Tag Archives: writing

Closure

In the course of working on revisions, I’ve been pondering the closing lines of poems. Examining the close of a poem is common revision practice; and over the years, I have gathered much advice concerning when and how to end a poem, some of which is conflicting (of course). Perhaps most famous is Yeats’ idea that the poem should click closed like a box. But poets themselves may disagree. Mentor & Muse (no longer extant) devoted its last issue to just this topic, and clicking on the link will get you to the opening page–on which you will find numerous poetry worthies quoted regarding the way poems ought to end. The essays in the issue are also worth reading, though you may end up feeling more confused than ever about what poems need to do. https://mentorandmuse.net/issue-11-on-poetic-closure/

Photo by Nancy Zjaba on Pexels.com

And just consider the word “closure.” It derives from the word for a fence, wall, or enclosure, also meaning to lock and from the Latin verb for to close. Gestalt psychology employed it to refer to the sense of satisfaction that comes from making things (or feelings) whole even when parts are missing or when a visual image is fragmented. It’s something the human brain seems geared to do: make a whole from bits and pieces. For example, in Impressionist paintings, we see the images’ gestalt despite interrupted and fragmentary brush work. Which strikes me as not unlike many poems I can think of. So when a poem closes with a measure of uncertainty or ambivalence, is the poem flawed? Or can attentive readers make a whole or sense of the piece through the marvels of the brain’s networking activity, connections, resonance?

~

I’ve read that the turn in a poem is a key to the closing, and ending lines will be stronger depending on how near they are to (or distant from, and evocative of) the turn. This seemed helpful revision advice. Yet does every poem require a turn? The idea of the volta is ancient indeed, but it need not be a prescription for all the poems in the world. Poetry from other than Western cultures often proceeds quite beautifully without a turn, and does that mean that such a poem is static? That’s often seen as a negative in art: when nothing moves, or moves the viewer. I’d like to refer my readers to L.A. Johnson on Jericho Brown’s duplex form, “Radical Stasis” in Poetry. What could be more static than repetition? And yet in Brown’s work, the lack of a turn implies circularity, not necessarily ambivalence and certainly not a lack of movement. Johnson calls it a transformation.

I want to experiment with how altering a poem’s closing might lead to changing the poem’s form or structure for a stronger impact. Another option I’ve used is moving the last lines to the start or near the start of the poem. Maybe those lines weren’t really the image or idea that particular poem was aiming for. And then there is docking the tail of a poem. It may be a cruel practice for dogs and horses, but a poem can benefit from a careful removal of the unnecessary closing line(s). Closing lines that summarize a point can wreck my delight in a poem, and alas, I tend that way sometimes…I spent my childhood Sundays in church, listening to my dad declaim from the pulpit. The oral and rhetorical structure of sermons is routed into my brain, and that can be a real problem when I draft. Poetry can be many things, but I don’t care for poetry that sermonizes.

At any rate, I have a LOT of unfinished drafts that might benefit from change-ups. Instead of writing a blog post, I ought to be working on those! But in closing, here’s a poem by Kay Ryan that uses stasis and the tedious routines of housework as operation and image, and that ends with the non-ending of making things “unhappen.”

Linens
by Kay Ryan

There are charms
that forestall harm.
The house bristles
with opportunities
for stasis: refolding
the linens along
their creases, keeping
the spoons and chairs
in their right places.
Nobody needs to
witness one’s exquisite
care with the napkins
for the napkins
to have been the act
that made the fact
unhappen.

~

Learning & yearning

photo from ebay, asking $199.00…

During bouts of outdoor work, when I’m mindlessly weeding, pruning, or doing soil prep, I’ve been mulling over whether–and if so, how–I’ve changed as to writing poetry (see closing paragraph of last week’s post). There are vague recollections of getting really on a roll and drafting new work into late hours of the night when I was 20 or 21 years old. But how I went about it, what approach I took to writing back then? I barely recall. It’d require research into my old journals to figure that out; there, I dare not go! And what happened to all the poems I typed up on my heavy, electric typewriter (an early 1970s Adler, if I recall aright)? They’ve mostly vanished, though a few reside in my attic in several boxes of old literary magazines which chose to publish my efforts.

Though I can’t clearly remember the “how,” I can say my topics and perhaps instincts and inspirations have definitely changed as the decades accrue. I wrote fewer poems during the years I was raising very young children, for obvious reasons, and my main topic at the time was mothering. The poems tended to be short. Mothering did affect my approach to poetry: brevity and swift sketches of imagery were all I had time for. It was necessary to be more concise compared to my earlier narrative lyricism fused with imagism and surrealism. As the children got older, I started reading a bit more widely into less-contemporary poetry and attempted a few formal approaches, such as sonnets, blank verse quatrains, and haiku. I wasn’t terribly good at it and needed some instruction, so I started attending short workshops when I could arrange childcare. The West Chester Poetry programs were helpful to me in the mid-90s and piqued my interest in going back to college for my MFA.

My advisors at Goddard observed that no matter my topic or method, environmental/natural images populated my work. I’d known this was the case but wasn’t aware of how prevalent the garden, fields, animals, and woods were…basically, always present. Even in some pieces I wrote when I was 19 and living in a city, there are sparrows and pigeons, dogwoods blossoming, spring rain. Some things don’t change.

~

Other aspects of the writing life morph, however, as circumstances alter and we get older and more experienced in dealing with said circumstances. Mothering continues even though the children have grown up–I still love and miss my kids, think of them often, and worry now and then, not that they need anyone to worry about them. I’m much smarter about how to grow things in the garden as well as more knowledgeable about the flora, fauna, and weather in my region. I’ve read reams of poems by excellent writers, studied what they do and how they do it, and felt excited by new work. I don’t miss being young, though I miss the stronger physical self I once took for granted. These experiences change the topics and the emotive aspects of what I write, I suppose.

It’s hard to explain what that means, though, so here’s an example. I’ve just finished reading poems by the 16th c. Korean poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a brilliant person who started writing before age 8 and died at 27. A young person all her life, by our standards, and a prodigy. A frequent theme of hers is yearning for a husband or lover who is far away, a trope as common in Asian poetry as in European poetry. The lover has gone to war, or been exiled, or is in another region on work for the king/emperor/church, or is at sea. Nansŏrhŏn frequently wrote in the style of the Chinese poets who penned this sort of yearning poem; in fact, her husband was often distant, trying to work his way into a higher-status position, while she was left at his home with her in-laws. Her desire may not even have been so much sexual longing as just plain loneliness. Her work, even when it is not more romantic in subject, is suffused with an overall sorrowful yearning.

I recall having that feeling when I was in my teens and early twenties. Often, I wasn’t even sure what it was I yearned for or desired specifically. I just felt the sense that something was missing in my life, and I suspect that many of my earliest poems aimed to describe vague heartbreak about a kind of emptiness. (I assure you, my work was terrible–no comparison to Nansŏrhŏn can be made here.) However, when I read her poems, that’s what resonates with me.

Later, when I actually loved a person who lived further from me that either of us liked, I’d listen to Mary Black, who was then with Planxty, as she sang the plaintive and beautiful tune “I Live Not Where I Love.” The ballad seemed accurate. Ah, young love.

The point of all this (and no, I haven’t been concise, sorry), is that while I recognize and appreciate the sentiment that accompanies yearning, my work has not been animated or inspired by that particular kind of longing for awhile now. It’s not that I lack desires, but the tenor of the feeling is different. Romantic love or an unrealized self? Not so much. The longing is for new places, further questions, better solutions, comfortable nearness, safe space, peace. I find much to learn every day, much to love, to admire. In spite of everything.

[[]] ~ [[]] Here’s a poem of mine that appeared 44 years ago in Painted Bride Quarterly #20. (Autumn 1983). I can see some structural things I would revise if I were writing this now. But let it stand as is:

House with a Red Roof

The house with the red roof makes a beacon
in the hills. We watch it constantly; it 
tricks our eyes.

The storm is bold behind it, an unsettled
feud of red and blue; heaven has its slate-
colored roof, its Chinese fire. It mounts 
hills, and before it, the house stands out,
a ruby in a charm.

The roof gems back summer sun, red hot, ablaze
and searing white siding: when we look away,
a yellow house with purple about it blurs our vision.

Autumn, red roof flanked by trees which hold
their color against it, slanting westward,
northward, ever lower.

A shadow bends the hill. The red roof hangs
on winter sky, the only bright for miles.
~
Photo by Nikita Parev on Pexels.com

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.

~

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.

Sowing and reaping

Last week of March, and I suppose it is time for my customary “prepping the garden and sowing greens post.” One thing I like about gardening is that there’s constant change; each year differs somewhat from previous ones, in terms of weather/climate and in terms of my situation/plans. This year, not much seed-starting indoors. Instead, I’ll sow direct and purchase seedlings locally. So what I grow in the vegetable patch will depend on what looks good at the farmer’s market or the nurseries. It will be a surprise.

The garden does need some prep work, however, and greens need to be sown early. Today I planted spinach, lettuces, purple kale, carrots, coriander. And I set up a raised bed, which I finally moved from its previous spot, for herbs. I listened for returning migrant birds, noticed little flying insects, and found grubs, worms, and numerous arthropods (millipedes, garden centipedes, sowbugs). The usual suspects! Mild days in early spring are salubrious to body and soul.

~

The reaping to which I refer in the title of this post is metaphorical, as spring isn’t a big time for bringing in the sheaves, though in a few weeks the winter wheat will be ripe. I feel I have reaped some joy from a recent poetry reading I gave at the library of my former employer, DeSales University, and how often do we feel that way? It’s a gift! Dr. Steve Myers invited me to read with three of the alums of the MFA program DSU now offers, and last night I found myself back in the library where my office used to be (once I finally escaped from the basement where I’d been located for 17 years). The audience was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students and friends who were kind enough to show up on a Wednesday night. It’s wonderful to feel appreciated now and then. 🙂

I haven’t been giving many readings lately or even attending open mics. Evenings and nights are not my best time, but the college is very nearby and I really was pleased to be able to participate…Best Beloved drove me there and back, so everything was manageable. I read some quite old poems and some quite new ones, and a few in-between from my books. And I sold a few books! Always a thrill. I am dwelling in gratitude today.

One of the best things at the event was seeing a former student who was one of my writing tutors and who now works at DeSales. She’s also lately enrolled in the MFA program. What a joy to catch up with a person I met as a bright 18-year-old with a natural talent for writing, who’s pursuing creative writing now–as a mother of two, and nearing 40–not so different from my own circuitous path in poetry. Such are the rewards of teaching…occasionally, I do miss it.

Lots of rain in the forecast for next week. Things will green up, and maybe those seeds will sprout.

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)

Systems

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

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


~

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

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

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

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

~

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

Magnificent

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

Hierothesion (Nemrut Dağ)

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

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

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

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




Writing act

Lately, I’ve been experimenting again with prose poems and with very short poems that are not quite tanka or haiku, but not much longer. Six to ten lines. Short lines. Then, the online journal Six Sentences got me intrigued about experimenting with that idea as a prompt–long sentences, short sentences, a mix of both–but only six sentences. I like playing around with words. I enjoy writing almost as much as I enjoy reading, and it’s fun to enjoy what I am doing these days, when so much else seems unenjoyable, sad, fraught, scary (another mass shooting, of children, today).

The garden offers comforts, too. Now we are in the harvest-and-rip-up phase as August nears its close. Lots of tomatoes, still a few green beans, plenty of butternut squash and sweet peppers and basil. It looks as though I will harvest a lot of hot peppers, too; although I only have one plant, it is robust and full of spicy peppers that will get hotter as they ripen. And the summer flowers, those glorious annuals, are lovely this year. We even have more butterflies than usual!

So many people have written about gardens, I sometimes find myself wondering what value there is in it, what could be political or artistic in a garden poem, what could make such a poem dangerous or antisocial. Why it is deemed necessary to yank NEA grants from poets, for example. What is it about the act of writing that makes us outliers? Can it be because any description or observation takes a perspective, possibly personal, possibly outside the norm, potentially widening another person’s viewpoint? And is that dangerous? (Perhaps.) Because a plant or animal or place name might evoke an event or person or symbolize something that might rock the boat–a sunflower for Ukraine, a bald eagle for the USA? Could that be risky? And might the interpretation be incorrect, but the writer assumed guilty of…whatever? (There is nothing new in any of this.)

Here’s a draft of a prose poem that came of my reflecting on such questions.

~~

The Act of Writing

only occurs when pen in hand meets paper, or the act is mere mechanics, pressing typewriter keys and imprinting page, or is virtual, encoded onto disk, on cloud encrypted, ephemeral, the act one of persona, a mood or dream, some moment observed, imagined, a recollection, a heart-stab, a shattered vase, anchors dragged along ocean floor, a plea, promise, letters never sent, a life of pain, a sworn compassion, or love that cannot otherwise be expressed, an argument for understanding. The act of writing rallies, rages, sets forth accusation or denial, sues for mercy, brays at nothing, pointlessly puts forth what’s known but long ignored, unacknowledged, unaccepted, an act political by proxy, being the kind of behavior those in power seek to suppress, who make the act of writing into reams of tedious fine print outlawing every fervent danger that clings to the very act of writing which is the practice of free and conflicted expression even when the reader sees only a description of deep scarlet bougainvillea arching over a poet’s unmarked grave in a landscape of olives and oleander.

~

As you wish

Photo by Ahmed u061c on Pexels.com

Discouragement, a regular visitor to this writer (and many other writers), has settled into the house with me. Summer is often, for me, a time of writing less and doing outdoor and social things more; this year, though spring was lovely despite torrents of rain, summer commenced with the deaths of two long-time friends, and I haven’t been able to shake my low mood. Now the rejection slips are arriving thick and fast, and I’m questioning the value of my work in particular and of creative writing in general. Like, why bother? What am I doing this for? For whom? What’s my purpose? And under what circumstances? Why?

Brooding certainly offers no help, nor does it change “declined” to “accepted.” Creative persons often find themselves questioning their pursuits, so I have good company. (Having just about completed the last book of Remembrance of Things Past, I can report that Proust’s narrator–largely a stand-in for Proust himself–wanders in the dark through wartime Paris pondering his own decision to try being a novelist and feels discouragement and doubts aplenty.)

Somewhere on a social media platform, I encountered these words by Virginia Woolf (from “A Room of One’s Own”): “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” Good perspective, that, to stop being concerned for how long your writing matters, or to whom, as long as what you write is what you wish to write. And then if you don’t submit your work for publication? Maybe that is something you can live with. Rather, something I can live with; at this point in my life, I have had hundreds of poems and essays published, six chapbooks, and three poetry collections…maybe from now on, I should write (as I always have) for myself. Even if my work is not in fashion, or considered irrelevant, or judged as potentially lasting, it is still what I wish to write, what I find necessary to express.

Though one does write to express things, and expression seeks audience. That’s a perspective for another day, perhaps. Meanwhile, back to weeding the garden and picking cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, zinnias, and sunflowers.

Changes & alterations

We built our house here about three decades ago. At the time, I was young and excited about landscaping the place; although I had been growing our own vegetables for years by then, I was fairly new to ornamental gardening. I made mistakes; I underestimated the speed at which shrubs and trees grow; I thought I could keep a handle on invasive species; the world of various bark beetles and aggressive vines was new to me; and I had no idea how hard it would be to manage almost seven acres without, say, a team of landscapers.

Or how rapidly an environment alters when the climate changes, and when cornfields and early-growth wooded areas become housing developments, parking lots, and streets. I have learned a great deal and much looks different now than thirty years ago, but the swallows still return to my garden between April 26 and May 6. My land contains fewer efts in May than it used to, but the gray frogs, spring peepers, wood frogs, and toads make their usual frenzied chorus at mating time each spring.

~

Recent changes have come from the emerald ash borer, which has decimated, or worse, the green ash native to this valley. The huge trees have come crashing down during the past 10 years, making hard work for us even if it does provide a bit of firewood. Cutting, splitting, stacking hardwood isn’t a task I’m much good at anymore. Thirty years ago, maybe…and there does not seem to be any good that comes of this tree loss, which I’ve been mourning each year as we have less and less of a woodlot treeline above the hedgerow and see more and more of the neighboring subdivision.

But on my damp, early-morning walk today, I perceived some changes that I should have expected and that offer a glimmer of hope for native trees and shrubs–despite the proliferation of Russian olive, multiflora rose, Amur honeysuckle, mugwort, wintercreeper, Asiatic bittersweet, mile-a-minute weed, and more colonizing invaders than I can tick off in one blog post. There, beside the tractor path, along the edges of the hedgerow (for edges are where things happen most quickly), I observed more tree saplings than in past years. With the vase-shaped, leafy arcs of green ash absent, sun reaches further through the thickets. And there I spot horse chestnuts starting to push up, tiny walnut trees, oak trees of differing species, “baby” hickories and maple varieties, along with understory’s smaller shrubs and trees like amelanchier, ironwood, redbud, buckeyes.

Granted, most of them won’t survive to maturity, but some of them will–gradually re-making the woodlot unless other disturbances undo the renewal.

I won’t be here in another 30 years to find out, but I find hope in these saplings. I’m also happy to see that the little woodland and field wildflowers such as false Solomon’s seal, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild violets, and mayapples remain. And though I find myself swearing inwardly at the way the Russian olives grow massive along the property line and the invasive bittersweet sends thick tendrils coiling up into the trees, it’s not the fault of the plants that they got here. Humans brought them to North America, and the plants–like European colonists–became a bit too successful in their new homes, pushing out what was here before their arrival. Am I any different, really, than the dandelion or the honeybee? My ancestors came to these shores not so long after those species were imported with earlier “settlers.”

~

The rain we’ve been getting means I haven’t been out weeding in the vegetable garden. After I take my walks, I come inside to dry off and do household chores, or make soup, or work a little on my poetry. I feel excited by a little writing project I have recently given myself, and I’ve also been playing around with drafting prose poems. Next week, I head to the high desert again for further inspiration and a chance to travel with a good friend, visit museums, and spend some time with my daughter. When I return in mid-May, the gardens, the meadow, and the woods will already be much changed.