Poets and Poems: Patricia Clark and “Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars”

Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars: Poems, a collection by Patricia Clark published in 2020, seems at first glance to be about nature. It includes poems about river birches, birds like hawks and mallards, gardens, moths, bees, spiders, the orca whale, and more. Even the poems not directly about nature touch upon the subject or theme in some way. 

And yet, as you read and speak some of the poems aloud, you at first sense and then see that these are not nature poems. They may use nature as a subject, they may display nature in all its wonder and diversity, but they are definitely not nature poems. Nature may be the frame or the stage, but Clark is writing about life.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Raven – poem by Edgar Alllan Poe at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Requiem – poem by David Whyte.

 

A Conversation with Jared Cater, Part 2 – Sunil Iyengar at New Verse Review.

 

Autumn Damask – poem by Sandra Marchetti at Every Day Poems.

 

“Low Barometer,” poem by Robert Bridges – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poets and Poems: Wendell Berry and “Another Day”

Eleven years ago, I read and wrote about a then-new collection of poems by Wendell Berry. Simply named This Day, it was a collection of old and new poems – what Berry called “Sabbath poems” – published between 1979 and 2013. He suggested reading these poems in a quiet place – the woods, a quiet room – because that’s where poems of rest and reflection should be read. 

Now we have the sequel – Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023. Berry turned 91 this month (Aug. 5, to be precise), and he’s still writing poems just as good as they were almost half a century ago. The poems are also just as consistent as they were in 1979; he has never tired of writing about the themes of family, relations, community, land, and landscape, all of it embodying the sense of place. His fiction, notably the Port William novels and short stories, are about the same thing; he even has a new Port William novel publishing Oct. 7, entitled Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Come, Jeffers: Poetry of Old Age #1 – Lucas Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

 

A Chinese Poem on a Greyhound Bus – Joseph Massey at The Free Press.

 

Four Walks in Central Park by Aaron Poochigian – Review by Carla Sarett at New Verse Review.

 

Scrutiny – poem by Teow Lim Goh at Every Day Poems.

 

“I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore,” poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Out Walking" by John Leax

 

I’ve read Nightwatch, the young adult novel by John Leax (1943-2924), and I’ve read his collection of short essays on writing, Grace is Where I Live and Remembering Jesus: Sonnets and Songs, one of his poetry collections. And now I’ve figuratively walked with him through the woods and fields, called Remnant Acres, near where he lived in upstate New York.

Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World is a collection of essays first published as columns in the Wellsville (NY) Daily Reporter. It is also a collection of poems on the same natural theme, because Leax found that nature spoke of God and faith and sometimes that discovery could only be expressed in poetry.

The subjects of each essay and poem are simple – a dead squirrel, a heron, stones, salamanders, the kitchen garden (and protecting it against the birds and critters), fishing, watching the moon, and more. Yet in simplicity one often finds clarity and truth, and Leax finds it in abundance. What he finds moves him to praise and prayer.

A prayer for order

Father of all creatures,

whose dwelling extends beyond this world,

let no one trivialize your being.

Let your order prevail.

Let your intentions come to be

for creation and for yourself.

Give us, each day, no more than we need,

and forgive us when we take for ourselves

the well being of others,

as we forgive others who seek to take ours.

Lead us away from our dreams of power

that we might be whole,

satisfied in you.

John Leax

It’s not my imagination that in this poem I find echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament.

From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”

Out Walking is a quiet, thoughtful, faithful work, a guide to what the natural order can and should mean. It may be a slim volume (140 pages), but it is packed with insight and truth.

Related:

Grace Is Where I Live by John Leax.

Nightwatch by John Leax.

Some Monday Readings

Darker – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Bone Into Stone: On translating Ovid’s Metamorphosis – Jhumpa Lahiri at The Dial.

Not So Close: Two different looks at Henry David Thoreau – Ashley Barnes at Commonweal.

The Importance of Walking a Battlefield – Doug Crenshaw at Emerging Civil War.

The Inflection Point – Michael Oren at Clarity.

Poets and Poems: Gabrielle Myers and "Break Self: Feed"

I read the poems in Break Self: Feed by Gabrielle Myers, and what comes almost immediately to mind ae the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe. I’m reminded of not all of O’Keefe’s paintings, but the ones of flowers and other natural objects that might be what’s being portrayed, and also might be some part of the human anatomy. O’Keefe’s paintings are sensual; so, too, are the poems by Myers. 

This isn’t coincidental or accidental. Myers is too careful of a writer, too deliberate in her choices of words. Her poems intricately combine features of the natural world with humanity, suggesting we are not only closer to nature than we think we are but also a very intimate part of it.

To continue reading, please see my post at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Change in the wind – poem by Kathleen at The Course of Our Seasons.

 

‘Back-Door Pastoral’ and ‘Life’s Lessons’ – poems by C.B. Anderson at Society of Classical Poets.

 

This is Love – poem by Amanda Johnston at Every Day Poems.

 

“Morning Song of Senlin,” poem by Conrad Aiken – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Jack Bedell and "Against the Woods' Dark Trunks"

You grow up in a place like suburban New Orleans, and one of the first things you learn is that the land on which the suburbs float was at one time marsh or swap. My own childhood home had two huge cypress trees in the yard, and they never did quite thrive like they did in marsh-days. The one next to the driveway died first, the cement partially blocking water from reaching its roots. A few years later, the one in the front yard died as well. Even in humidity- and rain-rich New Orleans, it needed more water than allowed by the St. Augustine grass.  

I thought about those cypress trees as I read Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks: Poems by Jack Bedell. Bedell is a professor of English and coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, which sits “across the lakes” from New Orleans, the lakes being Borgne, Pontchartrain, and Maurepas. It’s just up the road from Ponchatoula, which for a very long time laid a legitimate claim to being the strawberry capital of the world. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Experiencing Nature and the Earth with “Earth Song” by Sara Barkat

Do you know where you were on April 22, 1970? 

On a warm April Wednesday, I was on the parade ground at Louisiana State University, sitting in the grass with about a thousand other people. We were part of the first nationwide Earth Day, inspired in part by the infamous Santa Barbara oil spill the year before. We listened to speeches and music, we signed petitions, and we chanted slogans. We knew we had become something larger than ourselves, and we knew that college and high school students all over the country were doing exactly what we were doing.

 

I also got sunburned. 

 

Four days earlier, on April 18, poet Allen Ginsburg participated in what may have been one for the first Earth Day poetry readings. At Sr. Generosity’s in New York City, Ginsberg and two other poets read Earth Day poetry. Ginsberg’s reading, apparently, included chanting along with Hare Krishnas. 

 

Earth Day 1970 witnessed the birth of the national environmental movement, bringing together a number of disparate streams of concern that had been building over the previous decade. Twenty years later, in 1990, Earth Day went global.

 

More than 50 years after that first Earth Day, we’re still concerned about the planet. We’re still observing Earth Day. National governments have made the environment a special area of focus. 

 

And we’re still reading, and writing, poetry about the earth. It turns out we’ve been doing that far longer than Earth Day 1970.

 

Writer, artist, book illustrator, dancer, and medieval armorist Sara Barkat has edited a collection of 93 poems about the earth or some facet of it. Earth Song: a nature poems experience includes poems well-known and not-so-well-known. It includes poets who are household words and poets who are striving to be household words. It includes poems you might expect and some you don’t. And it surprises: I didn’t know, for example, that novelist Louise Erdrich also wrote poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: David Russell Mosley and "The Green Man"

David Russell Mosley tells the story of his original encounter with the Green Man in 2012. With a group of friends, he was visiting a theologian in Southwell, not far from Nottingham in England. The theologian took the group on a tour of the town, including the cathedral. The chapter house dates to the 10th or 11^th century; much of the cathedral dates to the 17^th century. The architectural details of the buildings included “foliate heads,” an idea incorporated into many British churches and cathedrals prior to the Reformation. 

It wasn’t until 1939 that the familiar foliate head was called the “Green Man,” in an article written for the journal Folklore. The Green Man was an ancient pagan symbol for nature and rebirth, and the image had made its way into Christianity. The foliate head can be found today in numerous churches and cathedrals. 

 

Mosley was taken with the image, but he filed it away in his mind for years, until, like many ideas, it began to force its way out of his head and on to the written page. The Green Man is a collection of 63 formal, and beautiful, poems about the seasons, nature, the church, saints, and creation. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Nature and “Dream Work”: We Had Mary Oliver for a Time

In January, poet Mary Oliver died at age 83. What do you say about a poet who won the Pulitzer Prize (American Primitive, 1983), the National Book Award (New and Selected Poems, 1992), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fistful of honorary doctorates, and was a bestselling poet for most of her life? She published 33 poetry collections and four non-fiction or essay collections, and she was recognized as one of the best nature poets ever. And she was one of those rare poets whose work drew brought affirmation from critics and the general public alike. 

You can say a lot of things, but it might be best simply to recognize her for the eminence in the poetry world she was and be done with it. And yet that seems too abrupt. 

I went looking for one of her works to read and discuss. I passed by the award winners and instead settled on Dream Work, the collection she published after winning the Pulitzer Prize. That first post-award collection would be a challenge for any poet; expectations would be high and the critical knives might be out if it doesn’t seem to measure up. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Paul Kingsnorth: The Poetry of the Future Landscape

British writer Paul Kingsnorth is best known for two novels, Beast and The Wake, and a collection of essays, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. I’ve read and enjoyed Beast; it is a novel of frequent run-on sentences and no quotation marks, about a man living alone in a landscape devoid of people but with people’s artifacts remaining. I’ve started The Wakethree times, this novel of an Anglo-Saxon landowner seeking revenge on Norman invaders. It’s partially written in Kingsnorth’s version of Old English; it also lacks quotation marks and capital letters. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, and I’m determined to make a fourth attempt to read it.

This unconventional form for his novels is of a piece with Kingsnorth’s environmental philosophy, articulated in a statement called The Dark Mountain Manifesto written with Dougald Hine in 2009. The manifesto serves as a kind of constitution for the Dark Mountain Project, self-described as “an international network of writers and artists searching for new stories for an age of upheaval.” It is a dark mountain for a dark view of what the future holds, coupled with what that future will require if individuals are to survive.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Athena Kildegaard and “Course”

Some 40 miles southwest of St. Louis is the Missouri Botanical Gardens’ Shaw Nature Reserve, more than 2,400 acres of forest, prairie, woodlands, and trails. It was first utilized in the 1930s, when air pollution became so bad in the city of St. Louis that the Botanical Gardens moved endangered plants out to “the arboretum,” which is what St. Louisans still call the reserve. 

On most days, it’s difficult to find a crowd at the reserve. One can walk the trails and perhaps pass one or two or perhaps as many as three people. Many times, I’ve walked the five-mile-round-trip river trail and not seen a single person or head a single man-made noise other than the sound of my feet on the gravel path. The trail ends at the Meramec River, and one can walk out on the gravel sand bars and simply watch the river flow. 

The reserve is a kind of natural sanctuary. It is that idea of natural sanctuary that permeates the 64 poems of Courseby Athena Kildegaard.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: the gravel bar on the Meramec River at the Shaw Nature Reserve.

Poets and Poems: Michelle Menting and “Leaves Surface Like Skin”

Lichen sticking to the grooves of tree bark. Pine needles surrounding a house embedded in the woods. A pale, yellow flower grazing the finger of a young man leaving for war. Imagining life as a tardigrade, or “little water bear.” Bramble-scrawled oak trees. Burial mounds so natural they seem part of the landscape.

Nature and geography offer a wealth of images and metaphors for poetry, and poet Michelle Menting drinks deeply from that source in her new collection, Leaves Surface Like Skin. The 46 poems of the collection are filled with nature’s images, but filled in a distinct way. Menting uses nature, geography, landscape, and the seasons to probe and push against the human condition. This is not so much nature poetry as it is nature poetry in the service of understanding one’s self and the people surrounding you.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Pat Durmon’s “Push Mountain Road”

Highway 341 is a generally north-south road in Baxter County in north central Arkansas. Its approximately 34 miles of length (with extensions) meander in the Arkansas Ozarks. The highway is also known as Push Mountain Road, and that’s the title poet Pat Durmon has given to her latest collection of poetry – Push Mountain Road (which certainly sounds more interesting, and poetic, than Highway 341).

Comprised of 118 poems (and one introductory poem), the collection is a celebration – of people, nature, relationships, the everyday, the small things (like making the crust for a quiche), and the larger things (like sitting in a radiation waiting room). Durmon combines an almost childlike wonder with the wisdom gained through a lifetime of experience.

In this poem, an observation about the declining afternoon light becomes something much more:

 

Open Doors

welcome

the failing

afternoon light

bellowing bullfrogs

a spider quilting

between porch rails

a wood-wild road

zigzagging

up the mountain

a herd of deer

coming our

from dense

ragged woods

where they cross

a pasture

to go down to the river

and catch grace

off guard

Pat Durmon

It is that “something much more” that characterizes Durmon’s poems. And the poem cover the landscape that’s extends outward from Push Mountain Road – the small towns, the people, the trees and streams, animals in the forests, the mountains and the seasons.

Durmon is the author of Light and Shadows in a Nursing Home: Poems and Blind Curves. Her poems have been published in such journals as Rattle, Main Street Rag, Poetry East, Cyclamens and Blades, Between the Lines, and Lucidity. A former teacher and now retired mental health counselor, she currently facilitates two support groups.

The poems of Push Mountain Road are the poems of rest and refreshment, a place to come to and abide as the world’s craziness swirls around.

Top photograph: Little Red River in the Arkansas Ozarks, via Arkansas.com.