Plume: Poems

by Kathleen Flenniken

Winner of the 2013 Washington State Book Award and finalist for the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award, Poetry Society of America

"Quiet but damning poems on the history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation." - Rain Taxi

"Plume is an excellent example of how documentary poetry can blend the personal impulse toward nostalgia with the journalistic imperative for objectivity, and the result is a stunning multifaceted take on this public tragedy." - Orion

"Washington State's new Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken gives an elegantly rendered example of another of [John] Morgan's dicta that 'poetry gives form to our feelings and helps us come to terms with them.'" " - Bellingham Herald"

"Many of the poems wrestle with the bomb factory's legacy of environmental contamination, illness and even death from exposure to radiation. But [Flenniken] also wrote them to honor the people she grew up with." " - Seattle Times"

The poems in "Plume" are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity.

Genres: Poetry, History, American

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2012

About the author

Kathleen Flennikens first book, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a 2007 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her second collection, Plume, has been selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series and will be published in Spring 2012 by University of Washington Press.

Flenniken’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust, a Pushcart Prize, and grants from Artist Trust and the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop and was awarded an Emerging Writer’s Fellowship by The Writer’s Center in Bethesda in 2010.

She teaches poetry through Seattle’s Writers in the Schools program, Jack Straw, and other arts agencies. Flenniken is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press, a non-profit press dedicated to publishing Washington State poets, and president of the board at Jack Straw.

From her website:
I came to poetry late, after working eight years as a civil engineer and hydrologist, three on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I started writing when I quit work to stay home with my young children. I took a night class in poetry--and I’ve taken it seriously ever since.

For years my subject was my daily domestic life. I saw myself as a natural historian of interiors. This is the focus of Famous. In 2004 I started (without recognizing it at first) a very different project, and for close to six years I wrote almost exclusively about Hanford, where plutonium was produced for 40 years, and about its bedroom community, my home town, Richland, Washington. Plume, the resulting full-length collection of poems, is part memoir, part history lesson, part cautionary tale, part quest. It is at its heart a search for identity, as I have tried to synthesize the truths of my childhood with the environmental facts. I’ve learned from the sustained examination of one all-consuming subject. Now I am at work on a new obsession--my own problematic, star-crossed love affair with my country, and my parallel relationship with romance itself."

Visit Kathleen Flenniken's website: http://www.kathleenflenniken.com

Praise for Famous

"There's a winning surface modesty here: it isn't Abraham Lincoln who merits the poem, but his oft-maligned wife; not Edna St. Vincent Millay, but her stay-at-home husband; not the Taj Mahal, but the everyday International House of Pancakes. Still, in Flenniken's hands, these occasions rise toward urgent news—as when, in 'Shampoo,' the memory of a mother's declining health soulfully becomes one with the headline about a submarine's sinking—until the leastmost of us are transformed, poem by poem, into the famous." —Albert Goldbarth

"Whether it's buying orange cotton capris or thinking of Robert Lowell's last taxi ride, eating at the House of Pancakes or staring into the deep, knowing gaze of a newborn, Famous makes it new again. Exploring the external trappings of contemporary life as well as the internal cadences of a mind that wants at once to be 'shocking and irresistible,' Kathleen Flenniken takes us into the slipstreams of fame, where our daily dramas play themselves out in the 'wild uncoded rhythms' of the imagination." —Judith Kitchen

Reviews

[Bjorn Sorensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken writes a semi-autobiographical story about growing up next to and later working in the large Hanford Nuclear Reservation along the Columbia River in SE Washington state. She turns poetry into a driving, heart-rending, multi-angled force that addresses decades of government misinformation and cover-ups regarding nuclear energy at Hanford and its unpredictable and invasive poisoning of the world we live in.

Two early pieces about the political advertising of presidents - JFK and Obama - shows some of the distance between rhetoric and reality, between intent and knowledge (as the book unfolds) and the more that half century involved with nuclear power and war. The book gets more personal when it describes neighborhood living in and around Hanford, but focuses most of its attention on the secretive nature of this relatively new endeavor.

"Document Control", one of the book's best pieces, goes like this:

A report...is carefully typed,
in another room reviewed, and in another room
classified [SECRET], document number assigned, and filed...
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeated thousands of times....

...There are managers
who manage managers who manage meetings
to review reviews of secret documents like these....

Some nights workers return to their freshly built
identical houses, drop their boots, badges,
and change, don't know they're misplaced
until their next door neighbors' wives
call them honey from another room....

Somewhere else, a decade later, back row,
a girl in a Peter Pan collar sounds out words
in a Dick and Jane reader. She will play her role.
We are all dependent on what each of us knows.


One of the many strengths of "Plume" is its a vast array of poetic styles. Every poem reads differently, giving the whole story a broader, more complex feel that is necessary and important with this genre. Flenniken plays with margins, spacing, prose pieces and blotting in an original effort to blend the human and the scientific.

Most of the book is an effective set-up for the last few, even more powerful pieces. "Dinner With Carolyn", near the end, mixes going out to eat with the truth about Carolyn's father, whose life was cut short not by the farm chemicals that Hanford doctors said he was exposed to in his youth, but by working at Hanford, by "chromosomal mutation / observed in Hiroshima victims.... / Money was always / short on money.... / he never said no."

Flenniken mixes the personal with one of the most dangerous developments threatening our earth. I did want the book to expand into nuclear power and its more quantifiable affects from Hanford and around the world, and thought the endings of a couple of the poems didn't match the excellent build up in the beginning and middle of the pieces. But this is minor commentary. I commend where this book places itself in our history and deeply admire its humane, creative and urgent underpinnings.

From the last poem, "If You Can Read This":

[turn back]

[death] [horizon to horizon] [bedrock to sky]

[death] [river] [indecipherable]....

[father and mother] [love?] [indecipherable] [horizon to horizon]
[bedrock to sky]

[plume/cloud] [indecipherable].... [time passing]

[planet (or atom?)]

[traveler] [death] [turn back]

[Schnaucl · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

The college I attended was about 45 minutes away from Richland, home of the Hanford nuclear reactor. In a geology class I took I learned we'd built it over fault lines which had not yet been discovered at the time. Oops.

These poems are written by a woman who grew up in the 1960's in Richland. The poems convey the sense of community and unity of purpose that existed at the height of the cold war in a place where everyone is connected in some way to the secret government project.

The book actually starts with an interesting anecdote. When the author was young JFK visited the facility (just weeks prior to his assassination), the thanked them for the work they were doing. When candidate Obama visited Richland he was asked about the Superfund cleanup (as it turns out, nuclear reactors produce a lot of waste that's hard to get rid of) and he didn't really know anything about it (though he said that would change by the time he was back at the airport).

It's amazing how things change.

Many of the poems deal with the topic of the health of the workers. Both the author and her best friend had fathers who died of cancer caused by working at Hanford. She tells their stories, and the story of her best friend. But she also tells the stories of countless others, gleaned in part from various testimonies before Congress.

One of the reoccurring themes is the secrecy that the workers were asked to keep and their repeated betrayal by their government. From intentional releases of radiation (the reason is still classified but one theory is that they were hoping to track Soviet facilities by similar emissions) which they kept from the populace, to the buildup of dangerous carcinogens in the wildlife which the government knew the local population frequently hunted, fished, and then consumed, to spraying all kinds of chemicals to asking the poorest and most desperate to clean up radioactive materials with little protection again and again the government betrayed people.

One of the interesting things is the real sense that to even question any of this would have been considered disloyal and unpatriotic in a way that doesn't seem to exist today. People might point fingers and shout about patriotic duty or say there's no such thing as honorable dissent but mostly it just comes off as empty posturing.

My favorite poems were the Redactions. They're the only poems that are printed horizontally (you need to turn the book sideways to read them). They start with an actual quote from an official government source about how the government wants to be as open as possible (often in the name of science). The poem itself consists of what appears to be heavily redacted information with a few letters or small groups of letters left unredacted to form the poem itself.

It's all very well done.

[Shaindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathleen Flenniken's Plume, which won the 2013 Washington State Book Award, centers on her childhood growing up as the daughter of an employee of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Flenniken explores the complicated mix of secrecy, pride, and sadness felt in a community that was told that it was doing important work to help end the war but that was exposed to radiation poisoning and other dangers of the nuclear age. A fantastic collection that is as educational as it is beautiful.

[Drew Toop · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a total disclosure, I actually know the author through her oldest son, who has been a close friend for some years now. That being said, I do not want the reader the think that my review of this work is in any way colored by these relationships, for while there is much Kathleen knows about me, one thing she does not is that I, too, have my own particular connection to the Hanford Reservation and, as you will see, have been directly affected by it.
My grandfather – my father’s father – whom I never had the luxury of knowing since he died long before I was born, was a laborer on the Hanford site when construction began in 1943, and continued to work there for some time. Just like the local peoples surrounding the region, my grandfather and his fellow workers did not know the nature of the facilities they worked on, or indeed that they would be instrumental in winning the war (not to mention the murder of 1.25 million Japanese civilians).
I never knew these things about my grandfather, until very recently. Growing up, Hanford was a subject that rarely found its way into conversation back in my hometown of Yakima, Washington, let alone with my family, where it usually was only brought up when we happened to take Route 24 on the drive to a favorite camping spot – or later, when I was much older, on the long journey to Washington State University in Pullman. My father had many stories from his childhood about the random checkpoints that used to be set up, the white-suited men who would check their vehicle with Geiger counters yet offering no explanations, and, perhaps most fantastic of all, the plumes of gaily colored smoke that often rose up from the reservation, flamboyant as hard candy in purple, green, yellow, the contrails of a new, atomic age flying over our civilization like a massive predatory drone.
Is that taking it too far? I don’t think so – my grandfather was killed by inoperable lung cancer. Like most men of his generation, he was a smoker, but I do not believe it was impossible that the materials he was exposed to had a deleterious effect upon his health, and considering the deep poverty under which he raised his children (not to mention his tireless work ethic) I would not at all be surprised that he, like the other laborers in Flenniken’s poems, may have been taken advantage of, paid a few bucks to do away with a wheelbarrow’s load of innocuous looking debris that was silently and secretly poisoning everything around it. You’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet after all, and so what if some Indians and some white trash get killed, now isn’t that too fucking bad?
So it is that whenever I return to the poems in Flenniken’s collection that I feel an immediate connection, a sort of familiarity that I have not felt in other regionalist works. Flenniken perfectly captures the sort of indifference one grows up with in the hills and valleys of Washington State’s desert region – a place that does not synch well with popular culture’s facile and ignorant portrait of the State as an endless carpet of green forests drenched in eternal rain, inhabited of course by hippies or plaid-clad simpletons guzzling Rainier beer. None of our parents ever taught us how to see this land with different eyes, how to appreciate it on its own terms with its own definitions of beauty. One need look no further than my hometown, where the residents have for generations to square the circle and make the desert bloom with their neon-green lawns and dainty European flowers that have no place here, a land better suited to teepees or pueblos than Tudor castles and plywood McMansions. (“Our families all came from elsewhere,/” Flenniken tells us in Rattlesnake Mountain, “and regarded the desert as empty, /and ugly, which gave us permission/to savage the land…Desert turned vineyard, orchard, strip mall, /houses in every shade of beige.”)
No wonder she wanted to escape! Oh, God, how I understand! For you see it is a common occurrence, nearly universal even, for the ambitious children of these desert places to flee for the West Side (capitalization intentional) to “live among trees,” or to places further, still. I certainly did. Yakima, after all, is a place whose name means ‘runaway.’ But time abroad has a tendency to reveal old things to us as if in new light; it was only after having lived in Asia for several years that I was able to return to my home country and see that it was neither brown nor ugly – it was a feast of colors subtle and more complex than anything an Impressionist’s palette could produce. Pink, purple, rose, greens like Easter grass and aquamarine, black and dark violet, rust and red, tans and yellows of infinite variety, between the hills and the sagebrush and the Russian olive trees and cottonwoods that encircle each tiny natural water source with thirstiness and turn the air sickly sour, all of it set against a blue sky in the summer without a cloud to mar its Yves Klein perfection.
Few people come to have this level of appreciation. The place is still rampant with a domineering, imperialist mindset; the idea that those who might seek to maintain what is left simply “don’t understand anything;” this antiquated mindset found in the American West that makes men scoff at the idea of preservation and stewardship of yucky things like drylands and spawning grounds, the exact same mindset that made it so easy to persuade these men to open up the Columbia to the atom smashers, and turn the heart of our State into another outpost of Inland Empire, another abscess swelling with the imperial virus that inflames the blood of the American. The poet’s son and I ourselves knew a man like this, yet another young engineer and scientist bamboozled by the Faustian nuclear bargain that promises cheap, “clean” energy for the price of eternal vigilance (you see how well that worked for liberty). Even a Chernobyl or a Fukushima is not enough to persuade these people (In Deposition we read, “…Every one of them ashamed for falling ill/the way the anti-nuke fanatics said we would,/who’ve never known shit about anything,/who’ve never understood us and never will.”), and I’m not convinced that thousands of gallons floating down the Colombia will, either.

[Jeannine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this! Read my full review at The Rumpus here:
http://therumpus.net/2012/05/lie-down...

Reading Plume is not only an education about Washington State and its role in the Nuclear Age but of an awakening in the American public as well as the poet herself to the peculiar dangers of invisible poisons and of trusting too much the authorities of science and government

[Jonathan Hiskes · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems tell the stories of the children of the Hanford nuclear project -- the families growing up down the road from the largest nuclear fuel production site in the country. This is environmental writing at its best, exploring place, characters, health, economy, a town's place in the nation. It's fresh, brisk, never preachy.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met Fleniken at a fund raiser a couple of years back where I bought this book from her and we talked about growing up on the Plume. And even then I thought 'a whole bunch of poems about Hanford huh?' But these are really great. I'm not a poetry reader but reading these reminded me what an art form it is. I loved the offset type and use of spacing to enhance the emotion and stories that each poem told. They also captured exactly what it was like to grow up near Hanford during its heyday.

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of book that makes you wonder if anything else is even worth writing.

[Hannah Notess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely fantastic. This is a great example of a book of poems that tells the story of a particular place and time and reads well as a whole narrative unfolding, but the individual poems also hook you. The book design is gorgeous as well.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting and (heartbreakingly) well written.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not much of a poetry reader. In fact, I had to create a shelf on which this book sits, all by itself. I find poetry (when read off the page) difficult to access. But for whatever reason, not this book. It's mostly about Richland, WA--a town with a long and difficult history as a major site of nuclear processing and waste disposal. I've never been there, but I know the area--Eastern Washington. For that reason, or for some other, these poems really were able to reach me. Quite a book.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Fascinating (and unfortuantely true) account of growing up at a nuclear testing site. I only wish there was more about Flenniken's live post-Hanford... Why go into the field? Why work in nuclear when you grew up witnessing its devastating effects? It feels like there's so much more to say on the matter, and with her style, I would gladly read another 50 pages.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent poems about author's life at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, WA. Her father was a scientist there and she lived there until she graduated from high school. Poems range from elegies and remembrances to recounts of daily life.

[Anne Faye Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gem! Poetry written by an engineer who worked at Hanford. Science, morale, and emotion packed into bite-sized food for thought.

[Will Washburn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well done, but honestly just didn’t grip me in the way other documentary poetry does. It’s just too local and specific in scope. Which is a very unfair criticism

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flenniken’s remarkable second collection of narrative poems uses a central theme. She grew up in Washington State during the Cold War, in a town created to house employees of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
It will turn quaint soon enough.
Bomb shelters
already charm us, stuffed to their low ceilings

with batteries, board games and cans.
Sardines are amusing
and pineapple rings for dessert.
(The Cold War)

Our families all came from elsewhere,
And regarded the desert as empty,
(Rattlesnake Mountain)

Hanford was a plutonium plant, and for years the residents and employees were told it was safe to live and work there. Once official documents were declassified, it became glaringly evident that it was indeed not safe. Many of the poems are made from these documents. Flenniken explores and shows the reader what it was like during those years as she tells about her father, who worked at Hanford, and her best friend Carolyn’s father, who also worked there and developed cancer secondary to radiation exposure.
at the same time inside your marrow
blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next
a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation
as you milled uranium into slugs
(To Carolyn’s Father)

“Plume is part memoir, part history lesson, part cautionary tale, part quest. It is at its heart a search for identity, as I have tried to synthesize the truths of my childhood with the environmental facts.”
From the Bio page on Flenniken’s website
http://www.kathleenflenniken.com/bio....

Fascinating to read that Flenniken, the Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012-14, has a degree in civil engineering and worked at Hanford for 3 years.
I sit in my summer suit from Nordstrom,
the only new hire today, not dressed
for fear in the shape of a mushroom cloud
or the end of the human race.
(Siren Recognition)

These poems are as much a personal narrative as they are a witness to history and our government’s ability to mislead. They don’t rant and rave, they weave the facts into elegant poems; the quiet statements make the impact even more powerful.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flenniken's poems plumb my conscience. Her battlefield is Hanford, Washington. Outside of the State, little know of the significance of Hanford, but for decades it was (and still is) the site for nuclear waste and disposal. The only problem is that people live their lives there.

Growing up, Flenniken was told that she should willingly submit to the radioactive testing because it was good for America. But the larger question is this: Why should little girls be offered up as sacrificial lambs to the radioactive cause for America?

Her poems, including "Plume" and "Redaction II" are powerful and need to be read. We need Flenniken and her poetry badly.

[Dianna Caley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems were vivid and highly memorable. She is the poet laureate of Washington state and since she is from the eastern part of the state I was expecting pastoral romance. The description of a childhood in Hanford surrounded by secrets and the description of watching unknowingly as the people around her were poisoned were very powerful.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flenniken grew up next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state and worked at Hanford for three years as a civil engineer and hydrologist. Plume is a collection of poems that explore both the poet’s place in this world, as well as Hanford’s role in a larger part of America’s nuclear history.

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heart-wrenching and poignant, a collection that makes me both proud to live in Washington state and ashamed to live in a nation that allowed Hanford to occur. Flennicken is a master of both form and language, and has told a shared history in verse accessible to all readers.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing poetry about Hanford, which is not something I expected to enjoy, but wound up enjoying all the same. Quick read, with lots of layers - great to read aloud, and fascinating subject matter for a poet.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and grounded in everything that is eastern Washington. I will go back to these poems repeatedly.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was unbelievably good.

[Francis Opila · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (where plutonium was produced during the Cold War) are quite piercing and help us remember what we may want to forget.