Unlovely drafts

Well, I have been writing. But less about the current wintry days than I expected, because of the online poetry seminar I’m taking.

One recent prompt in Anita Skeen‘s workshop involves employing phrases from a text and using those words, or images, as a start to a poem that would not encompass or even relate to the original topic. I’ve written work that does that; but more commonly I continue the topic in some way, most notably with my long-poem/chapbook manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong. And what I notice is that I tend to choose “unlovely” texts, articles or essays that are historical, scientific, or academic, rather than to use the words of poets or novelists. Why that is, I can’t say for sure; it may simply be due to my deep-rooted nerdiness. But I think of poets like Martha Silano, Rebecca Elson, Muriel Ruykeyser, and others who have created amazing work, beautiful poems, from newspaper articles, scientific papers, academic texts, encyclopedias–so I feel encouraged. The result, for me, however, is often an unlovely draft.

Etching by or after J. Gamelin, 1778/1779. Created 1779. Contributors: Jacques Gamelin. Work ID: h3ybfzwe.

I have recently spent some time proofreading one of my brother’s papers that addresses the origins of some of the crania in Samuel George Morton’s collection, which resides at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia and is among the controversial holdings there of sacred/religious objects and human remains. The University has committed to “repatriating” such items in its collections that belong to indigenous peoples, for example, and to returning human bones to places of origin or to “respectful interment.” The challenge with Morton’s large collection is to ascertain where, in fact, these human beings came from. [Informational page is here.] My brother has been trying to track down the people, likely young Africans, who made up one set of about 55 skulls collected in Cuba around 1839-1840.

It’s a terrible history, of course. The Middle Passage, slavery, illness, misery, abandonment even in death. And it’s an academic paper, so the language–not to dismiss the author’s writing ability, since he’s keeping to the conventional style–does not lend itself to poetry.

Basically, I’ve given myself a difficult task. Yet we learn through difficulty, do we not? Often, too, the unlovely poems are those that deal with how rotten human beings can be, or illuminate the worst of times and offer us insight and information that we had not been taught, hidden horrors, trauma, all of the above. I have written many lovely poems about lovely things. The world, however, manages to be far more complicated than beautiful, a mixed bag of joys and miseries, and it seems to me that literature and art ought to reflect that fact sometimes.

What I’m posting below is a very rough draft, just to demonstrate how I begin a difficult poem, a poem based upon historical facts that I’m learning myself. It’s a completely different process from when I write from an image or observation of my own. For example, the “Librarian” poem, which is about 15 pages long, took me a couple of years and a visit to the United States Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC) at Carlisle Barracks, PA! First I pull some quotes, make a lot of notes, highlight images or place names that seem most resonant. Then I develop these into what I call “jottings” and fragments, and start setting them into an initial sequence–which I often change later.

Stanzas? Line breaks? Metaphors? Meter? All of that can wait; I like to work on structuring the narrative first when I try something in this vein, and I want to find images that might speak to a reader. So it is clear to me that this poem is not one I’ll have finished before the end of the 5-meetings-long workshop. Assuming I ever do finish it. Yes, poetry is hard work.

~

José Rodríguez y Cisneros, Havana Physician, Ships 55 Human Crania
to Samuel George Morton, Anatomist (1840)


A Cuban journalist writes that by 1915
“The Vedado of my childhood was a sea rock
over which the seagulls flew”

sandy, overgrown with Caleta sea grapes
the nesting-place of rats, iguanas

but once a cemetery for paupers and bozales,
the unbaptized, slaves, the suicides

abandoned on this coast as carrion

where turkey vultures and wild dogs
fed on corpses hastily interred

“el Pudridero” they called it—
the rotting place—
local people thought it cursed

for a more scientific-minded man, opportunity
to harvest skulls for anatomic pursuits.
Nameless, blameless nobodies

who were otherwise less than worthless:

the definition from a 19th century
Spanish dictionary:

“bozales. A Negro recently removed
from his [native] country—
metaphorical and vernacular,
one who is foolish or idiotic…

can be applied to wild horses.”

~~

*note~

“the Vedado Interment Site…originated as a sinkhole that came to be utilized as a mass grave…[the majority] of the Vedado Group likely consisted of enslaved people born in Africa during the early 19th century, most of whom died of infectious diseases soon after arriving in Cuba.” —John S. Michael

Tracks

This was no fox.

The other day, we noticed a coyote limping down the meadow. We hear them now and then, at night, but we seldom see them; and this one was out at noontime. A bit unusual. I felt concerned about it as it moved off into the undergrowth at the field’s edge.

Out of curiosity, I guess, the next day I traced its tracks from the treeline between our property and the next one, down through our meadow, into the woods beyond our lot. Mind you, I am not an animal tracker. Furthermore, our snow is absolutely criss-crossed by tracks: deer, rabbits, humans, birds, squirrels, cats, and the occasional owl-hit. It took a little looking to determine which tracks had been left by the coyote, but I had seen it taking the deer path through the dead weeds, so I started there. It wasn’t really too difficult to determine, despite paw prints from all those other critters. The prints resemble dogs’ tracks; and there aren’t spots, like those you see with a fox, where the animal suddenly prinks, leaps, or lunges its nose and forepaws into the snow while chasing field voles. Also? The prints were too big to be a red fox.

An aside–I recently read Catherine Raven’s memoir-ish book Fox and I, which I liked very much and from which I learned a more than a few fox-related pieces of information. And some descriptions of winter in Montana, which is too much winter for me, especially after this latest snowfall in Pennsylvania. But anyway—

The average cat weighs 10-12 pounds, the average red fox 30-ish pounds, and eastern coyotes in our region can be 45-55 pounds. This one was, I think, a male because it left quite heavy tracks, though possibly it was putting more weight on three legs because the front right paw was injured badly enough it never set that paw down. I recall once when our family dog got caught in a neighbor’s “soft-paw” fox trap. As soon as I got her loose, she ran for the house, and I noticed her prints in the snow–three heavy prints and a lighter one since she was favoring one foot. This coyote wasn’t using its leg at all. In a few places I could see a swash on the snow surface where the snow was deep enough that the coyote’s foot had skimmed it. The circuit led into the woods and I pressed no further.

That’s about the extent of my animal-tracking knowledge. It was, however, an interesting departure from my usual winter walk, and a nice day for walking. Everyone else in the county was out buying gasoline and groceries because a big storm was in the forecast for the weekend. Which did arrive (the storm, I mean. Well, also the weekend.).

I’ve been working on new poem drafts lately, after weeks of barely any new writing, focusing on revision instead. What do you bet that coyote, or its tracks, or at very least, the snow, will show up in at least one new draft?

~

FYI: Here’s another set of tracks commonly seen at my house in winter:

Tracks of a John Deere Model M (c. 1947)

Shirt knowledge

I have been missing my dad, so today I put on his old cotton knit sweater, the one that’s developing holes in the weave, the one I kept because his scent lingered in its fibers. It’s been over five years since his death and, alas, that familiar scent has finally vanished from the sweater. Though I like to think that it has been absorbed into the other items in my closet, maybe the hoodie my daughter knitted, maybe the flannel pjs, maybe the four old pairs of jeans I wear continually or the one full-length gown I’ve seldom donned but have kept for reasons not entirely rational. I’m hoping my dad has somehow permeated my closet, the things I wear next to my skin, my life.

And I came across this poem recently in Gary Whited’s Having Listened. Indeed, it resonates in the way a poem can, a sort of slanted parallel of feeling, affinity, relationship. I love the idea of “shirt knowledge,” the thought that inanimate objects might “know” in ways humans cannot perceive. Those last lines: “how to be private and patient,/how to be unbuttoned,/how to carry the scent of what has worn me,/and to know myself by the wrinkles” seem accurate to my current state. Comfortable, comforting.

Like an old shirt. Like a good poem. Like a memory of my dad.

~

My Blue Shirt

hangs in the closet
of this small room, collar open,
sleeves empty, tail wrinkled.
Nothing fills the shirt but air
and my faint scent. It waits,
all seven buttons undone,
button holes slack,
the soft fabric with its square white pattern,
all of it waiting for a body.
It would take any body, though it knows,
in its shirt way of knowing, only mine
has my shape in its wrinkles,
my bend in the elbows.
Outside this room birds hunt for food,
young leaves drink in morning sunlight,
people pass on their way to breakfast.
Yet here, in this closet,
the blue shirt needs nothing,
expects nothing, knows only its shirt knowledge,
that I am now learning—how to be private and patient,
how to be unbuttoned,
how to carry the scent of what has worn me,
and to know myself by the wrinkles.

by Gary Whited
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91973/my-blue-shirt

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

Unsettling

We got some rain on Saturday, which we’ve needed, and dismal cold rainy January days are perfect for settling down with a book. I’m reading The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture (1977) by poet, writer, farmer, educator, activist Wendell Berry, still working at 91–his book Sabbath Poems was published in 2024. I’m much more familiar with Berry’s poetry than his prose, though he’s written at least half a dozen novels and many books of nonfiction. This text, I’ve since learned, is one of his more famous–it’s been revised and re-issued six times. The copy I got from the library is the original version and features cover blurbs by Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Stewart Brand, among others; Publishers Weekly summed up the book as “a cool, reasoned, lucid and at times poetic explanation of what agribusiness and the mechanization of farming are doing to the American fabric.”

Which is a fairly good one-sentence précis, though Berry’s wording often strikes me as more passionate than “cool,” and agribusiness is only one aspect of his critique. I was in high school in the 1970s, and at the time it seemed average Americans were beginning to recognize that pollution and overpopulation could be problematic, that maybe we needed to eat more natural and wholesome foods, and that establishing an Earth Day might help people turn focus toward the planet. Simultaneously, we had Earl Butz as Agriculture Secretary, a man who ended many New Deal programs to help “small” farmers and who encouraged large (eventually, corporate) farms. Butz appears several times in this book, and no wonder; he and Berry debated the topic in public and in print, and their thinking was almost diametrically opposed concerning the philosophy behind agriculture. Berry’s book is a social and philosophical argument that is only somewhat dated and really quite prescient, though he might come off as mildly curmudgeonly to today’s readers. Or maybe not so prescient. He was simply paying attention.

The sections of the book that most resonate with me are those in which he writes of nurturing and relationships, and points out that good relationships involve responsible actions and collaborative, mutual care whether they are marital, family, or social relationships or relationships with the soil, the flora and fauna, the whole planet. He predicts a future in which people live in their houses and not with the land, or even within their communities, and where wilderness is “conserved” so that it can be exploited for entertainment and scenic views. People in the US, he says, don’t feel responsible for the land on which they live; they don’t understand its cycles, its weather patterns, its waterways; their property is merely property–a commodity for convenience and investment. I’d say that future is already upon us.

Thus, Berry has made me think more deeply about my relationship with “my” property. If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you may notice how often I consider weather, dirt, local animals, insects (especially invasive or non-native ones), plants, tree diseases, water–I’m no farmer, but I am a gardener and do feed myself at least partly from my own backyard. I take almost daily walks around the perimeter of our 6+ acres, poking around in the hedgerows, scanning the sky, looking down at walnuts and animal scat, watching for new buds or coloring leaves or bird nests or wildflowers. I worry over droughts and hailstorms and flooding. Climate change concerns me in very local and specific ways, not just in general.

One could say I’m at least trying to nurture the earth. I’ve made many mistakes along the way and done some damage that I’m learning how to rectify; I have also realized that I have to accept some changes, such as incursions by invasive species, because they are beyond my control. Through the almost 30 years we’ve lived on this land, I’ve tried to understand it better. After all, we built a house on it. The soil was hard-packed, acidic, overused from previous decades of corn-growing, full of stones, sumac, and asiatic rose bushes, a fallow field that hadn’t been planted or farmed in decades but didn’t necessarily need me to tend it. It wasn’t my family’s land, and I didn’t intend to end my days here; however, I figured if I was going to live on this spot, I had better do whatever tending and nurturing it might require.

Which is about the best I can do as far as a relationship with the land in which I dwell, and about the best any of us can do in any long-term relationship: try to understand it, get acquainted, do some research, make plenty of observations (maybe take notes), and nurture what seems to need special attention and care. The land has given me much more than I’ve ever given it. It’s offered shelter, beauty, an education, food, the companionship of animal life, cricket sounds, tree frog songs, firefly lights on long summer nights, open spaces for my children to play in, owl calls and fox kenning, the grace of leaping whitetails, dead-fall wood we can burn in winter, forest-bathing, hammock-swaying, inspiration for writing. The wonderful porch here, where I often sit to write in my journal, opens a view to the meadow out back. So many poems started on that porch, with that view…

That’s how the earth nurtures me. May I be somehow worthy of it.

photo by David Sloan 2020

Small, refreshing

Another day. One that the calendar claims occurs in 2026, although at times I disregard the calendar–another human-made thing, and I find so many human-made things destructive and frustrating. It’s not as though a “new” year puts away what has happened the previous 365 days the way I can put away the holiday decor. Which I haven’t actually done as yet. Anyway, we’re still in the first week of January, and Twelfth Night has barely arrived, so if I do want to acknowledge the calendar I can excuse my lack of clearing-away. But I can’t clear away the losses of the past year, and I don’t want to. I want to remember my friends for as long as I can.

It’s true that wintry walks offer quiet splendor (sometimes) and a chance to reflect, but mostly winter affords the chance to stay inside, curled up with a book or browsing through garden catalogs. Theoretically, it’s a good time to revise and submit my work; often, however, I don’t get to that process because winter is also a low-energy time for me. I powered through a fibromyalgia flare two days after New Year’s Eve because loved ones were visiting, but there’s a bit of fallout as a result–worth it, though; and I’m chuffed about taking poetry workshops later in the month. Meanwhile, reading books! I got a Samuel Hazo collection from my local library, I’m reading Wendell Berry and Richard McCann, and Ada Limón’s You Are Here is on my to-read pile. I’ve also felt inspired by the start-of-a-new-year blog posts Dave Bonta has curated on his Poetry Blog Digest. Many writers and books there I want to check out, and many writers and poets feeling some of the same things I’ve been feeling about the past year and what to make of the years ahead.

So to recharge, as it were, I’ll do small, refreshing things this January: take photos, doodle with watercolors, read books, tromp about in boots, meet pals for morning coffee, draft poems, play with images, as per Johan Huizinga–“To call poetry, as Paul Valery has done, a playing with words and language is no metaphor: it is the precise and literal truth…What poetic language does with images is to play with them.”

Play’s the thing

My freshman humanities professor, the brilliant, late Larry Fuchsberg, assigned Johan Huizinga‘s The Waning of the Middle Ages as one of the texts for our course…an unusual choice for American teens in 1975, as was another of our books, Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. At 17, I found Burckhardt rather slow going stylistically (it was published in 1860, after all); by comparison, Huizinga (circa 1919) was refreshingly clear. I really enjoyed it and learned a great deal. I kept meaning to read his 1938 book Homo Ludens, but for awhile it was difficult to find in libraries or bookstores. Also, I lacked the time to track it down or read it. The premise interested me, though–that we humans evolved our culture from the “pointless, imaginative” urge to play, and that play is fundamental to our learning and our social structures. Also, we are not mechanical beings–the messy frolicsome-ness of people is as necessary for our survival as food, water, and shelter.

“Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.” 

Finally, I’ve begun to read Homo Ludens, and it’s even on Amazon now; also I discovered that it exists online here thanks to Yale University. Fifty years after my initial encounter with the author, I find his thinking just as interesting as I did in college, and just as difficult. As in his other books, Huizinga uses etymology as one of his methods of examining the meaning and culture of play. He was writing for an audience that he assumed was well-educated in the classics, so there are passages in Greek, Latin, and French that neither he nor the English translator bothers to translate for less linguistically-adept readers like me. Fortunately, such passages are brief and are used as sources for his argument, and I’m not reading to find fault with his material. I’m interested in his argument and insights as a whole, and intrigued by his thinking. He apologizes for his lack of sources (ha! There are hundreds of them) because he was “working in haste.” He composed this book in the Netherlands as Germany began to be a serious threat to Europe, and he wanted to get his ideas in print before he was silenced. In fact, his last few years were difficult. He had used his standing as a well-known cultural historian to criticize the Nazis and was arrested in 1942, basically house arrest; he died in 1945 just before the war was over.

I’m only on Chapter 4 but am finding, in the etymological tracings of the words that intersect in meaning(s) for play–game, contest, gambol, gamble, dallying, tournament, match, riddle, performance, frolic, pretending, folly, fun, sport, etc.–fruitful stuff for poetry, for thinking about poems and about how poems work as craft, as poems, and as works of art and imagination. And also, what roles poems may play in culture today, and whether that differs at all from the role poetry played in ancient times. Huizinga writes:

“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.”

Language may not be necessary for play but can easily be incorporated into it, and language can become play. Or playful. I don’t know much about Wittgenstein, but I find myself thinking of his theory about words having “family resemblances” that often connect, overlap, shade meanings. So we get jokes, puns, flirting, mocking, and new “rules” for our language use that culture constantly shifts in all kinds of directions. Language is a game-changer, and poets make use of that.

I thank Larry Fuchsberg, musicologist, book-lover, and educator, for introducing me to Johan H. Teachers, you never know how much you may have influenced a student’s life, even decades later.

Last messages

End of another year. This one included some truly joyful times that will stay with me for quite awhile. But in that almost-inevitable reflection that arrives with the winter solstice, I find myself recalling dear ones whose lives closed in the past 12 months. I used to have physical reminders of friends and family, the last card or letter they wrote, something to put into a file or drawer or keepsake box and take out from time to time; a photograph or two, or maybe a recording of their voice on tape. Now that human communication has mostly migrated to the digital, to the “cloud,” those tangibles are much less common. But the messages persist.

A few weeks back, I migrated to a newer cellphone and, in the process, moved a year’s worth of text conversations to the new device (I’m not sure how I did that). All the old messages popped up, including three from dear people who are now deceased. Quite a different form of “ghosting.” I’ve kept in an online folder many email messages from my most frequent correspondent and long-time friend, who died February 1st, but I can’t quite bring myself to look at them yet. And it isn’t quite the same experience as opening and unfolding old letters.

I can’t bring myself to delete the messages from my phone, however. I suppose at some point that will occur, perhaps in another upgrade. Letters are ephemeral, too; all it takes is flood or fire. We have to rely on our minds, our memories, when it comes to recalling loved ones. Maybe that is what elegy is for, I don’t know.

~

As for the present–the Spirit of Christmas Present* ?–some of my Best Beloveds will be gathering here and there with me soon. Once the holiday hubbub dies down and the lonelier, cold January days arrive, I have poetry workshops to look forward to. They’ll be online, which suits my schedule in winter. Last year, I enrolled in two such workshops and found they spurred me to get a good deal of writing done, so I figured I might try repeating the process. Anita Skeen is doing another series for The Friends of Roethke Foundation with readings, prompts, and discussion on “writing toward wisdom.” In Dickens’ era, I’d be considered old enough to be wise (though most of us, Dickens certainly included, know better about age inevitably bringing wisdom). But the operating word for Skeen in this case is “toward.” It will be interesting to see where she takes her workshop participants in the new year.

* John Leech illustration

Systems

[I am aware that human hair isn’t good nesting material]

Late autumn reveals
oriole’s purse-like nest
constructed of my daughter’s hair.
Breeze touches 
what I cannot.
                                (November 2010)


~

I found this tanka-like poem, written when my daughter was away at college, among some old computer-based file folders I’ve been organizing. It’s one of many old poems of mine I’ve ‘rediscovered’ in the process of trying to keep my poetry systematized. Before I left my job at the university, I imagined that I would manage to organize and update my creative work files during the first year of retirement and keep everything in reasonable order once I had established a system. As if.

It’s not as though I haven’t made progress, made some brave efforts in the direction of archive and revision, culling and filing my drafts and “finished” poems (efforts that are both electronic and paper-based). The fact remains, however, that I do not possess the kind of mind that solves the keeping-track aspects of life very systematically; and, as writing remains a significant part of my life, it suffers from the same inefficiency. I admire artistically-minded people who can keep track of their work using logistically-useful methods that work for them. I’ve read their tips, their essays, talked to them about their systems, tried emulating them. Sometimes parts of their methods are helpful to me, but I lack something. Rigor? Ambition? Energy? The desire to spend the time required?

I keep writing, but I also keep falling behind at staying organized. And then there is the issue of technology constantly updating, so that a method I used in, say, 2015 is not available anymore…unless I invent a bunch of work-arounds. (My long-standing backup method is PAPER, and I still employ it, but I hate file cabinets and folders and don’t use them.) As for spreadsheets? I avoided learning to set them up during my entire career in academia because our department had a brilliantly capable office assistant who did that stuff for us, bless her heart.

All of which means that now and then I cannot locate a draft, a poem I want to revise or to send to a friend, or consider putting into a manuscript. Frustrating. And when I bought a new laptop, I had to decide what files to move from my old desktop; how far back do I want to go? Those poems from 1987, for example–eons ago, as far as computer system lifespans. Yes, I have hard copy from dot-matrix printers. Files originally in AppleWorks and Claris, files that lived on 3.5″ floppy disks. Copies I typed out on various typewriters through the years! Although I’m complaining about it, I realize that in some ways it’s really cool that my poems have undergone so many iterations in terms of tech. It means I have been around awhile and confirms the reasons I think of myself as a writer…and not as an efficiency expert.

~

P. S. I continue to write my drafts with a pen.

Source material

Creative writers are often asked where they get their ideas from. In my own case, the answer to that varies a great deal. Sometimes ideas arise from personal experience, of course, but one’s life offers only so much material if you are a relatively staid person like me. Topics for poems can arise from recent headlines or from histories, written or oral; from conversations overheard in a grocery line; from stories other people tell me; from folk tales; from science books; from dreams; from works of art, and numerous other sources. It’s this wide array of possibilities that make the concept of the creative-writing prompt so popular. A quick Google search for “creative writing prompts” offered well over 20+ pages of entries, in several languages.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I have written pieces based upon prompts, especially when in a workshop or class, or when I feel rather tapped out of my own imaginative source material. I’m especially fond of writing that stems from viewing or experiencing a work of art–sculpture, painting, musical composition, dance, installation art (ekphrastic poems). Generally speaking, though, that’s not from whence my poems originate.

I can’t really say why I feel an urge to put down in writing specific reflections about something that’s caught my attention–or even what sort of experience evokes my response. Maybe I feel intrigued by an image, a detail, or an ambiguity–a question arises in my mind that I tussle with for awhile. Then, I may compose a draft and let it sit. Two days. Two years. Longer. Lately I’ve been revising some old poems and have realized I no longer recall what their incipience was. Which can be a good thing, because I am no longer wedded to the “reason” I wrote them and can instead consider whether they can be crafted into decent poems.

I am also working on a manuscript that I let sit for at least six years. An idea got into my mind after reading Robert Burton’s 17th-century book on depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy, quite some time ago (2017, perhaps?). I took a stab at writing what seemed to be evolving into a historical fiction story, which is not my usual approach (I have zero practice at plot and dialogue). Then, I stopped. As one does. But the topic lodged in me somewhere, I suppose, and early this year I returned to it. What if, I wondered, the draft could be restructured into a series of prose poems? There might be a sort of hybrid novella-poem in the earlier draft.

That’s more or less what I’m developing, at least for now, and we’ll see what if anything emerges. It’s keeping me interested, which I like, and the experiment feels fresh compared with “writing what I know,” or writing “how” I know. Because yes, of course we ought to write what we know; but we also know about human beings, and we have imaginations, and anything is possible.

By Robert Burton – Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, 1628, in the British Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84390857

Magnificent

Qesra Îshaq Paşa or Ishak Pasha Palace, Ağrı Province, Turkey, Ottoman Empire, 17th c.

For a recent poem draft, I looked up the etymology of the word “magnificent” even though I was fairly sure I knew it. Like many words, its meaning has altered a bit over the centuries, but in this case less so than most: from the old French, from Latin, the root words for “great” and “make,” it formerly referred to great-mindedness, courage, nobility [per the Online Etymology Dictionary] and later gained the additional meaning of splendor or costliness; “Meaning ‘greatness of appearance or character, grandeur, glory’ in English is from late 14c.,” whereas later uses of the word carry connotations of architecture, expensive taste, grand works of a more human variety.

The draft I was working on was about Melville and whales, but of course thanks to stopping to look something up, I went down a research rabbit hole and ended up deciding that the magnificence whales possess would be more of the greatness of appearance sort and perhaps was not quite the way I want to describe whales. But the word did put me in mind of some of the monumental temples, mosaics, palaces, castles, and sculptures I saw in Turkey last month. Many of those are “magnificent,” but they act as reminders of how fleeting human magnificence is, in comparison to whales. Whales evolved into their modern form about 4 million years ago, long before humans were modern humans, let alone building palaces or temples to please the gods, intimidate their enemies or their subjects, or glorify and deify their kings.

The photo below is of the temple and perhaps the tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene (because archaeologists have so far discovered no actual tomb, the existence of said tomb is speculative, though the site is considered to be a hierothesion). The top of the hill is not natural but is a gravel tumulus. Human-made. Gravel hauled up the mountain to increase the size of the mountain and deter potential grave-robbers. Who else would do that work but slaves?

https://annemichael.blog/2025/10/20/back-in-time/

I know the theme’s been written into poetry before, but in these times it seems to bear repeating. Here’s an early draft I’ve been working on, in loose blank verse, in which I invoke a famous poet whose poem on the theme has lasted a mere two centuries. But that’s longer than many an empire has endured.

~

Hierothesion (Nemrut Dağ)

Tomb or temple, likely both, one king’s
angling for a pantheon he’d crafted
on his own, as kings will do when empire
hardens in their veins. They turn to stone.
Minions, memorize my name! (like
Ozymandias, as Shelley can attest).

Tourists scale the tumulus and find,
at sunrise, eagles, lions, and Apollo,
gods of brokenness, unhumbled despite
centuries of disregard. Extinct.

We know him not. And what has made us pause
speaks not of his glory but of our dismay:
how much purely human work, slaves’ toil and toll,
it took, interring him this way, high up
and rubble-laid, to raise him above all.

Where are those workers’ bones? We walk on them.
This we know without a temple or a tomb.