“Caddis,” our Silent Spring finalist, focuses on the caddisfly and then zooms out to examine a legacy of pollution and its impact on the natural world. It is a breathtaking poem, and we thoroughly enjoyed chatting with poet Danielle Janess about the background of this piece. Enjoy our conversation.
Rebecca Paredes: You submitted “Caddis” for our Silent Spring challenge, which asked writers to dig into themes of climate change and the world changing under our feet. How did that prompt inform this piece?
Danielle Janess: The impulse to write “Caddis” comes from my life and family. I grew up on lower Lake Huron, where I have vivid memories of caddisflies and mayflies, at a certain time of year, seeming to cover every exterior surface: screen doors, walls, windshields. They remind me of the feeling of peak spring and the turn into summer. For my father, who taught me to pay attention to the natural world, their hatch meant the start of trout fishing season. Caddisflies belong to the scientific order Trichoptera. They undergo four distinct metamorphoses, transforming at first in water (from egg to larva to pupa) before emerging into air as a winged, moth-like adult. A keystone species of the Great Lakes, they support cultural, recreational, and commercial fisheries. Because they spend most of their lives underwater, they are also highly sensitive to water pollution. I think almost constantly about Lake Huron and the St. Clair River—they are my lifeblood. The poem reckons with our human impact on the Great Lakes by looking at this one small but important insect.
RP: This poem uses anadiplosis, a literary device where the last word of one line appears at the beginning of the next. To be honest, we geeked out about this in the Glossy Planet Slack channel—we loved how this device ties together the “weaving” mentioned in the epigraph and by the caddisfly, and how much that repetition transforms the poem when read aloud. All of that to say: can you talk about your decision to use this device?
DJ: If you watch a video of a caddisfly larva building its protective case, prepare to be amazed. While the grub itself is not the most attractive creature, they are wondrous little architects. The French artist Hubert Duprat famously “collaborated” with caddis larvae in the 1980s. He put them in aquariums alongside precious gemstones like pearls, rubies, lapis lazuli, and genuine gold flakes. The larvae then spun bejeweled sheaths from the gemstones, each one completely original. While not all Trichoptera build cases, those that do use materials that vary depending on their species and what’s available in the local water column. That could be minerals like sand or fine gravel, debris such as leaf bits and twigs, animal matter like snail shells and fish scales, or, as we now know, micro and nanoplastics.
In my youth I saw loads of caddisflies, but until recently I didn’t know about their intricate lives as aquatic artists. The more I learn about them, the more my appreciation deepens. I wanted to honor their way of being and making, so I played with different ways for the poem to approach the insect’s mode of assemblage. No one quite knows how they got their common name, “caddis.” But Merriam-Webster cites it as an old English noun, c.1500, for worsted yarn, ribbon, or binding, whereas Trichoptera comes from the Greek, meaning “hair-winged.” I got to thinking about hair, braids, weaves, and binding (the verb), which they do with the sticky silk from their mouths. One day, in a craft class led by Yvonne Blomer, it clicked. She mentioned a form in which the end of one line begins the next, which made me picture a weaving shuttle, and my mind flashed on the caddisfly. I also hope that the sense of motion afforded by the pattern conveys something of the forward-moving current in the St. Clair River.
RP: “Caddis” both points out how we are interconnected and how our actions impact the broader ecosystem. In particular, I loved the shift into microplastics and how the poem highlights not only how omnipresent they are, but also how they become woven into the very bodies of humans and animals alike. Do these themes reappear in your other work, and if so, what draws you to them?
DJ: Your question hits on something I wrestle with both personally and in my current poetry project.
What does it mean that I have inherited from the life-sustaining enormity of the Great Lakes and also from the violent appropriations of mega-polluters like Shell, Nova Chemicals, and Enbridge?
In Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, the poet Jan Zwicky says that “love, awareness, and the desire to respond are distinguishable but inseparable.” Like it or not, because of my life and family, I am connected to the crimes of polluting corporations. For seventeen years, my father worked as a process operator at the Sarnia Shell refinery, among the world’s largest manufacturers of gasoline, distillates, liquid petroleum gas, heavy oils, pure chemicals, and solvents. I am keenly aware that his labor, along with my mother’s, provided for my upbringing and for our family’s home on the lake. He died in 2020 of multiple aggressive cancers. Studies show that men in our region experience cancer rates at thirty percent higher than the Canadian average.
In 2024, just outside my hometown of Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong, Nova Chemicals opened a plastics production site that produces one billion pounds of brand-new plastic annually, in the form of polyethylene pellets, aka “nurdles.” Billions of these lentil-sized nurdles now litter creeks and stormwater routes that drain directly into the St. Clair River and Lake Huron, leaching yet more toxins into our environment, drinking water, and food chain. As for Enbridge, their badly aging Line 5 pipeline moves as much as 540,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Superior, Wisconsin, to the Sarnia refinery, snaking under the Straits of Mackinac and crossing under the St. Clair River through the heart of vital Great Lakes ecosystems. Over a fifty-year period, from 1967-2017, Enbridge’s Line 5 spilled over one-million gallons of oil. The Aamjiwnaang First Nation of Sarnia has opposed this pipeline since 1953 because it trespasses through their legal treaty territory.
While Line 5 predates my birth, I am old enough to remember our local beaches before they were strewn with polyethylene nurdles. I remember swimming in the lake before the invasive zebra and quagga mussels, brought into the Great Lakes by freighters from the Caspian Sea, filtered the water to its current clear blue by sucking up the phytoplankton and subsequently driving our native whitefish and trout populations to the brink of collapse. All this is my cradle, and it will be my grave.
RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working on now?
DJ: I’d like to share a few of the many living writers whose work contributes to this conversation. These include Rita Wong, whose poetry overlaps with water activism; Philip Kevin Paul, W̱SÁNEĆ Nation poet, whose work astonishes for its relationship to his home on Vancouver Island; Laurie D. Graham, whose poetry often investigates familial history and whose latest collection, Calling It Back To Me, I can’t wait to read; and Tim Lilburn, whose radically contemplative, linguistically-charged work, in essay collections like Living In The World As If It Were Home and poetry collections like The Names, invites the reader into wholly new heights of thinking.
Lastly, please let me say thank you again, Rebecca, and to all of you at Glossy Planet, for this meaningful recognition.
