Monthly Archives: June 2025

Behind the arts

The regional drought has officially ended, and the rain continues. Ironic, then, that the online site Feed the Holy just posted a poem I wrote near the close of a droughty August: “Zen Gold.” Fireflies and bats, while not abundant, manage to enjoy the recent dampness. The monarch butterflies have returned to our meadow, though I don’t catch sight of them on rainy days. But the moist conditions didn’t dampen the turnout or enthusiasm of local citizens who came out in droves for peaceful “No Kings” protests here…in a decidedly “purple-red” area of Pennsylvania.

Speaking of regional, this weekend I also attended the debut showing of a documentary film about the performing arts community in Bethlehem, PA, formerly famous for Bethlehem Steel Corporation. The film is titled “Rooted,” and it follows that “roots” idea with the planting of trees at arts sites, the metaphor of the mycorrhizal network (see my references to Lesley Wheeler’s latest book–so much overlap!) and the concept of community development. Especially through works of imagination. In the 1970s, when the steelworks was beginning to slow production and lose employees to retirement and business to competitors, small groups of young, talented artists in theater, dance, music, and puppetry started performing in parks, churches, etc…and gradually found inexpensive space in the city to establish themselves and pursue their dreams. Some of those little startups, such as Touchstone Theatre, have been operating, teaching groups of children, entertaining the community, and advocating for the arts for over 50 years.

Godfrey Daniels coffeehouse/listening room and The Ice House (home of Mock Turtle Productions) have been sites for poetry as well as for music and theater-craft. I have participated in and attended poetry and one-act play readings at both of those venues. I don’t live in Bethlehem, but it isn’t too far away from me–still in the Lehigh Valley region. And I deeply appreciate the work that pioneering arts-folks have done, and that arts advocates and teaching artists continue to do, for our area. The people behind the arts deserve recognition.

I’m not the sort of person who networks well; event-planning exhausts me, and preparing for committee meetings and writing grants are not my forte–though I gladly proofread grants and PR materials for local non-profits. Thus I admire the types of people who not only create in the arts but also find creative ways to keep the arts alive through outreach and planning, often in the face of very steep odds (yes, I’m talking funding here, and board membership, and organizing the necessary minutia, and the grind of public relations). God bless them for making space for actors, musicians, dancers, visual artists, sculptors, installation artists, poets, and visionaries of numerous kinds. It’s because of folks like these that I don’t have to travel all the way to New York or Philadelphia to experience lively contemporary arts of many kinds.

You can think of local arts organizations as the independent booksellers of the performance world. You go there to discover stuff that you won’t find on best-sellers lists, for work that’s by new artists, or work that’s been rediscovered, or cool perspectives on the familiar canon of major works by the famous. That has value. That offers inspiration. That gives you the courage to keep on doing whatever kind of art it is you do. Which in my case is poetry, not generally thought of as as performance art–though it once was, and slam poetry events prove it can still be. Maybe I’m a little more of a hermit-in-the-woods writer, but that doesn’t mean I never want to venture out into the wider arts community. And when I do? I’m grateful for the people who have established the beautiful network under my feet.

image: https://truetimber.net/TrueTimber arborists

Perfumes and tunes

This time of year, certain blooms and fragrances evoke my childhood memories. I spent most of my childhood and all of my adolescence in southern New Jersey, along the Delaware Bay; the swampy coastal plains have now largely burgeoned into suburban housing developments, but in the late 1960s there were actual townships with old-fashioned suburbs–the kind with sidewalks–and many a privet hedge that bloomed in early June with small, white spires that gave off a faint scent. In overgrown areas of meadow and scrub, the sweet smell of Japanese honeysuckle perfumed muggy evenings. And while I don’t recall much scent from the mimosa trees in bloom on Harvey Avenue, once those fallen pink blossoms began to rot on the sidewalk, they added a distinct punk that meant summertime. The honeysuckle is blooming here now, making me wonder about the neuroscience behind the sense of smell. Gotta check out these books, perhaps: Kiser reviews four recent books on olfaction.

On a side note, none of these evocative plants are native to the Americas: Ligustrum vulgare, Lonicera japonica, Albizia julibrissin–and yet I associate them with South Jersey. It is almost like a refrain in my memory-mind.

To speak of associations reminds me of Alexis de Tocqueville. I’ll post a quote of his below, one that makes me think of language and poetry and science. But back to refrains:

Musical refrains also run through my brain, evoking memories and nostalgia, or just being irritating “earworms.” At any given time such tunes may include Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, strains from a late Haydn quartet, one of many Springsteen songs, Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” or–most confounding of all–the Chock-full-o’Nuts jingle from the 1960s or some similar commercial sloganeering. Why such things wear a familiar groove in the gray matter I don’t know, though Oliver Sacks’ book on music (Musicophilia) and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music offer some insights, and I’m thinking of reading this one by Samuel Markind when it comes out later this year.

Alas, I’m not gardening because once again the garden is awash in mud, so I entertain myself with endeavoring to discover how/why my brain works (and yours, and anyone else’s), since that’s one of my favorite lines of inquiry when I can’t work outside. I will take a sodden walk later and dwell on possibilities while enjoying the scent of the invasives; I’ll work on some poetry revisions; maybe I’ll listen to music…and freely associate with any and all possibilities. Here, as promised, Alexis de Tocqueville:

“When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it.

When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it.”

Honeysuckle photo by Nadiye dabau015fu0131 on Pexels.com

Blackberries

[note] *Hmmm. Somehow, I backposted this post. It was written June 23rd, post-solstice!

Actually, they’re wild black raspberries, someone informed me. They usually ripen around the end of June, and everything eats them–orioles, robins, catbirds, deer, possums, raccoons, possibly even foxes. Black bears, if they’re in the vicinity, though we haven’t seen one here.

Humans enjoy eating them, too. Usually I don’t get more than a few for yogurt or ice cream toppings, but this year–a bonanza. Maybe the canes liked all that rain. Harvesting them is quite a task, because the canes are in the hedgerow thicket and twined about with poison ivy and cat’s-claw and other spiky and rashy flora, not to mention the thorns of the berry canes themselves. And harvesting comes as the hot, humid weather descends on this valley, making the effort a sweaty and uncomfortable one. I always think of farm workers, almost all of them immigrants, who get hired to do this sort of work–the vital work no one else wants to do. They deserve better pay and considerably more compassion than they generally receive. Half a quart of blackberries cost me half an hour of sweat, many scratches, and a swath of dermatitis; but, like Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, I had bread and milk and blackberries, (for breakfast).

Current mood: harrowing. Aghast. These two poems, though I wrote them many years ago, seem apropos to the moment.

~

Like Thumbelina

Where there’s green foliage
so dense my eyes ache
I spend an hour in shade
snacking on blackberries
the birds haven’t found.
My head hurts from the agonies
of money. The cell phone rings.
Ferns and five-leaf vines
muffle street sounds,
a little colony of feathery mosses
sits under a tree-burl shelf.
I find a hole pressed snugly
against old roots and leaf-mulch.
Like Thumbelina,
I want to curl myself inside
a sassafras leaf, sleep
beneath a toadstool
undiscovered,
unmolested,
temporarily free.

~~
Thicket

Behold the thicket:
it is deep with brambles.
It is blackberries in July,
wineberries in August.
	Move, and the thicket
	impedes you, catches
	your sleeve,
	plucks you awake.
The bee is here. The spider.
The thicket is alive, and crawling.
Green with jewelweed to salve 
rashes from the thicket’s
poison ivy. Green with prickly
horsenettle, coarse pokeberry,
the brilliant, twining nightshade:
	thickets sweat poisons
	as well as fruits.
I have brought you here to show
that you can never get through,
not unscathed, not without
brutality of some kind,
the saw, machete, knife.
This tangle no amount of patience
will ever undo—
	it will overtake you,
	grow into your hair,
	invite warblers in to nest,
	spiders to unfurl their orbs.
You must learn not to hate
before entering the thicket;
you must acknowledge all its ways
to understand its wild embrace.






A little green

Summer arrived rather suddenly here in the valley. After a rainy May that was a bit cooler than average, June has slapped us with 80° days and sunshine. Not that I am complaining, but it does throw a curve at the vegetable garden’s usual progression.

And all that rain burgeoned into so much verdancy–my eyes almost ache from all the green! We’ve needed the rain (the wettest May on record) to make up for the driest October on record (2024). Nature appears to be doing its best with balancing things out in the face of all we humans have been doing to unbalance it.

Quite a switch from the spring greenery in the mountains of New Mexico, greens that are far less chartreuse in hue, the kind of green you have to be looking for amid the deep jades of pines and the brownish-green cholla. Prickly pears are a bright shade of green but don’t evoke any sensation of lushness. The little-leaf oaks start out with a fresh hue but become very dark, nearly black, as the season progresses.

I was thinking about the hues of the high desert because of our visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. One of the galleries there is a display of the artist’s pastel chalks, brushes, and color chips she created for herself to get the palette she felt best represented the landscape she knew. Many shades of ochre, browns, dull oranges, sandy yellow, and that famous turquoise blue of the New Mexico skies–but also the green of cottonwoods in spring, the green of pinyon and ponderosa, the sage green so common among low-growing plants like sage and rabbitbrush.

Try defining the word green.

A little Joni Mitchell to accompany that request: