Seeking to capture the local land and culture in my own writing

As for poetry? “Wonder if my work adds up to summa, if it has a point” …

The night before (so where were we?): “the aging aesthete dismissing Pfingston’s piece, ‘This isn’t a poem,’ as though he knew, this uptight, pretentious high-school teacher whose 30 friends kept clinging to him, whispering comments about ‘classical forms’ and the ‘need for discipline’ and keeping a guard against ‘imitators’ and how Joan Stone can’t STAND Duane Niatum, ‘He borrows everything.’”

“That’s what happens when you get a PhD,” I almost said.

How many tall tumblers did that guy down — a dozen? How can any drunk evaluate a poem, appreciated its silence?

I’m tired of veneer, tired of poetry tasters — everything but the purely original, primitive, religious incantation …

[I had not yet delved into Jackson Cope’s “incantatory language” perspective on early Friends …]

When a batch of submissions go out, the first back are quick rejection slips — usually overstocked — then the mixed bag of acceptances and misses — and finally the slow anguish of almost-takens and those returned unread …

It’s almost a pattern

~*~

Wollah Wollah = whistling water = Walla Walla

~*~

When Coyote desired Beaver’s beautiful daughter, Rain sent his own beautiful daughter to plead with Coyote, who instead tried to rape her and make her his other wife. And thus, enraged, Rain punished the east — Coyote’s land — by raising the Cascades mountains so that Coyote and Wind could not steal all the clouds.

I’m left wondering about Beaver and his child.

~*~

Meanwhile, these local poets and artists who don’t study, don’t know what’s been done before, wouldn’t recognize ancient excellence, don’t know what’s being done now, don’t experience the nature out there or the scary, untapped energy fields within themselves … who don’t try to make each piece unique but merely a repetition of their static non-discovery closed-in closed-off non-lives …

[How’s that for non-judgmental?]

~*~

Hops, which are used to favor and stabilize beer in its brewing, were another famed agricultural product from Yakima. The vines would climb the ropes to the top, with the whole vines being cut down at harvest. Note Mount Adams in the background. (Photo by William Borg via Wikimedia Commons.)

~*~

 I used to write poems about the weather. But what can you say about a place where the weather’s always good? Only that the wind’s blowing?

[Think of a comment I recently heard, about a poetry editor who scorned Weather Report pieces. Gave them an instantaneous rejection.]

~*~

Watching clouds 50 miles away.

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.