The Element That Defines America: Ten Great American Poems (and a Whole Book of Poetry) About Fire

In the summer and fall of 2020, in the middle of the early pandemic, wildfires burned 4.2 million acres in California. That fire season marked the beginning of a new awareness of climate change—the dramatic had become habitual. Most fires are caused by people being dumb, leaving their campfires unattended, or lighting a cigarette, though some are caused by lightning.

But our fires are, now, exceedingly and undoubtedly, egged on by the radical elevation of the earth’s temperature, caused by us, humans in our stunning diversity of Earth-hating activities, from cutting down forests to releasing toxic chemicals. I live in an area of California known as the “wildland urban interface,” with all beauty that promises—deer in the yard, refulgent trees and flowers. Now, that landscape also promises smoke-clouded skies and seasonal evacuations.

These are the facts of our time. But poetry isn’t just about the facts. It’s about the secret history of the heart, about the life of the senses, about the wisdom of the world that re-configures in our dreams. Poetry travels through the facts like air making fuel for a campfire.

And fire has a spiritual history that predates our wildfires—one of the four pre-Socratic elements, fire has also always played a role in our relationship with the sacred. We light candles in churches to see hope, and we extinguish them to know when to leave. We incinerate each other when we die and scatter each other in our favorite places to give each other meaning. Gaston Bachelard writes in his unstoppably readable essay collection, The Psychoanalysis of Fire:

Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance. Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse.

Too many people I know have run from fires in the last few years for me to say that fire could be “good,” exactly, though I know it can help us. When fire helps us, it’s only because we treat it like a god, and understand that to use something doesn’t mean to master it.

Fire also has an American history. This is a country where we burn flags and crosses, but where, as poet Adrienne Rich wrote, quoting the radical priest Daniel Berrigan (imprisoned for burning draft cards and the records of teenagers drafted for Vietnam) we are asked to defend “the burning of paper instead of children.” We like movies that end in fiery explosions. We’re generous about guns, whose mechanisms necessitate the ignition of the bullet—a hand-held fire.

Speaking of personal fires, though many cultures smoke cigarettes, American culture smokes cigarettes in a particular way (I say, as the daughter of two smokers)—with guilty excess, and so, we handled quitting with puritanical purpose (Ellen Bryant Voight’s incredible poem “Sleep” is the best treatment of this I know).

The history of fire in America must be the history of the uncontrollable in the American spirit. We can be reckless and inscrutable to ourselves. I can think of no element more resonant with the last few years than fire.

When I wrote poems during the wildfires of 2020, I was mothering a three-year-old, teaching classes online, and taking care of my dying father, whose lungs, due to years of smoking, looked, as the doctors noted in a most American simile, “like meat.” I was in rooms with my husband and my stepmother and my brother and sister and nurses and aides, in masks, always, gathered around the subjects of our care like they were little fires. I was hiding from the smoke on certain days and greedily walking on clear others.

I was trying to be safe; I was crying about being too safe, or not safe enough. I was crying from the smoke. I was checking this website: https://www2.purpleair.com. I was trying to drink water. I was lucky, I was mostly safe. The poems I wrote about daily life in such a context are backgrounded by danger, by stories of the fire. Like many poems, they are like smoke, the trace of what’s burning in the present moment, the kind of evidence that lingers before it disappears.

In that spirit, here are ten American poems about fire, and a book—not simply about actual fires, but about what fire enables us to know. These poets know its danger and its power. Listen to what they’re saying about where you live and who you are.

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Larry Levis, “My Story In a Late Style of Fire”

A verbal inferno of memory and regret, “My Story In a Late Style of Fire” must be one of the greatest American poems about love and desire and the wreckage they leave. The only reason the poem isn’t better known among non-poets (poets love it) is that there’s so much of it—two pages, lines longer than Whitman’s, and a plot that veers from introspection to guided meditation to self-accusation to sermonizing.

Come for the open-hearted beginning, sad as a bad Christmas: “Whenever I listen to Billie Holiday, I am reminded / That I, too, was once banished from New York City.” Stay for the ending, truer and truer with every twenty-first-century election: “It is so American, fire. So like us. / Its desolation. And its eventual, brief, triumph.”

Anne Bradstreet, “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 1oth, 1666”

A rhyming reminder that the Puritans had skills when it came to soul-searching, this poem doesn’t blink an eye as it watches its safe space go up in smoke. The sonically sutured couplets team with a pulsing tetrameter to represent the relentlessness of fire and the courage of the reporting onlooker, moving from panic to awe to sorrow to resistance.

Bradstreet describes her burning possessions with human-scale affection: “My pleasant things in ashes lie / And them behold no more shall I. / Under thy roof no guest shall sit / Nor at thy Table eat a bit / No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told / Nor things recounted done of old / No Candle e’er shall shine in Thee, / Nor bridegroom’s voice e’er heard shall be. / In silence ever shalt thou lie, / Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity.” You don’t have to share Bradstreet’s faith to share her intuition of how easily what we take for granted can be destroyed.

Langston Hughes, “Fire”

A blues song, a musical fantasia that spins around the word “fire,” which gets used a dizzying fifteen times here (counting the title), this poem doesn’t interpret fire, it lights it, repeating its three-line refrain four times: “Fire, / Fire, Lord! / Fire gonna burn ma soul!” Sinners go to hell, right? Not so fast. Listen to this: “Tell me brother, /Do you believe, /If you want to go to heaven, / Got to moan an’ grieve?”

By the end of the poem, I dare you to say whether “fire” seems more punishment or pleasure. In 1926, Hughes and his Harlem Renaissance crew choose Fire!! as the name of their literary magazine, devoted to burning up old ideas. This poem picks up the very idea of moral judgment and crumples it into a ball and tosses it into the flames.

Douglas Kearney, “Sand Fire (or The Pool. 2016)“

Maybe we’re all just sheltering in a swimming pool in the middle of a fire, maybe that’s what the twenty-first century feels like. “Sand Fire,” from Kearney’s 2020 collection, Sho, describes a father and a daughter swimming in an actual pool the middle of an actual fire—the Sand Fire of 2016, which burned over two thousand acres in Southern California.

But it also administers an energetic metaphysical meditation on the spiritual properties of water and fire, offering a father’s account of baptizing his daughter (and watching her baptize herself) into a world in which self-love necessitates resistance: “come back striking /what’s above.”

Forrest Gander, “Wasteland: On the California Wildfires“

Speaker and landscape interpenetrate in three-line stanzas that leap across the page. This poem from Gander’s 2020 Twice Alive describes the burned landscape of the apocalyptic 2017 Tubbs Fire, which claimed whole neighborhoods, and acres of land. Gander describes that fire’s impact with documentary gravitas and a poet’s ability to turn a phrase: “No one goes on living / the life that isn’t there.”

But he also finds himself caught up in the fire’s force, and implicated by the evidence of its triggering climate, becoming as much a part of the fire as its victim: “I rose, swaying//and tottering on my /erratic vortex, extemporizing/my own extreme weather.”

Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice“

American movies see the end of the world in blockbuster terms—alien invasions, earthquakes that wreck L.A., global nuclear war. But what’s more American than San-Francisco-born Yankee poet Robert Frost armchair quarterbacking the scientific revolution with his poetic predictions for our destruction?

What I like about this poem is that after a gateway-drug nod to the literal in lines one and two (“Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice”) the poem takes off for the spooky metaphysical, positioning fire and ice, desire and hate, as inseparable, married, equivalent. “Fire and Ice” isn’t just about the way it seems that humans, given the opportunity, will find some way to destroy ourselves—it’s about how we’ll do it, through excesses of “desire” and “hate” spoken of here in such concise terms they’re the best kind of dramatic whisper.

Emily Dickinson, “Ashes denote the fire that was“

Dickinson’s imagination plays forensic investigator, detecting the existence of fire (in real and metaphorical terms) from the presence of the ashes, reverse engineering life-energy from its traces. Even the “Grayest Pile” was once a flame to be reckoned with. “Revere the Grayest Pile,” writes Dickinson, “For the Departed Creature’s sake / That hovered there awhile—” And all of this might both about dead people and venerable ones, so think about that the next time you say your parents never had any fun.

Linda Hogan, “The History of Fire“

An elegant creation myth with family, the earth, and storytelling at the center. Chicksaw poet Linda Hogan’s stately—fluent—couplets find everyone a place: “My mother is a fire beneath stone, / My father, lava. // My grandmother is a match / my sister straw.” In doing so, they magically—concisely—include all our varied American landscapes, from the Pacific to the Plains. Here, fire means warmth, community, and wholeness. And the poet has a place, too: “I am wind for the fire.”

Sandra Lim, “Just Disaster“

A tiny, hallucinogenic short story about a girl and a wolf and a burning house, this poem is as riveting as a flash fiction. The first two lines are an amazing opening for a poem, they’re shocking because they’re not shocking, just like the news tends to be: “We stopped to watch the accident. / Fire! It had finally come to pass.”

I won’t give away the punch-packing plot planted in the middle four lines, but the last couplet reminds the reader that what terrifies also beckons. There’s a part of the self that knows full well how to dance with destruction: “So often you don’t think, / ‘Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it.”

Jorie Graham, “I am still”

Bradstreet watched her house go up in flames; Graham watches the whole world do it. As she watches, even the incombustible grows incendiary: “Rocks // burning in the /distance / Then distance/burning.” This, the fourth poem from Graham’s most recent collection To 2040, takes its literal inspiration from watching wildfires burn—on Twitter, on your phone—as images.

But the indominable quatrains of the poem alchemize documentary footage into cosmological predicament. Witnessing the fires, we see our creative and destructive potential as a human race, capable of greatness in both directions. The only way out is through, Robert Frost said of poetry, and the poet’s role is to keep speaking: “Say everything I say to the air / which begins to / thin now, say // everything before it dis- / appears.”

American Book of Fire: Brenda Hillman, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

This is an entire book about fire from one of the finest priestesses of the Earth in the land, Brenda Hillman. You can’t do better than to start here with Hillman’s agile moves between the literal and symbolic. A positively elemental, positively human treatment of this most ferocious subject from all the earthiest and most philosophical directions.

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Fog and Smoke by Katie Peterson is available via FSG.