Avocet The Weekly
“Nature, the manifestation of divinity.” - Joseph Campbell
Issue No. 17
| April 10 - 2013
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17
“And Spring arose on the garden fair, Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere; And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley
ELUSIVE “A something so transporting bright.” Emily Dickinson You elude me like the holy presence of an ancient tribe that will not write your name or speak it, like the music in his head that will not flow through Mozart’s pen, like the light that dances in Van Gogh’s brush but on the canvass dims. Sometimes in the morning sun of early May you tremble on the dogwood blooms lifted high above their limbs by sudden rushing wind -and then are gone.
Charles H. Harper chatharper@comcast.net
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Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17 AN OCCASIONAL DUCK
No birds flying today
to the wind
except an occasional duck
so busy with symmetry-breaking
and gulls up in the brush strokes
rolling the flat land into
of mare’s tails where I would
transient pyramids
wish the spring migrants be…
inching them in measured time
raptors streaming north or climbing
into crystal motes of dust.
the heavenward thermals in pious kettles.
The raucous town parading its skin and feathers
For only that moment ungrateful
would greet my descent with
here atop the highest dune in
that joyful commotion of abandon
the Provincelands
but the wind who cannot listen
the valley of lesser hills below
promises wings.
bald-headed domes sprouting sparse hair and sand craters like Carol A. Amato
drained kettle ponds.
carolardito@yahoo.com To the east the crescent stretch of dark wealthy sea rich with humpbacks breaching minkes shallow diving, the patient blows of the last
In this perimeter of solitude
“The thing about being a writer is that you never have to ask, ‘Am I doing something that›s worthwhile?’ Because even if you fail at it, you know that it›s worth doing.”
it would be useless to call out
- Richard Ford
of the right whales.
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Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17
“Spring is when life’s alive in everything.” - Christina Rossetti
Roadside Violets
Just there off the embankment in the thinning woods, a patch of wild violets, Just weeds, really— Blooming boldly in such unlikely soil. In a shaft of sunlight I watch them folding and unfurling like barely tethered kites. And while I quietly wait a new bud is thrusting upward.
I wonder why, in this hidden space. A southwest hisses in answer, “Must there be a reason?” But I have an idea.
There is too much barren earth And so many spring blossoms to spare.
Donna Buck Dcb3255@yahoo.com
“Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.” - Anthony Burgess -4-
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17 (W)rites of Spring
Traveling miles
What better time
North to South Michigan top to bottom reminded why I am a child of April, Spring
to be (re)born?
Paul Bach pebachjr@yahoo.com
Renewal, rebirth
resurrection this the New Year
All starts
fresh green from grey life from death
“The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land’s edges also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses its hint of earlier and other creation...”
What more Spring-like than Easter?
- T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages.”
Dead will rise
sun will shine world in bloom words from the page
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Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17 FIELD TRIP TO THE FARM Uneasy, out of the city, ten first graders scuff along in twos, holding hands down the lane lined with daffodils.
From the near field three spring lambs leap the stone wall.
A surprise gift of bleats, and then: laughter.
Martha Christina martachris@aol.com
“I have as much freedom as I take.� - Bohumil Hrabal
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Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17 Springtime How I love the warm breezes Shirtsleeve weather, jeans Carefree footsteps, jogging Along footpaths, blossom blown. The laughter of children Skipping, jumping, happily Escaping the wintry bonds Of sweater, overcoats, hoods. The benches once abandoned To rain and mounds of snow Now bear the bottoms of the Old, the weary, appreciative. The local gardeners busy Preparing the areas in which To plant the colorful, fragrant Foliage that brightens our lives. Alas, all is not Eden, for some Ragweed, allergies, suffering Attends the joyful and sublime Time ‹tween winter and summer.
Ed Miller eedml257@aol.com
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Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17 “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
From our last Challenge-taker…
The Cosmic Going Out Is the Cosmic Going In Like a sun-soft daisy turned from shadow I see dawn so as not to be hard on my heart. Every earthly hour my brain broadcasts the joyful existence of clouds and stars. Wind plays my hair. The Universe delights in the feet of trees. And I go out again in dreams, going to the moon within. for Jo Balistreri By Karla Linn Merrifield klmerrifield@yahoo.com
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Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17
ONE of our ONE own From
of our own
“The day I see a leaf is a marvel of a day.” - Kenneth Patton Poet Joanne Stokkink has written an outstanding review of ECOPOETICS, THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE, THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE, BY SCOTT KNICKERBOCKER: A BOOK REVIEW After reading her wonderful review, I want to go out and read this book to become a better Nature-writing poet. Thank you, Joanne.
SUPPORT NATURE’S POETS!
W
e hope we provoked you to thought; that you leave having experienced a complete emotional response to the poetry. I want to thank our poets for sharing their work with us this week. And, “Thank you for reading, dear reader!” Again, if you haven’t yet, send in one nature Spring-themed poem (please, only one) please do! Please remember it is one poem, per poet, per season for The Weekly Avocet’s submissions. Be well, see you next Wednesday Charles Portolano Editor of the Avocet, a Journal of Nature Poetry
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ECOPOETICS, THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE, THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE BY SCOTT KNICKERBOCKER: A BOOK REVIEW
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n the introduction to his book Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature and the Nature of Language, published by the University of Massachusetts Press October 2, 2012, Scott Knickerbocker, a professor of English and Environmental Studies at the College of Idaho, says he wants poetry to push our thinking to what he calls a more “ecologically ethical state.” A poet, he says, uses language that, if successful, “inspires, startles, or coaxes” us into knowing the world with “revivified senses.” He believes that “poetry and our close reading of it demand that we focus our thinking, pay attention with all of our senses,” and “grow
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Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17 One of our own, cont. in imagination.” He believes that healing our relationship to the earth requires us to do exactly the same thing. And with his many excellent examples he shows us how.
and “The Auroras of Autumn.”
Differing in her ecopoetics from Stevens, the author shows Elizabeth Bishop treating nature as independent and able to defy our observations of it. Accordingly, Bishop sees nature, even the In this very unusual “How To” book the author discusses the relationship between word and world strangeness she finds in nature, as something that can teach us about us. Strangeness in the natural in the work of four modern American poets— world is normal for her. In his discussion of Wallace Stevens as “Eco-aesthete,” Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” Knickerbocker states Bishop’s “Strange Reality”, Richard Wilbur’s that this poem answers “affirmatively the central “Natural Artifice,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Physical Words.” It isn’t obvious at once how reading these ethical question behind Ecopoetics: Can language simultaneously give presence to nature and show poets (or poets like them—or even ourselves as poets writing like them) helps heal our relationship nature as surpassing language?” “The Fish” is a to the earth, but Knickerbocker’s many illustrations great poem to read for these kinds of surprises. And there are more great surprises mentioned in of poems and lines of poems making us aware of other poems by Bishop including her poems “The the earth in a different way, does do that, showing Armadillo,” “Roosters,” and “Sandpiper.” us how language, if read deeply, can encourage or enable us to see better. As he says, “Heightened The third modern American poet discussed in perception promotes deep thinking.” And this book, and the only one of the four poets still deep thinking can’t hurt our thoughts about our around today, is Richard Wilber. According to relationship to the earth, to poetry, to our lives. Knickerbocker, Wilbur values the ‘things of this Knickerbocker has chosen these four poets because world’ not as ends in themselves but as ways of admitting spiritual reality; and for Wilbur, the of their treatment of language in ways that make imagination, in its best form neither makes trivial what he calls “sensuous poesis,” meaning to the “world of fact,” nor ends with it, but “seeks treat language as wild and active, using formal the invisible through the visible.” For example, devices,—performing nature, not just passively in Wilbur’s poem “Mayflies,” the speaker realizes mirroring nature. He sees in the works of these that his role is to “honor the beauty of creation poets a poetry that performs the wildness of the through poetry, even though both may be as natural world using sound effects, metaphors, ephemeral as mayflies” and in Wilbur’s ecopoetics, similes, meter, rhyme, and so on. He wants to see language perform the world on the page rather than “language relies on nature as its matrix but is not to be confused with it.” In this distinction between just mimic it. word and world, Knickerbocker believes that there For example, Wallace Stevens’ poetics displays is the greatest capacity for wonder and gratitude an inseparability between language—call it which are the “first requisites of any enduring imagination—and nature. And Stevens plays with environmental ethic.” There’s more discussion this inseparability between imagination and nature of various others of Wilbur’s poems including by using poetic devices such as sound as a scheme “Mind,” “Praise in Summer,” and “Advice to a in many of his poems. About Steven’s ‘Anecdote Prophet.” of the Jar” Knickerbocker says that Stevens’ choice of the ballad form “emphasizes his playful attitude Sylvia Plath’s poems as an example in this book must come as a shock to anyone familiar with her toward what could otherwise become a ponderous work and her life. Yet according to Knickerbocker, philosophical lesson on the nature of reality and the imagination.” Several others of Stevens’ often Plath’s poems sharpen the natural world and are “deeply engaged with that world” so that language anthologized poems are discussed here as well, is never simply a “transparency for nature.” As we including “The Snow Man,” “Autumn Refrain,” -10-
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 17 know, many critics accuse Plath of solipsism, that is, of creating Guidelines for the world in her own image. However, Knickerbocker, reading Plath’s journal entries and earlier poems, was led to classify her as an ecological poet and practicing “sensuous poesis” in spite of herself “expressing the wildness and vitality she craved in nature through • Please send only one poem, per poet, per season. Let’s do language itself.” Plath wanted spring-themed poetry now. her poems to be very physical • Please no more than 38 lines per poem. in the sense that “worlds are bodied forth” in her words; • Please use single spaced lines. and Knickerbocker uses many • Please use the Times New Roman - 12pt. font. examples of Plath’s poems to show what he calls her “desire • Please send your submission to angeldec24@hotmail.com for this transcendence in and • Please remember, previously published poems are wanted. through nature.” Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” is a • Please always put your name and e-mail address under your perfect example of this, with poem. Thank you. its subtle rhyme scheme, subtle love, and subtle elevation of language and nature is “too entangled for mere the miracle of nature. In the discussion of Plath’s “Poems, Potatoes,” we can see, representation,” asking that we look more carefully at the many forms this relationship takes. And too, that her use of figure definitely “complicates so the poets in this book, while expressing great any simple notion of the relationship between interest in the natural world, oppose severe realism language and nature.” And this is true in many and instead highlight the metaphorical nature of of Plath’s poems. Among others of her poems ecocentrism, thereby heightening the perception of discussed in this book are “Mushrooms,” “I Am and encouraging a deeper thinking about the natural Vertical,” “Stillborn,” and “Elm.” world. According to Knickerbocker, the poems of these If you want to use more metaphor and less mimesis four writers display the “double nature of poetic in your nature poetry, this may be a good book form,” which keeps language from imposing for you. Though you would not at once associate itself on the natural world while at the same time the four writers discussed in this book with nature revealing “entanglements” with that world. For poetry—you would associate them with form and/ all of these poets, the most significant contact or metaphor and other poetic devices. Because with nature occurs through poetic devices, Knickerbocker does such a fascinating job of not by eliminating those devices. Again, these explication with these writers’ works, you are poets use what Knickerbocker calls “sensuous bound to enjoy his pointing out how they express poesis” to “perform the complexity, mystery, and “sensuous poesis,” thus making nature come alive in beauty of nature rather than merely represent a very different way from what we usually expect to it.” Nevertheless, he notes (and we notice) that find in most nature poetry. the general trend in mainstream American poetry seems to be away from “poetic artifice.” This Joanne Stokkink seems unfortunate and Knickerbocker argues finally and firmly that the relationship between jstokkink@comcast.net
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