Category Archives: Nature and Gardens

Kairos

I have never followed or for the most part particularly liked the music produced at Def Jam records, but I’m finding Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being to be a calming, Buddhist approach to living an imaginative life. It’s the kind of book I can read in short bits at a time; frankly, having studied creativity and Buddhism and the arts for many years, nothing in it is exactly new to me. Yet the book acts as reminder and affirmation, for which I’m grateful.

Reminder that with a little objective space between me and my life sometimes, I can be reminded of my perspective and think more kindly about others’ perspectives. Reminder that whatever my readers take from my work, however they interpret it, however they critique it, whatever does or does not resonate with them–the work remains my own expression. It’s the best I could do at the time.

Reminder that the work of creativity doesn’t have an end point. Well–death, I suppose, ends the individual body’s ability to create; but if there is work out there in the world (music, poems, novels, films, paintings, sculpture, and so on), the creative acts of the past can continue. They continue to offer perspective. They continue to invite interpretation and expression.

This sort of reminder is good when I’m involved in making an ephemeral and very limited set of objects, a poem series made into an artist book. It’s so minor in the scheme of US culture in the 21st century, and so very much an expression of my own thinking, about which a limited number of people can possibly care. Rubin says that doesn’t matter–the culture, the popularity, the quantity. [Interesting, coming from a guy who has clearly made considerable money, and helped musicians earn considerable fortunes as well, and who hangs out in Tuscany much of the year.] But I don’t discount his words. Certainly, if I had been writing to make an impact on culture, to be popular, or to make money, I’d have stopped long ago. So I keep working, all in the fullness of time.

~

We never can know what will last, or why. Or why not. This weekend, we cut down a pair of “friends,” two pear trees that I planted over twenty years ago. We’ve had bountiful years and sparse years, years for pear butter, poached pears, and pear tarts, and years of drought and times the squirrels snagged fruits or wasps bored into them or deer leaned their long necks up to sample something sweet and juicy. Orioles loved the trees, and bees pollinated them. White petals carpeted the lawn after rainfall in spring. But fire blight found them and did its swift, fatal damage so rapidly the arborist told us to take them down and burn them.

Kairos: καιρός, an ancient Greek word meaning “the exact or critical time,” is a word I first learned through New Testament theology, though I now understand its use in science and philosophy. I suppose this autumn is the kairos for sawing down the blighted trees, just as it took me a few years to learn the kairos of when exactly I should harvest the pears. I’m sorry when I look out my kitchen window and don’t see them anymore, but I know fire blight spreads and could harm apples and cherries in the neighboring area (we have to burn the cuttings). So–it was time, as the saying goes. The pear trees’ work of making new seeds within sweet pears is over, but who knows what other work continues underground or what creativity will arise as a result? Possibly a poem. All in the fullness of time.

a case of fire blight

Why poetry?

Taking my stroll today, I found myself thinking about poems–not my own, but other people’s–and about poetry in general. Some questions came to mind: Why don’t I get tired of poetry? Why, after all these years, do I continue to read it, to write it, to think about it, to read what other people say about it, to talk of it with willing friends?

I find I will get tired of hearing (or reading) even excellent interviews, articles, and podcasts about politics or movies or social commentary or numerous other things that interest me. And while it’s true I’m sometimes not in the mood, or haven’t the energy, to listen to poetry readings, I’d say that in general–aside from my physical fatigue–a good poetry reading in-person or virtual, and any poetry discussion, does interest me. Why is that? When so few people find poetry fascinating.

But then, I don’t get tired of going to art museums and art galleries, either (and I’m not an artist).

One poetry-related space I’ve been enjoying is going on a poetry hike with Grant Clauser via YouTube. Also, thanks to Dave Bonta‘s compendium of poetry-related blogs, I’m intrigued as Brian Turner shares with his readers the process he takes to make and revise poems. The way he composes turns out to be not un-similar to my own way of writing poetry, starting with hand-written notes and crossings-out and arrows and re-writings, though I don’t use a notebook much these days. Some of us remain old school! But I also find myself engrossed by seeing the methods other writers use–younger poets, or people with disabilities that keep them from the handwritten draft–to start and the develop their poems. One of my former students uses voice-to-text and simple recordings/playbacks to write, for example. I’d find that awkward, but for her it enables marvels for expression.

~

This week, I’ve paused on my artist book while I wait for some paper that I ordered to show up at the art store. Next, I have decided that I need to start practicing paper-cutting. I used to be a fairly deft hand with an exacto knife, but that was 45 years ago, and I’m not as steady-handed as I once was. Once I have some samples cut to size, I might be ready to experiment with a digital printer.

One thing at a time.

Meanwhile, the October we’ve had in our region this year has been extraordinarily mild, sunny, and dry. So I have been able to work on yard/garden/outdoor home maintenance projects and the indoor work of book-making can wait a bit longer. Right?

P. S. I do not have an answer for this question. Maybe you do? Why poetry?

Heading into November…

Poetry online

Suddenly the humidity rolls away and the temperatures drop and, with shorter days, the tomatoes stop ripening. Some of them start to rot on the vine; it’s time to start pulling up vines and cutting down sunflower and corn stalks. The meadow continues being gold with solidago, but robins start flocking in the lawn and there are no more fireflies, cicadas, or catbirds. Karina Borowicz’s poem “September Tomatoes” captures the feeling perfectly: “The whiskey stink of rot has settled/in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises/when I touch the dying tomato plants.”

I’m happy to note that three (yes! Three!) of my poems, all of them fairly new, appear in Issue #74 of Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis. While it’s unsettling that we’ve come to a time when poems about how we’re finding ourselves in environment crisis seem necessary, I’m grateful to Gail Entrekin for editing Canary for many years. And glad to have my poems in its virtual pages. Poet/writer Lynn Levin, whose work I’ve long admired, told me about Canary; I enjoy reading each issue, and the back issues as well. It’s nice that Entrekin keeps the archives of previous issues accessible to readers.

Header image for Canary Literary Journal

Which brings me to what I’ve been reading lately, because I continue to re-read from my poetry library. This week, it’s Adam Zagajewski. But I should mention that I read poetry online pretty much every day, usually on my laptop because the cell phone is just too small and often screws up line breaks. (We poets spend enough time considering line breaks that tech formatting should never decide lineation for us!) Reading online poetry journals lets me keep up with contemporary poetry and learn about poets I might have otherwise missed–such as Borowicz. I found “September Tomatoes” online when looking up something else.

While I hope there are legions of people who read poems online, I suppose readership of literary journals tends to be niche. I hereby encourage you to Google “online poetry journals” and browse a bit. Look at their archives. Google a new poet whose work you admired. Keep reading!

I love books, but certain aspects of the world wide web enable us to find art, music, writing, dance, and so forth that we might overlook otherwise. I’m reminded of how I used to (still do, actually) enjoy dictionaries and encyclopedias when those were the simplest, most accessible forms of compiled and aggregated information for the layperson. I’d open the tome to look something up, and then find something intriguing or distracting, and read about that, which would get me interested in finding out more about something else…or, I’d look for one bit of information and discover a background far more fascinating or that I was unaware of; yes, the old down-the-rabbit-hole effect has been around since long before we had Wikipedia and its ilk.

And that network of educating ourselves, of defining our terms, trying to satisfy our curiosity, questioning our assumptions–that goes far back into human history. The technology behind the technology is cerebral.



Re-reading, re-learning

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away. And I love her observations and the occasional aside that seems to break the fourth wall:

...Once a squirrel
dropped through the chimney into the whole
ruined civilization of the basement. Here,
I'm taking the squirrel's viewpoint.

That’s from “Small Hours.” How terrific is that–the ruined civilization of basements? And the little comment that suggests indeed, the squirrel has a viewpoint. This poem ends 8 or 9 lines later with the sense of “being swept up/and contained in my bed” but the image she chooses is that of a child on a bicycle, which (to this reader) evokes memory and those hours we find ourselves in the somewhere-else of sleep and remembrance. No statement. No whole-poem metaphor. How did she come to those closing lines? Why do they work so well?

I want to learn that.

~

Brian Turner’s book The Goodbye World Poem is another re-read and feels utterly appropriate for a time of personal losses and deep reflection. And thankfully, it’s also a reminder of joy. These poems were written after the deaths of Turner’s wife (poet Ilyse Kusnetz), his father, and his best friend–truly, how does one find the means to say anything at such times? Yet somehow, Turner produced a trilogy of poetry books: The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem, and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, all published in one year (2023). Exploring what grief feels like has a long history among poets, and Turner’s work reminds me, in topic, of such collections as Donald Hall’s books Without and The Painted Bed, among others; Turner’s poetry is quite different from Hall’s, but the pain of loss and the gratitude for memories of the loved one are similar. And his work differs a lot from Terranova’s.

What do I want to learn from Turner’s poems, what is it he can do in these works that I would like to learn how to do? I love that I learn things in his work, information about whales, jellyfish, swamps, science. His work is usually narrative, doesn’t pretend to be anything but personal and memoir-based. Use of the first-person in poems doesn’t necessarily mean the poem is the writer’s experience or even her own memory/story, but it’s difficult to imagine Turner’s poems as being a stand-in persona. The imagery may offer metaphor but sure feels like “I saw this, I observed that.” Real stuff. Real life. That can get old in poems–but Turner keeps these observations new. Again, there’s reflection in the work that takes us past the surface words, tries to get the reader to find a way in to this grief, this loss, this mix of human feelings.

I think what I like in this work is how Turner acknowledges and presents the mix of human emotions and the movement toward compassion for the sufferer, whether the person suffering is a dying loved one or one’s own distraught and agonized self, whether the sufferer is an animal or a place (environment, region, biosphere). His poem “Fallen Giants” just gets to me each time I read it. It can be read almost as non-fiction prose, though it is lineated–long lines–and uses rhythm and repetition carefully. But, in fact, the poet is describing what whale fall might be like as the huge carcass descends through the silent ocean. And knows that whales are intelligent and can grieve:

...They fall into a hunger they cannot imagine,
with the sound of loved ones in their ears, calling to them, sonorous
and mournful, the pathos undeniable, and mournful because called out
for love's sake, the fluid world a conduit for the voices of these giants,
who sound themselves across the globe, across generations, speaking
to their loved ones...

This poem closes with the image of whales’ huge lungs, how they hold their breaths until they ascend “to the surface/ with a terrific blast of exhalation, a kind of announcement to the universe/that they were here, on planet Earth, a presence in this world, alive.” Compassion for whales that feels like compassion for human beings, for the earth, for the universe. I want my poems to acknowledge and evoke compassion in readers, remind them that the world is complex, beautiful, though often sad. And that it is good to be alive in the world, if only for awhile.

~

From the late summer/early autumn garden, several beautiful reminders of what life on Earth can offer. I recognize very clearly that not everyone has the good fortune to have a life that gives them bright flowers and ripe tomatoes. So I will be grateful today.

Hornworms

Late summer, and this year the tomato hornworms are out in force. I have mixed feelings about these creatures, because once they hatch into hawk or sphinx moths, they are wonderful pollinators for many plants, fascinating to observe as they hover like hummingbirds over the buddleia. But as caterpillars, do they have to be so damned voracious? Most years I can remove them to places far from the vegetables or snip them in half, but sometimes–like this year–I resort to spraying tomatoes with Bt.

We are having a wet August, however, which is a problem for Bt application: I have to keep applying it after every rain. Not to complain of rain in August–so much more welcome than drought. I always look for hornworms to remove them by hand, but they are so good at camouflage that I’ve only found three so far, and two of those were carrying parasitic wasp cocoons so were not going to live to do much more damage (I removed them anyway). Yet each morning I find further “pruning” of my plants. Sigh.

It’s not a big problem, really. My tomatoes have been going wild this year, with plants 7 feet tall, 8 feet in circumference, all of them loaded with fruit. I should not mind sharing with a few very hungry caterpillars when, after all, I’m loading my friends with tomatoes and making more sauce than Best Beloved and I can possibly consume in a year. And yet, it is rather annoying. So I was scouting the internet when I found this blog from Brie Arthur re hornworms. It’s a nice overview and shows “both sides” of hornworm invaders (though as she is in North Carolina, she has tobacco hornworms on her tomatoes).

Hornworms bring to my mind two very astonishing Stanley Kunitz poems written from the worm’s viewpoint. A tricky task, taking the persona of a non-human and still avoiding the more common issues of anthropomorphism. Kunitz, a master, pulls it off. Here is an excerpt from “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.”

~

All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I'll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won't be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

~

I encourage you to read the entire short poem. So layered. And it gave me new respect for the animals that eat the same things we want to eat, who can blame them?

Photo by Chris F on Pexels.com

Arts, gardens, bicentennial memories

When I was a second-grader in Yonkers, NY, our school took us on a class trip to an art museum in New York City. I could not tell you which art museum it was (possibly the Whitney, possibly MoMA), but I remember how vividly impressed I was by one of the things I saw there: a very large mobile suspended overhead, ever so slightly moving. I had never seen anything like it before, and it rocked my world. It was clearly art, but unlike any art I’d seen before. Thus began my lifelong love of art museums, which my parents were glad to encourage.

When a new art museum opens near me, which certainly isn’t all that often, I try to get to it. Philadelphia is a little over an hour away, so I was thrilled when I heard about the new Calder Gardens, (opened in late 2025) which combines two of my favorite things–art and gardens. Not to mention the opportunity to wander past old an favorite, the Rodin Museum, as well as the reflecting pools and tall pines surrounding the much newer Barnes Museum, and to stop at Buena Onda for fish tacos. The Calder gardens were designed by Piet Oudolf and are lovely. Evoking plains or meadows in the midst of a very urban environment, the landscaping proves that pollinators will find their way to plants even when surrounded by traffic and skyscrapers. Delicate grasses were setting seeds when we arrived, giving an airy lightness to what was a typical hot, muggy summer-in-the-city day. Bees and butterflies were as busy as the streets.

I have to say that I don’t much like the museum’s exterior, but the interior architecture suits Calder’s works perfectly. The galleries are unexpected, curving, textured, with walls that range from wood to lava-like to smoothly-polished stone, and they feature niches for seating and gazing, in addition to huge windows that look out onto Calder’s larger stabiles that are situated in well-like, below-ground outdoor spaces. Lighting allows intriguing shadows to be cast by the mobiles; a soundscape softly fills one of the galleries. Docents offer detailed talks and answer visitor questions. The whole place, though on the small side in terms of “quantity,” is a memorable experience.

~

On our way to the Calder Gardens, we passed the monumental Philadelphia Museum of Art and noticed that part of the Parkway and “the oval” were blocked off; there was a huge array of theater lights and speakers that technicians were raising in front of the museum’s famous steps. If we’d visited toward the end of the week, we’d have found the Parkway considerably more limited.

Oh, right. July 4 in Philadelphia: always mayhem, but this year the semiquincentennial.

We avoid Independence Day in Philadelphia because I don’t care for crowds, though I’ve been known to make exceptions for a march or a concert. Not to mention the traffic and parking or the fact that Philadelphia in July is miserably hot and humid, absolutely without exception. Anyway, the nation’s 250th doesn’t feel all that celebratory to me. I suppose I have become cynical.

But seeing all the setup in Center City took me back to Philadelphia on July 4, 1976, when my family lived across the river in New Jersey. My parents–they must have been crazy!–drove us into the city for the evening’s bicentennial party. I had just turned 18, my sister was 16, our brother was almost 12. We saw the musical “1776” on the big lawn in front of Independence Hall (no lawn there now–it’s the Liberty Bell Center). We then walked around the city, going from park to park to watch the fireworks, the five of us holding hands sometimes, trying to stay together and not get separated in the crowd. An enormous crowd! It was exhilarating and a bit scary, and I recall thinking that it gave me a sense of what a war zone must feel like. All those bangs and booms, so loud and so frequent I could feel the vibrations in my body; and sprays and fountains of light overhead, and actual fountains reflecting sparklers and fireworks, warning lights, streetlamps; cars driving past, honking; people singing and shouting. There were protesters, too, but despite the protests (we applauded their efforts and the right of citizens to protest), and despite the presence of police and federal troopers, I don’t recall feeling fearful or anxious. It may be the closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling “patriotic.”

Well, I was very young, and I wasn’t following the controversies very closely (curious about said controversies? See this article). I was aware of conflict and division in the USA, but youth tends toward optimism and energy; I was excited about art, music, books, my college education. That was 50 years ago. There’s much I have forgotten, but the arts haven’t let me down in all those years. Poetry, sculpture, music, painting, dance, and the “humanities” sustain me still.

Invention

I’ve been thinking about creativity in the sense of inventiveness, spurred by two recent visits to two very different places. The first place is the Hagley Museum, an industrial museum, site of the original DuPont de Nemours gunpowder works in Delaware, along the quiet Brandywine. The area was not so placid from 1803 to 1920 when the factories were active and a town’s-worth of people lived and labored here doing a dangerous job. The historic non-profit has created a “museum of invention” at the works, in what was once a textile mill, and it features a large number of mostly 19th-century patent models. Also some of the mechanical drawings that accompanied them. Inventors from all walks of life are represented, and I was impressed by the usually-anonymous craftspeople who made the 3-D models for the Patent Office. So cool!

I think this is the west side of the house…

Then, a couple of days ago, we visited Luna Parc, which is quite an experience. It is a handmade house, sculpture garden, and studio that Ricky Boscarino has been working on for decades. A Rhode Island School of Design student fascinated by silver-smithing, Boscarino decided early on that he wanted to make a living doing art. He began by making unusual (and sometimes slightly alarming*) jewelry and creating art from found objects. He’s also a painter, ceramicist, welder, woodworker…and trying to make his housing needs, studio, and life as sustainable as possible in the wooded region near Stokes State Park in New Jersey. Now, the place is a non-profit that trains students, sponsors art interns, and continues to grow and morph into, well, who knows? He’s devoted his life to art-making. And the place is really fun to explore.

Talk about inventive!

It’s something people need to do, have an urge to do–invent stuff for some purpose, to solve a problem, for enjoyment, or out of a need to play around; we are, as Huizinga says, Homo Ludens (see this post!). Play leads to all kinds of things, piqued by curiosity and that urge to fiddle with things. The patent models at Hagley were behind glass, but I was itching to play with them, like a five-year-old.

That is what I like about writing poetry, too, the play and invention of it–using words, images, sounds, patterns. Earlier today I was messing around with quatrains that used rhyme/slant rhyme line endings, switching off between ABBA and ABAB by stanza. The poem’s content isn’t cheerful, yet puttering with possible patterns was fun and kept me thinking about the topic. Then I went inside and put Bach’s Inventions & Sinfonias on the stereo.

~

* One of Boscarino’s jewelry pieces
Inventive patterns
some wild stairsteps

All of the above by Ricky Boscarino. Purchase his work or book a tour here.

Rainy-day reading

Much-needed rain has arrived, and therefore I’ve been inside all day instead of out in the yard and gardens. I thought maybe I would feel motivated to send some of my poems out into the wider world. Turns out that the motivation was a decided maybe, leaning toward lethargy. Instead, I curled up with a cat and Jeff Burt’s collection The Root Endures (Sheila-na-Gig Editions).

Actually, I read this book a week ago but decided to take a closer look so I could post about it, because I like it a lot. Jeff Burt’s poems contain nature-images and close observations of creatures, plants, and weather yet keep reminding the reader that there’s a decidedly human component here, an interior character who speculates about what human beings are doing here, thinking about, recalling. And how the world is constantly in flux. The rural Wisconsin of the speaker’s childhood feels vividly authentic, and I learned about lime bogs and de-tasseling corn. (I love it when I learn things from poems.) The book seems autobiographical in narrative but never becomes as specifically personal as a memoir would.

And frankly, I guess I might identify more deeply with this book than other, perhaps younger or more urban readers would. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic suburbs, but I spent all my childhood summers in the Midwestern small towns where my parents’ extended families lived. I infer that Burt is pretty much my peer, age-wise; some of his remembered details conjure up a kind of resonance I enjoy. What I’d like to learn from this collection is how to sustain a longer poem, which he does quite well. Not a strength of mine, though I’ve attempted it once or twice with some success. A poem that has numerous short stanzas and travels several pages needs to keep my attention, whether I’m reading it or writing it. Burt’s title poem (the last poem in the book) does this, as does the poem “As If Copper Wire Sang the Unleashing of Time” and “Into the Standing Grain.” Maybe studying writers like Jeff Burt and others can teach me how to write better medium-long poems when a longer poem seems necessary to whatever I’m trying to express. I don’t think I’m interested in writing really long poems–think A. R. Ammons, C. K. Williams, Robert Lowell–but I’d like to explore length a little more.

Whenever I read poetry, if I enjoy the work, I try to learn what the poet is doing that makes me like it. Sometimes it’s the perspective on a topic that surprises me, sometimes it’s the way the poet handles language or forms. Some writers have memorable phrasing or startling imagery, and some poets lift a lot of emotional weight with incredibly spare, condensed, or common words. Which is kind of amazing. Writers like Rebecca Elson, Martha Silano, and Tracy K. Smith create art out of physics and astronomy so that science enhances expression in new ways, or at any rate ways that are new to me. Tyehimba Jess’ Olio rocked my world with the possibilities of nonce forms, shape poems, historical narratives, and the ongoing tragedies oppression and racism have perpetrated.

I’ve always loved pondering and thinking (as a child, I was often accused of daydreaming but it isn’t the same), and poetry moves me into that happy space. Being curled up with a cat doesn’t hurt, either.

Widget

Process & metaphor

redbud
photo: Ann E. Michael

Springtime! Bees, ants, gnats, and a few butterflies have appeared. In the veg garden, the greens are thriving. I’ve sown the ornamental corn, noted the appearance of volunteer sunflowers, amaranth, and chamomile, and moved or weeded out those seedlings coming up where I don’t wish them to be–like in the middle of my soon-to-be tomato patch. The zinnia seeds have germinated in their little square, along with lettuce and spinach in their designated rows. The swallows returned today, right on schedule. Late April, and the garden looks pristine and tidy, even relatively weed-free for now: sectioned into rows, with a couple of raised beds and some stakes ready for climbers like cucumbers and pole beans. All prepped for the mid-spring explosion. The very small part of myself that likes things neatly in place promises to keep the garden less messy this year while knowing that won’t happen. The wiser self cautions that too many rigorous expectations take some of the joy out of the work.

~

Frankly, it’s all too easy to find metaphors for life in the garden. Nurturing seeds with a sense of hope, even expectation, sure. Endeavoring to control outcomes though one cannot control the weather? Yep, that too. Culling, thinning, weeding in an effort to produce abundance, clarity, or beauty? Yes; and waiting and working under hot sun or in the pouring rain and being surprised by hail or hurricane or drought. (You can pop any of those words into the “search” bar on this blog page and find times I have written about said weather events.) In the thousands of poems I’ve drafted during the past 45 years, garden topics and metaphors abound. Lately, though, I’ve been dwelling on how change–inevitable in the garden–presents problems to solve but also lovely surprises. And yeah, there’s metaphor in that as well. Though people tend to avoid change, change brings a wealth of education in its wake.

It’s true that education is often humbling. We work our butts off only to discover we’ve been doing things wrong, or ineffectively, all along. That’s one of the things I learned when I began trying to grow things in earnest, and it is also true of my experience writing poems. You have to be willing to make mistakes and accept that you made them if you are going to improve; it doesn’t mean you have to solve each difficulty in a prescribed way. You can invent! As long as you know that invention sometimes fails, you can learn from it. Create a nonce form for a poem, for example. Or an improvised trellis for a squash vine that got a lot larger than you’d planned.

Every year in late winter, I devise a garden plan and order seeds. Every year in early spring, I revise the plan in some way. Every year in mid- to late-spring, the garden looks very different from those designs…it helps to have a flexible nature, since nature hates rigidity and thrives in its own way. Often unexpected. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes quite a charming surprise to which I’m more than happy to adapt–I welcome the variation! It’s a process that reminds me of writing. No wonder my gardening and my poems are so connected: the processes are so similar.

NoPoMonth, but…

April is National Poetry Month; but this year, I am in hibernation mode.

I’m not going to readings or writing a poem a day for 30 days, not posting much of my or other people’s poems or poetry books on social media, and not doing much poetry writing or any submitting. What’s gotten into me? Some kind of malaise? Or just a sense of being overwhelmed by, you know, life and aging and perhaps too much reflection. Plus there’s garden catch-up to tend to, since I was away for the early part of the season opener. And we’ve had a heat wave with a dry spell and lots of wind, so I’ve had to pace myself with the heavy stuff. Thankfully, Best Beloved can pitch in with much of that. Yet I am reading poetry, and if that ever stops I’ll know I’m in trouble.

So–back from traveling westward-ho. While in Fort Collins, Colorado, some dear friends introduced me to Wolverine Publick House, Cafe, and Bookshop, where there’s a lovely poetry book room in which I found my colleague Ian Haight’s book, Spring Mountain: The Complete Poems of Nansŏrhŏn. Also lots of other fabulous poetry that I had to restrain myself from purchasing, lest I overload my carry-on luggage weight. I read many of the Nansŏrhŏn translations in earlier versions that Ian emailed to me, and it is wonderful to find the book in print (from White Pine).

While in Boulder, CO, another friend suggested Devon Price’s book Unmasking Autism, which has given me much room for reflection. For many years, I helped students write college-level papers and realized that a number of these young people had varying aspects of “autism spectrum disorder”…that I, as a writing tutor/teacher, was wholly untrained to deal with. To help them, I made it up as I went along, student by student. It turns out that most of what we know about supporting autistic people to navigate contemporary social structures has been pieced together by people making it up as they went along. It helped me that one of my dearest friends has a now-adult child with autism–I’ve known him since before his birth, and I think of him as an intriguing person who has much to offer to a society that essentially ignores or shuns people like him. He needs more support services than the students I saw at the university, but he is quite his own person, and always has been. It saddens me that people like him are not more celebrated (not merely tolerated) in our society. We would all be much richer for the experience. Devon Price makes an excellent case for how acceptance of neurodiverse people can enrich the world; however, that would mean dismantling much of the capitalist, work-ethic, individualistic social systems we have, not to mention changing how the US health insurance and health care industries operate. So–not too likely any time soon. If ever. But I believe we need more social space for people whose “peculiarities” are not harming others, even if they seem a bit “weird.”

That would be good for me, for one. Speaking as a perpetual outlier and occasionally rogue thinker, it’d be nice to feel my ideas and modes of thinking aren’t weird, just different; they can be acceptable in their own way. I do not fall under the category of adult autistic but, like most of us, I have some traits that I share with the people Price writes about. Recognizing that we share traits is a way to get to know people who seem “unlike us.” And to feel less afraid of, or uncomfortable with, having them in our lives.

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Finally, I want to shout out to Bob Mee, whose blog I read (thanks to Dave Bonta’s Poetry Blog Digest.) Mee’s recent post questioning whether the brain, as we age, changes the way we write poetry really got me thinking. I’m getting longer in the tooth myself and, as I’ve been writing poems since I was 20, his post got me curious about my own changes in style, approach, form, content, topic, influence over the years. I will probably be mulling over this idea for some time, and it may even get me to dredge up some really old poems to see whether how I write poetry has changed. Mee says: “when I sit to write the process is different. My brain is still capable of energetic concentration but I look at some of the ‘old’ poems from twenty years ago and know I cannot write like that any more.” Hmm. I’m not sure this is as true for me as it is for him, but I think it is worth examining.