Tag Archives: ecology

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.



Drying up

….and the drought continues into mid-November. This is a very long stretch of dry weather, and the rivers I’ve crossed recently–the Delaware, the Schuylkill, the Lehigh, the Susquehanna–are looking mighty low. Little islands are showing up in the center of the riverbeds. Tree roots visible along the banks. I found this government website that filled me in concerning the current situation. Looking at the charts, wow.

My low mood continues, for a number of reasons: the recent political news, the continuing wars, my mother’s consistent decline, the drought, my physical distance from my grown children on the other side of the continent, a friend’s death, a bunch of recent poetry rejections, the fact that I can’t go into a store without hearing Christmas music…granted, some of these reasons are not earth-shattering but the effect is, well, cumulative. Han VanderHart’s recent blog post speaks to the rejection, reminding me of things I know and should keep in mind. The challenge is just getting through and occasionally finding delights at which to marvel, for the delights surely endure. Ross Gay’s Book of Delights is my book group’s next selection, a book I’ve read before but which–at this particular moment–will probably benefit me when I re-read it.

I also feel creatively dried-up, and that’s dismaying. Reading novels (see my last post) offers peasant distraction but seldom gets me writing my own work. I’ll never be a novelist. I’ve been reading poetry, online and in books, as I always do; yet right now, the poems I have been reading, no matter how wonderful, have not inspired me to work on my own.

I’m not even revising! This is not my usual self, not my poetry “norm,” not a space in which I feel happy or well-regulated or at least inspired. Perhaps I have encountered the dreaded writer’s block. Or rather, a drought of some kind, an inner sluggishness of the imaginative flow. Despite the glorious stretch of sunny days and moonlit nights, the incessant blue sky reminiscent of those high-altitude desert environments I seem to love, despite these delights, I’m discontented.

How very human of me.

Listen, there’s a trio of redtail hawks along the woodlot. Their nasal “screeee” and their graceful swoops between the bare branches catch my attention. Sunlight on the field tells me, “You could at least get outside and take a walk.” Okay. Can do.

What are we doing here?

What is a self-directed, multi-disciplinary, eco/environmental artists’ residency? Why are we here? Or, since I can only truly speak for myself, why did I choose to participate in this experience, off the grid in the only true desert in Europe, with people I had never met? Several of my friends have been asking me these questions. I couldn’t really answer in advance because I had no data! I chose to come here partly to get some time alone, partly to visit the land where Lorca lived, and partly because everything would seem new to me.

Not everything seems new to me, as it turns out. Which is also something I expected. For example, my college experiences, both undergrad and graduate, were largely self-directed and multi-disciplinary; what’s changed is that now art disciplines include things like 3-D imaging, computer videos, podcasts, software-as-medium, and the like. Even blogging (here I am, composing creative work for humans to read through a computer screen). For example number two, the artists here are not so different from artists I have met in many circumstances and places over the years: they are curious, intelligent, creative, willing to take risks, and often quite mindful. Another example of things not so new is that, having spent a bit of time in the Albuquerque NM region recently, the lay of the land here and its exceptional flora, fauna, and aridity are not completely alien to my sensibilities.

I’m seeing a number of ideas about xeriscaping, creating fire-breaks, and about stopping erosion and saving water–such as environmental water systems that include basins, ponds, and plants as filters–in process or already in use here at the cortijo. We watered seedlings using water from an in-progress swimming pool near a small natural pond (one of only a very few up in this region) where the natterjack toads were croaking contentedly. The orchard is not producing much, as the trees are still small; but in a few years the farm should be able to get much of its fruit on site.

I’ve learned about the environmental history of this region, too, and how it has changed as the ecological ravages of humans have both worsened it and tried to revive it over centuries. In the Neolithic era, there was more rain. Bison roamed here, and people set up hunting camps in caves. Millenniums later, the Moors settled in the 11th c, built fortresses and small castles up in the hills. The close of the 15th century signaled the rise of noblemen, haciendas, bustling towns and small farms (cortijos)…and major deforestation. During the 19th c, the imperial government instituted a plan to reforest areas of what is now the park, and the economy grew, with more small farmholders; then the economy and population shrank in the 1950s and 60s when the climate became harder to deal with and infrastructure available elsewhere (electricity, paved roads, etc.) hadn’t gotten up to the mountains. People left for the cities. There are many abandoned houses/farm structures here.

Joya-Air explores and promotes sustainability, through mindful conservation and technology that uses fewer resources, along with creativity: art and ecology. The organization is “an advocacy association for ecosystem restoration / rural culture and residency for international contemporary artists and writers.” Simon Beckman is the curator/founder.

People volunteer at and attend or participate in these sorts of residencies and experiences for a host of reasons. For me, it’s a chance to switch perspective, view things from a place far from home, compose poems in a quiet space meant for just that–creative thinking and reflection. To inhabit, however briefly, a place intended to coexist with the flora and fauna, to find out what “off the grid” is like. And to learn new things, all of which contribute to the art of poetry.