Tag Archives: poems

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)

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.

Walking

Numerous so-called health and fitness articles continually pop up on my screen, and many of them not only tout the benefits of walking but claim to know how many minutes or miles of walking (or rate of speed and such) are necessary to ward off dementia, keep your heart healthy, your bones in shape, your muscles well-conditioned, your circulatory system moving, your lungs going, or to extend your life. Oh, and relieve stress. And while you are at it you can get a device for your wrist or an app on your cellphone to monitor your pace, steps, heartbeat, etc.

But not everyone can walk. Too many of us forget that, take it for granted–especially “content” developers online angling for clicks. And, while I do like walking, I don’t particularly relish being told how I should go about it. I agree that it would probably be good for me to walk at a brisk pace for an hour every day, and some days I am inclined to do just that. There are other days I want to hike up a hill, or take a pokey amble around my meadow, or wander through a nearby park, or climb Nemrut Dağ just as dawn breaks. Or curl up on the sofa and read a book. I appreciate routine, but not invariable routine.

Autumn happens to be a time of year I like a slow stroll or hike; save the brisk walks for cooler, lousier weather. Now that most of the leaves have fallen, I can spy bird nests and paper-wasp nests (there’s one of those in our tamarack tree; last year, there was one in the Japanese maple). Milkweed puffs are swirling in somewhat chilly air, red berries decorate shrubs and trees. Red-tailed hawks and black buzzards wheel overhead. No reason to churn through the scenery at a rapid pace.

A. R. Ammons wrote an essay titled “A Poem Is a Walk,” in which he describes the physical act of taking a stroll “with” a poem, rhythm, breathing, the stride; he says both a walk and a poem are useless–though you might want to read the essay before agreeing or disagreeing on the uselessness, since his essay is almost a phenomenological argument (and we have to decide what is meant by “useless”). [Note: The essay is paywalled behind University of Arizona’s site, and–oddly–the one legible free version I found is here, from the Università degli Studi di Milano! Well worth reading, though, and in English.]

I think better when I walk slowly and steadily, with pauses to look around. That’s when images come to mind, metaphors, descriptions, sensations, ideas. Sometimes, it is a kind of haiku-walking, generally undirected. I don’t plan to reflect on anything or come up with prompts for poems. And I don’t do it to improve my life expectancy.

I just like to walk. And maybe, a walk is a poem.

Blue

At one of our local used book stores,* I found a copy of William Gass’ 1976 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Gass writes in a style one might term prolix; but if you are like me and sometimes appreciate lists, wordplay, allusions, lengthy sentences, and fine distinctions in your sentences–as well as humor–while exploring the limits and the stretches of words and language, this book-length essay on the word/concept/color/iconography/sexual innuendo/moody attitude and conflicting meanings of the word blue might appeal. I’ve been feeling a bit on the blue side lately, hence my attraction to the book (though I do like Gass as a writer, as long as I don’t have to read too much of him at one time). And guess? It cheered me! [I will caution the reader who avoids the use of “bad language” that Gass employs such words in this essay, for purely intellectual reasons…]

Granted, my feeling blue has a different tone from other uses of the word: blue postcards, sexual meanings of blue–I’m reminded of the movie “I Am Curious (Blue)” which was considered racy and given an X rating when I was a kid, though the blue in that title referred to the Swedish flag, apparently. My blue is the blue of songs like “Baby’s in Black” or Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album. Or just that classic music form, the blues.

And I’ll get over feeling this way. That’s what moods are: feelings that come and go, transitory. It always seems as though low moods stay around longer than neutral or cheerful ones, but many scientific studies show that it is our perception and memory of the negatives that make us think we are sadder for longer. Even Wikipedia has an entry on negativity bias, with some sources if you want to check things out yourself. As I age, I realize that bad moods and sad events and past mistakes don’t need to stick around as much as I used to think. A bit of mediation, some practice and readings in Zen and in psychology, a lengthening perspective on life’s vicissitudes, some counseling and even some medicine; whatever it is that’s brought me here, I recognize that before long the depressive hours will lift. Also I know some methods of thinking that assist me to move to more neutral ground.

I will note there are many kinds and hues of blue, enough for Gass to write 112 pages on it and for the word to appear in 85 files of my own poetry during the past 12 years–I did a quick word search just to find out. That is in the files alone, and each file contains many poems. so I can only imagine how much I have over-used the word in my writing life! Certainly, not all of those blues are sad. Many are beautiful, sunny, the blues of blueberries and balloon flowers, the New Mexico sky, mountains and oceans; teal-blues and turquoise, the bright royal blue I like to wear, the pale color of robin’s eggs.

Blue. It has always been my favorite color.

~~

*The bookstore is Apport, in Emmaus, PA. Ben has an active Instagram feed and really cool catalogues of odd books, art, and ephemera.

*The first “blue” above is an encaustic painting by Deborah Barlow; the second is at Bandolier National Monument; the third is of the Blue Ridge Mountains; the last was taken at an inlet bay, maybe in Delaware–I’ve forgotten.

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.






Correspondences

Dear Beejay,

Remember how we used to correspond by email every week? Sometimes more often. You, the best correspondent ever, though we never wrote paper letters–in those pre-internet years, we’d lost touch, moved too often; no postal mail from you until, once we were connected again, you sent me a birthday card. And tomorrow is your birthday. So here’s your birthday email. You see? I didn’t forget.

It remains dry here. That spate of rainy days in early April? Over with and barely a half an inch since then. I’m watering my veg garden daily. Today I sowed another row of spinach. The first and third sowings are doing well, but the second sowing didn’t germinate–can’t figure out why not. The lettuces and other greens are looking good, and the strawberry plants are in bloom. I even took a chance and planted some zucchini seeds. The task of thinning lettuce and carrots is indeed tedious, but it is a lovely day and the air is mild; and frankly, thinning carrots is less tedious than sending poems out to literary journals, I know you’d agree.

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry. It comforts me somehow, even when the poems are sad or angry poems (that seems to reflect the times, which poetry can do). Your own writing, who has it? Does it exist on some hard drive somewhere? You always were excellent at organizing things. A talent I envy and do not possess.

Anyway, I did a bit of weeding to prep for the tomatoes and peppers when the seedlings are ready to transplant, but I got a late start on them and may not even move them to the garden until after my trip to New Mexico. Right now we’re getting pollen blow here. I expect your pollen blow was over two or three weeks ago, and that the azaleas are past their showy bloom time down there. I know how you love azalea season. And the beach–I guess you won’t get there this year.

I do find myself, at odd moments, wondering about your cats. When our lives were routine and there was nothing of interest to write about, we could always turn to cat anecdotes. Today, my Nessie joined me in the garden while I was working on the carrot patch. The catnip plant in the herb bed has leafed out quite early, and Nessie stretched his whole lean body over it and lolled himself into a snooze-fest, exposing his white belly. You would have laughed. You always called tuxedo cats “Holsteins.” I’m insulted on Nessie’s behalf.

When a person we love dies, I guess there’s an impulse–almost an instinct–to memorialize them, at least among those of us in “Western societies.” Or maybe it is a human impulse, I can’t say. I have written too many poems of elegy, and there will be more; but sometimes, it takes awhile before I feel I have the right perspective or frame of mind to write about them, or about my feelings of loss. Today, so much reminded me of you, Beejay, that I had to write something. If not a poem, then an epistle–the way I used to write to you, of ordinary things, the garden, cats, seasons, poetry.

Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Reading my contemporaries

The poetry collections I’ve been reading during much of the past year have largely been works of contemporary writers–books that were published during the past two decades, some during the past two years. My focus on such current work was not intentional. After all, there is still so much poetry from the past three or four thousand years that I haven’t yet explored! Grad school, however, was decades ago; that’s when I last studied both contemporary and classic/canonical/influential poems with a specific eye to learning from them. I continue to learn from the poems I read, though. I just don’t take as many notes or write any papers about them these days.

Three collections I read recently have got me thinking about the grittier sonic elements in poetry; the use of scientific, foreign, antiquated, and invented words; wordplay in general as a poetry component; and how sound can push both experiment and meaning in a poem. I’ve been mulling about the task of writing anything that feels “new,” to me or to my readers, and about the challenges more sonic wordplay would mean for me as a writer. I’m saying here I think it would be difficult to do, because it differs from my long-accustomed voice and style. I’m also saying I like a challenge in creative work, and that my style(s) go though changes always, so why not? In creative art of any kind, the passing of years makes a difference in many things. Content (because: experience). Situation (because: life happens). Methods (because: technology and materials). And influence–what I was reading in high school vs. grad school vs. today–though some favorites will always hold a place in my creative mind.

My poems tend to be plain-spoken, although I’ve never been shy about going beyond the standard vernacular to employ a geological term, a botanical name, or a somewhat archaic noun or adjective when it suits the feel and sound of the poem. Most of my poems don’t fall under the description of experimental or edgy. I’m not making waves with language, but some poets are. And my recent reading has me wanting to experiment more. It will mean failing a lot, because I’m working against my habitual methods of composition. I won’t be as good at it as these poets (below) are. What I’m hoping, though, is that the practice of trying more sonic wordplay in my work implants a tracery of that practice onto my poetic voice.

~

So which contemporaries do I mean? More than the three I’ll briefly mention here, for sure (and it is not as if the only poets playing with words and sound are my contemporaries–far from it). However, here’s a start with some examples that I particularly love.

I mentioned Silano’s poetry in a recent post when I appreciated her scientific ideas that meld with an “everyday” life. Reckless Lovely contains many long-lined couplet verses that name objects such as a 64-ounce Big Gulp, Wells-Fargo, Italian Renaissance paintings, or the red spot on Jupiter as the poet observes and speculates on the cosmos that surrounds her. And she invents or alters words that suit her for rhythm, alliteration, sound: “the sfumato is sfumato-ing, the lute-r is lute-ing;” “when most of all that creep-eth/breath-eth buzz-eth/galump-eth sex-eth spar-eth/went AWOL/paving the avenue of asp/the boulevard of bee…” or the totally wild mashup Silano composes in “Summons and Petition for Name Change”:

Dim sum-my dilberry. Down there Daquiri.
Ear of Eden. Eminently Earthy. Empress Gensho.
Fandango-ing funnel. Fox foot. Flamingo.
Geranium in the Gate of the Gourd. Gentian's grin.

~

I find much to admire in Martha Silano’s work even though I often have to look up words (physics and geology nomenclature, usually).

Lesley Wheeler’s most recent book demonstrates her ability with form and sound in a different way, though in “Gran Torino Gigan” the alliteration is as snazzy as Silano’s abecedarian poem above: “Buzzes fade up front,/where beltless adults murmur and smoke//after unfurling musty sleeping bags…in rhizomatic zigzags, with a sharp zipper.” Contemporary technology gets into the poems and, with it, the sounds of our infrastructure, as in “I believe in utility poles, transformers,/lightning arrestors. Subtransmission lines/and static lines. The dead southern yellow pine…” and the theme of fungal connectivity means that we learn some useful and often beautiful mycology terms. Yet Wheeler often relies on shorter words when they suit the tone of the narrative. In a poem dealing with the aftermath of her mother’s death, she writes “No one’s grimmer inside/than me. My bully of a heart wears cheap/scuffed pumps and cusses like a mobster.” The repetition of the word “snow” in “Minus Time” establishes the poem’s pace. So many poems in the collection offer experiments in form!

Percival Everett has gained an even stronger following thanks to his novel James, but he’s been writing poetry for years (Trout’s Lie is from 2015). This collection is deceptively simple in language and vernacular: there are surprises. Several poems make allusions to “great poetry of the past” by name or phrase; short lines build and build, twisting the lyric where we don’t think it would go. There are several examples I’d like to give, but this post is getting pretty long. I think I will close with an excerpt from Everett’s “Maybe Even Clouds,” the first section, which begins “Count the marines..”

They look like nice
Boys and bad boys,
From Vermont-and-Montana-
Following-orders-dumbshit-
Non-blinking-soon-
to-kill-soon-to-die boys,
Who might or might
Not, should or should
Not, but never would
Not and never can
                                not.
Not sure doesn't matter.
Doubt is a penniless
Customer, conscience
Waits for the weather
To change.


National Poetry Month may be almost over, but I’ll keep reading poems. And posting about them. And writing them. I encourage you to do the same, because there is no time in the history of the world when human beings haven’t benefited from poems.

Paper files

Frankly, I have never been much of a fan of organization. I don’t mind planning, in brief and purposeful bursts, but getting things in shape after the fact–once the mess exists–well. I know people who truly enjoy pitching in and re-organizing, but I am not one of them. Besides, I’m also facing similar tasks in my household, rooting through the kids’ rooms (they left years ago) and our attic and basement to cull, straighten up, and organize. The tasks are mutually distracting. And often tedious. I’m working on my attitude, though, trying to find some method of making these chores, er, “creative” in some way. (File under “Lying to Self”).

Call me old-fashioned, I’ll readily admit to it; but lately I have decided that the most efficient way for me to keep track of my own writing is by using a physical filing system. I have experimented with various spreadsheets (I have no patience with Excel, however and alas) and computer folders. I do use the latter for a year-by-year archive of my work, but I cannot easily extract what I am looking for that way. Now that I’ve retired from my 40-hour work week, I have wanted to manage my creative work better and keep track of what needs revision, what seems finished, what has been submitted, what’s been published. That strikes me as a necessary part of tending to myself as a writer. The past year has been a time of working through options, with accompanying irritation and tedium.

Photo by Anete Lusina on Pexels.com

After years of endeavoring to use electronic files, it came to me that there’s nothing wrong with old-fashioned paper systems, organized alphabetically by title, with the computer-file names and draft number at the bottom of each poem. This is how I think about the poems when I want to work on them or submit them, so it feels natural to me. Why operate against one’s own operating system?

I suspect one reason (oh, there are many, but let’s start with one) I am so angry about Elon Musk’s “DOGE” initiatives is that efficiency is never all it is cracked up to be and is also not the be-all and end-all of any society’s best organization. Of course those who push AI believe that algorithmic calculations can make the world run smoothly, but said people are egregiously uninformed about human nature and the myriad forms of individual thought processes. We are non-standard. Averages account for almost nothing, really. We do not think the same thinks. (And yes, I meant thinks not things, autocorrect). Diversity is what keeps evolution going. There is no change without it; and without change, we die.

So: I’m inefficient, to a degree, when it comes to keeping my creative work in order. However, the paper filing system, with a notebook and index cards and files on my hard drive, assisted by my still-useful memory (a human brain!!), have so far been working pretty well. It has taken me several weeks to put my stuff together, but now it’s far easier to fetch what I want to work on, send out, or collate, which I need to do to prepare for upcoming reading [I have two online readings coming up–one on Feb. 18 and one on May 2]. I’m also grateful that the task kept me busy while I was anxious and worried and grieving over recent not-so-terrific experiences in my (physical, real) life. Real life, which is not averaged. Seldom predictable. Inefficient. And something to celebrate for all its strangeness.