You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
It’s life in the inner city, usually not far from downtown and often in an enclave near the river. High density population, at least compared to the suburbs, and filled with children. Usually blue-collar or poor or a mix of students added in, it’s noisy and lively, even colorful in its urban decay. You can walk to the store or corner bar.
We lived on the second floor and later, a street over, on the third.
That’s where these poems originate and resonate still.
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What may appear to be a lazy river meandering amid its wooded isles deserves consideration and room to run wild.
Passions arise and freeze over. The flow dwindles to rock. Rats run along the shoreline of factory brick at the dam. A few miles on, either direction, the dairy herds gather.
All of it reflecting my soul when I lived there.
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Living in a temperate zone where green returns after gray slumber, I always find the leafy proliferation a wonder. It’s a festive temple, of sorts, and a comfort.
Restore your soul in its abundance.
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Rarely do you stand at the summit. It’s a lesson of life.
Even on the trail, the climax awaits, somewhere overhead.
We need something to look up to, from infancy on.
And then there are clouds – or the surrounding range.
Or the streams, threading together, below.
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For your own copy, click here.
An opportunity to stop by the periodicals room in a well-stocked town library had me sensing something had shifted since my last visit. The room itself, at the heart of an 1884 building, is gorgeous, with tabletop reading lamps and much dark woodwork. The local history archives are in a tall-ceilinged room behind glass at one end, while the rest of the chamber is embraced by an open contemporary addition from 2006.
This time, though, as I looked around, I realized how few of the shelves had magazine covers facing me. Mostly it was the plain metal finish. And then what hit me was that of 14 of us sitting quietly there, all but two were working on their own laptops. We could have just as easily been at Starbucks, apart from the no talking and no food requirements.
As I read short stories in Ploughshares, with its heft an assurance in my hands, I reflected on the paradox of being one who treasures a room like this and its contents and then being one who’s appearing more and more only in digital formats read on these flickering screens.
What are we to make of it, ultimately? The library has posters telling patrons they can now access their favorite magazines online at home, thanks to an institutional subscription. So how do we simply wonder and peruse, open to whimsy and discovery? What are we losing and gaining in this exchange?
The lessons remain:
Not a bad model for a poem, either. Or a whole collection to pack along the way.
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For your own copy, click here.
Just a heads-up for anyone who might want to show up in Amesbury, Massachusetts, tonight. I’m the featured reader at this month’s Prime Time Poets gathering. The open mic starts at 6:30 in the Market Square Bakehouse, 5 Market Square, just a few blocks from John Greenleaf Whittier’s home. And, yes, I’ll be paying homage to Whittier in his more topical, acerbic vein.
Once again, Bryan P.T. Riley has put together a lively slate of reader for the coming months. Here we go!
The Olympic Peninsula is an extraordinary extreme in continental United States. It juts out in the far upper left-hand corner, surrounded on three sides by ocean and inlets and featuring a jagged mountain range in its center. Much of it is lush and tangled, and there is relatively little human habitation.
It could be a land of the gods, as its very name suggests. Or as the Native Americans, with their stories still intact, will relate. Forget Zeus and Hera, then – this is a panoply arising from American roots and its westward focus.
Come along into the rainforest and then camp just in from the beach. As I did, collecting these poems.
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For your own copy, click here.
As I said at the time …
I’m a sucker for writing that stays close to the grain of everyday experience. The charge often leveled against such transparency or luminosity accuses such work of being “superficial” or even “banal.” (Recently, I saw a blast of “shallow” fired at one poet, and I’m still angry – maybe I just don’t have a lot of patience anymore with work that baffles me more than it informs or moves emotionally or spiritually. After more than a quarter-century of returning repeatedly to his pieces, I’m still amazed at their depth and continuing revelations.)
You also seem quite aware of what I call the “motor oil” dimension, something I think is required in the sustained voice of any current, authentic American artist: an ability to acknowledge the oil stains and discarded cans in the American landscape – urban or rural. It comes up as cigarette butts, the Port-o-John, the neighborhood Arby’s, or the sounds you detail. Makes the beauty of the turtles all the more authentic. (By the way, what is the sound of a turtle’s voice?)
Turtles – like serpents – go into realms humans cannot. Must be part of their mythological empowerment.
Hmm, thinking of Snyder again, how his Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems came from summer employment, as a forest fire lookout atop icy Sourdough Mountain, while yours was more Siddhartha-like along a muddy river. Also, of the gentle humor I’ve admired so much in Brautigan’s work, also present here.
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For my own resulting poems, click here.
In Quaker practice, elders are what other denominations call bishops, except that in ours and other Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonite, Brethren), they’re found within the congregation, rather than over it. And elders can be young folks, if they’re so gifted.
For a free copy of my poetry chapbook, Elders Hold, click here.
Jnana's Red Barn 