 2019-2021). Anything that looks like a full meal she’ll leave where it is. She also doesn’t disturb the evidence of “certain pharmaceutical transactions.” After her walks in San Antonio, she puts other people’s trash in her own trash bin.
If it seems strange that a respected poet who will receive the National Book Critics Circle’s lifetime achievement award in March and is the poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine crouches over the smelly refuse people can’t bother to throw in a trash can, to Nye it seems quite natural. She hypothesizes about her habit in Cast Away: “Perhaps this stems from being bicultural, belonging nowhere and everywhere at once, being a ‘pleaser,’ always trying to make my parents and friends happy, or perhaps it’s a result of my preference for clean spaces.”
One thing it is not is a waste of time. The poems in Cast Away go straight to the heart of what our trash reveals about us. In “At the Bus Stop,” Nye writes:
Political pundits talk about how divided America is now and how each of us should converse with Americans who aren’t exactly like ourselves. Or maybe the venting Nye does in “New Year” is also an option. It’s a poem about being in downtown San Antonio on New Year’s Day, when “[n]ot even a single day / has stretched its arms out yet.” Near some trash bins, Nye sees her first stranger of the year; he’s wearing a sweatshirt that says “All I care about is hunting and maybe like 3 people and beer,” which prompts Nye to think, “All year I can say to myself / He is not my father. / I am not his daughter.” There’s defiance in this thought. Nye is proud of espousing values that some conservatives call “snowflake” values, that lazy, hackneyed term.
Nye has increased her trash routine as she’s felt more depressed about the difficulty of political change during the Trump administration and as she laments “the loss of a sense of principle, of value of a certain kind.” Trash removal is a “therapeutic act,” she says. “If I felt overwhelmed with all the things I could not change in my nation, I could go out and pick up trash.” She remarks that she lives just three hours from facilities along the Texas-Mexico border that detain migrants, “and we can’t change that as much as we might hate it.” If we can’t change the injustice near us, “how can we be expected to solve Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Gaza, Yemen, all those tragedies?” she asks. “So yeah, [trash] has taken on new significance for me.”
Filling trash bags with garbage makes Nye feel better about the world, politically, but it also evokes truths that are apolitical. “You’re able to feel the tangibility of all of our lives, how temporary it is, how delicate, how fragile it is,” she says. “Trash is a ritual of intimacy through which I experience the reminder of how delicate everything is. And when I drive down my street and there’s no trash, I feel personal joy.”
Claiborne Smith, former editor-in-chief of Kirkus Reviews, is the literary director of the San Antonio Book Festival.
