From The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry, Poems of the Japanese Zen Masters

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I'm fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

Under the water tower at the edge of town
A huge Airedale ponders a long ripple
In the grass fields beyond.
Miles off, a whole grove silently
Flies up into the darkness.
One light comes on in the sky,
One lamp on the prairie.

—James Wright, Above the River: the Complete Poems

Wright was as much at home in Ohio as he was making his way as a poet in defiance of the life his father had chosen, the small town, his life’s work at Hazel-Atlas Glass. He saw through part of his life, enough to write from the pauses inherent in its structure.

He wrote about the forgotten people, the ugliness in people, about football and “the sons [who] grow suicidally beautiful / at the beginning of October, / and gallop terribly against each other’s bodies."

But he also wrote about nature, the pastoral, human connection to the natural rhythms of life: one light, one horse, the prairie. He paused long enough in the silence created by this kind of seeing to create poetry that the critics said, “expressed and enacted compassion over the world’s suffering.”

Reading Wright, I have more compassion for the man who worked with these images. A man who was honest and accurate in the images he created. And, one senses, genuinely vulnerable to the sadness and the beauty he encountered.

Mary Oppen, in Meaning A Life: an Autobiography, wrote about the “objectivist” poet’s point of view (in relation to conversations with Louis Zukowski and her husband George Oppen) about the critical attempt to “construct meaning, to construct a method of thought from the imagist intensity of vision.” She quotes from an interview with George in 1969:

If no one were going to challenge me, I would say “a test of truth.” If I had to back it up I’d day anyway, “a test of sincerity—that there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

Phenomenologically, then, Brahman is affirmed by the Advaitin as that fullness of being which enlightens and is joy. It has its basis for him [her] in experience (anubhava), not in mere speculation; and the experience, which is enduring for one who attains it, is the goal of human life.

—Advaita Vedãnta: a Philosophical Reconstruction, Eliot Deutsch

Even the sound of the wind chimes outside the door of my teacher’s house, on Thursday nights—my breath relaxes. I notice the wind on my arm, the trees moving. And I sink down into myself with each step, her voice through the open window.

Experience changes clothes. Becomes more light. The consciousness of being alive, reflected in other living things.

The cleansing power of voice, of language. I’m re-reading W.S. Merwin’s The Book of Fables. And out of recollection comes the following lines from “A Tree”:

As I was a child I heard the voices rising. I sat by a wall. It was afternoon already, facing west, near a tree, and I had heard them before. All the roots of the earth reach blindly toward mouths that are awaiting to say them.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo by John Gould

“It’s a lyric reaction to the world,” says George Oppen (1908-1984), “a sense of awe, simply to feel that the thing is there and that it’s quite something to see.” Casual as it sounds, this bracing view goes to the core of modern American poetry. William Carlos Williams had reawakened us to “the New World that rises to our windows” every day:

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens…

—John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

This reflection on British and American poets came out last year—and if you knew about it, and you read this blog, you might be wondering why, with a title like that, I’ve never mentioned it.

Well, I just saved up enough in my poetry budget to buy the frickin’ thing ($35), for one, and direct commentary on poetry is always behind poetry on its own, and criticism/philosophy in general—on my list.

But this is too close to the bone of what we’re dealing with here—so I’m going to throw a few pieces in, from time to time. And you can decide for yourself. It does cover a lot of ground.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

So Saturday, the boys and I are coming into Yosemite on Hwy 120, sleet off and on, about 35 degrees, and a deer flashes across the road within feet of the front bumper. There’s another, down, in the road, barely lifting it’s head, one eye rolling back.

“Holy crap!” Peter (13) yells from the back seat. There are no visible marks on the animal. No car with a bent grill. We idle dangerously on the curve in the road. CRASH!

The biggest coyote I’ve ever seen jumps onto the road from the bank and grabs the deer’s neck in its jaws. Shaking it.

*#*##$%$#*!! Andrew (15).

Nature is savage. Marlin Perkins never had it better—in the middle of the road! Readers of this blog are lucky there were other cars coming and my efforts to back up to get a photo were thwarted—“Dad, you’re going to kill us!”

….

My car is a mess, not withstanding the window made out of packing tape that resulted from a black bear bending my doorframe down to the ground last fall. Apparently, they really will break into your car for a tube of sunscreen. Amidst the rubble and remaining glass shards, an old journal from a Half Dome trip in 2001:

The yawning breadth of the Sierras
and that’s enough. That’s why
we came here my brother and I
in November after the first snow.
People gone the cables
down for the season
no common-sense reason
to be here. Only the fluttering
of a pack in the wind
to mark the ascent,
the lonely pace of a raven
following from camp bringing news
of an alien planet.

After a day of bouldering near Camp 4, the boys and I huddle around a gathered-wood fire and watch the climbers sort gear by headlamp. What sounds like thunder— reverberating through the camp—is really a rock-fall. People from all over the world come here because they are drawn to adventure, to something that exists nowhere else.

As for poets, Gary Snyder found his Yosemite inspiration in trail crew work, as his Zen training might suggest. We’ll end with this meditation with a piece from “Riprap” :

In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change in thoughts
As well as things.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

What is man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Okay, so if you’re following along from last week, after the light interlude of Farley Mowat peeing out his territory among the wolves, I pick up Charles Seife’s book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea and return to more serious matters.

It turns out that Pascal helped invent probability theory, at first to put more money in the pockets of aristocratic gamblers, but then he had an “intense spiritual experience” that turned him theologian. Nothing like an encounter with paradox, with the complexity of existence, to alchemize the pursuit of scientific truth into the acceptance of groundlessness.

Poets play with this potential all the time. The physical object, the image, the signified, the unpinable locus of meaning. The wisdom and neurosis of spiritual devotion. The seemingly spiritual experience of awe in the face of natural phenomena.

A few lines from Robert Duncan:

That Freedom and the Law are identical
And are the nature of Man—Paradise….

It is as if I were moving towards
the wastes of water all living things remember the world to be,
the law of me
going under the wave….

and Anne Carson:

To hear how God was moving through the universe

gave Isaac his question.
I could tell you his answer
But it wouldn’t help.

And Fanny Howe:

Let it snow unless it is in heaven

Let it know
What it is itself that waterstuff

As it covers the silver
Winter dinner bell.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Staking out the land turned out to be rather more difficult than I had anticipated. In order to ensure that my claim would not be overlooked, I felt obliged to make a property mark on stones, clumps of moss, and patches of vegetation at intervals of not more than fifteen feet around the circumference of my claim. This took most of the night and required frequent returns to the tent to consume copious quantities of tea; but before dawn brought the hunters home the task was done, and I returned, somewhat exhausted, to observe the results.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

To undergo an experience with something—be it a thing, a person, a god—means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of “undergoing” an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it.

And a few pages later, in Ecstasy, quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries:

Night was coming on. I saw the sky, some stars, and a few leaves. This first sensation was a moment of delight. I was conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing.

Encountering nature on its own terms is not a mild or particularly calming experience. Inhab
iting that space can be a kind of suffering, a submitting to going inside, with whatever is waiting for us there. It can also be a release, beyond the realm of our selves. But the experience itself is always “other.”

Death as the “pro-spect of the gift of birth,” a birth of the world itself—one Paul Celan calls “perceiving.”

Who
says that everything died for us
when our eyes broke?
Everything awakened, everything began.

Great, a sun came drifting, bright
a soul and a soul confronted it, clear,
masterfully their silence mapped out
an orbit for the sun.

—from Poems of Paul Celan

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

“Snow composed of water is black despite our eyes.” [Anaxagoras] Indeed what credit would snow deserve for being white if its matter were not black, if it did not come from the depths of its hidden being to crystallize into its whiteness? The will to be white is not given to a ready-made color, which has only to be kept as it is. Material imagination, which always has a demiurgic tonality, would create all white matter from dark matter and overcome the entire history of blackness. These expressions may seem gratuitous or false to clear thought. But the reverie of material intimacy does not follow the laws of denotative thought.

-- Gaston Bachelard, from The Secret of Milk: an example of imaginative synthesis, in On Poetics: Imagination and Reverie, 1987

So what has all this got to do with nature and poetry?

Not to get too heady about the whole thing, but the force conveyed, embodied by even the simplest poem -- one that is any good -- owes its existence to this “reverie of material intimacy.” To something inherent in the way our minds comprehend the world, to something woven into our being, but somehow independent of and beyond rational thought.

From Keats’s “Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art”:

Like Nature’s patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;


How’s that, again? What does poetry do that makes us pause the way we do in nature? Words are words, description. And image is just a recounting of sorts, a facsimile, unless it isn’t. Unless it has space within it and around it. Unless it has “mobility” in Bachelard’s way of looking at it. And poetry is as much about the space, about what isn’t being said, as it is about what’s there.

The heart of the experience is what poetry points at but never touches. It’s the knowing smile that spreads across my face when I’m spread out, exhausted, below the upper falls in March. The vapor of winter snow melt just releasing itself into the unexpected warm afternoon. The cascading echo of barely liquid water hitting the slowly shrinking ice cone 2,000 feet below, and the veils of mist sweeping across the chamber of granite.

That moment of inhalation, of fullness, cannot be captured, but the force of it can inhabit the act of reading a poem. We can choose to engage in that experience.

From H.D.’s “The Walls Do Not Fall”:

I sense my own limit,
my shell-jaws snap shut

at invasion of the limitless,
ocean-weight; infinite water

can not crack me, egg in egg-shell;
closed in, complete, immortal

full-circle, I know the pull
of the tide, the lull

as well as the moon;

J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

If you're looking for poems, poems, articles, books, blog posts, and other resources on a particular theme, check out this great tool on the Poetry Foundation's website.

For this post, here's what I did: Search -- by Category / Nature / Seas, Rivers, Estuaries, Streams

It tells me there are 370 Poems -- says who? 184 about Winter. 2,961 about the Cycle of Life.

Well, I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth at 10 p.m. before my blog deadline. And neither should you. Put those charitable dollars at the Poetry Foundation to work. Pick a category, or a first line. And go.

This is the real deal -- no cheesy selection of out-of-print, remainder, never-heard of her/him poems on the Internet. And it’s easy. You don’t have to tell anyone you didn’t pour through a bunch of weighty volumes to find it.

Here are snippets of the first few I clicked on.

A Cave of Angelfish Huddle Against the Moon
by Ron De Maris

Put an ear to the light at fall
of dark and you will hear
nothing. This pale luminescence
that drifts in upon them
makes a blue bole of their caves,
a scare of their scything
tails…

As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life
by Walt Whitman

I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

Burning Island
by Gary Snyder

Who wavers right now in the bamboo:
a half-gone waning moon.
drank down a bowlful of shochu
in praise of Antares
gazing far up the lanes of Sagittarius
richest stream of our sky—
a cup to the center of the galaxy!
and let the eyes stray
right-angling the pitch of the Milky Way:
horse-heads rings
clouds too distant to be
slide free.
on the crest of the wave.

“Birds small enough...”
by Donald Revell

And the physician who brought me
Drowned under sail next day in a calm sea

There are birds small enough to live forever
Where the mind ends and where

My love and I once planted a cypress
Which is God to us

Try it. See what you find. And share it here.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo courtesy John Gould

…The good life, the thing wanted for itself, the aesthetic, will be defined outside of anybody’s politics, or defined wrongly. William Stafford ends a poem titled "Vocation" (he is speaking of the poet's vocation) with the line: "Your job is to find what the world is trying to be." … And the younger poets’ judgment of society is, in the words of Robert Duncan, “I mean, of course, that happiness itself is a forest in which we are bewildered, run wild, or dwell like Robin Hood, outlawed and at home.

-- George Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” Spring 1962, George Oppen Selected Poems
_________

This is a well-know essay by one of my favorite poets. A poetics that bears fruit in the continual discovery of ourselves in the natural world, and in the reading and re-reading of poems.

What the world is trying to be, intimates a force that is, on the surface, much more purposeful than evolution. It leans toward a master plan, yearning for completion. Survival, passing on the capacity for a better life, is a result of chance.

Somewhere in the folds of an ever-ripening natural order, however, is the aesthetic, Klee’s storehouse of power, awe. And how do we access, communicate this? Tangentially, through poetry.

From selected poems in the William Stafford Newsletter:

So now I know why people worship, carry around magic emblems, wake up talking dreams
they teach to their children: the world speaks.
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.

In Duncan, we find that being bewildered and outlawed, that sense of groundlessness that feels somehow vitally truthful and familiar, to be very close to home, in the world we live in. He writes in “The Moon” from Bending the Bow:

….The kindling look

as if over the shimmer of the lake

his flesh radiant

My Lord-and-Lady Moon

upon whom

as if with love

the sun at the source of light

reflects

Lifted

Mount Shasta in snowy reverie

floats
_________

Worship, play, reverie…what the world is trying to be is not “trying” at all, but something far more curious and subconscious. Something like the experience of reading good poetry.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

The ecosystem of a forest balances the entwined interplay of plant, animal, insect species, down to the bacteria in soil, each finding an ecological niche to exploit, their genes co-evolving together...

How we perceive and understand all this makes the crucial difference. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way," wrote the poet William Blake two centuries ago. “Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.”

—Daniel Goleman, from “Ecological Intelligence,” in Psychotherapy Networker, January/February 2010

Our living room is full of poetry books, journals, criticism—and tonight, they have nothing to do with this post. Lost in an article on the intersection of brain theory and environmental science, just when I’m feeling overwhelmed by “paradigm shifts” and the evolutionary scope of the mess we’re in, there’s Blake.

These kinds of “we need a new kind of thinking” articles have a way of pissing me off—stating the obvious or previously conceived in “interesting new ways” and conveniently ignoring all of the political and social structures that have concretized the current paradigm.

At first I’m intrigued by the promise of the title, the provocative nature of the content. Then, inevitably, I am left enlightened in the same dark cell. In many ways, we think because we are conditioned to think—as a consumer, for instance.

Oh, boy--don’t let me go too far down that road. That’s literally what I was saying to myself, when poetry intervened. So how does imagination get us out of the current environmental predicaments? Maybe imagination, here, is the courage to make decisions, do things, according to a sense of duty, a basic humanness, an innate value—rather than to the prevailing values.

While we contemplate that, I’ll leave you with something from Ed Roberson (Just In: Word of Navigational Challenges, 1998):

...Even the size of a whale

I don’t see what I look directly at.
I didn’t see the pronghorn antelope,

Speed they pointed out equal our car’s,
But never having seen distance so large

I couldn’t pin in it point to antler
And saw in parallax instead the world
Entire a still brown arc of leap so like
A first look at the milky way each stone

A star I saw but could not see...

There isn’t a field of study that doesn’t, at some point, turn to poetry for inspiration, for articulation in the face of the ineffable. When things get messy, poets get the nod.

And there isn’t a volume on our shelf that doesn’t, at some point, echo the origins.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Redwood. Photo courtesy John Gould.

This must be the perfect progress where
movement appears
to be a vanishing, a mending
of the visible

by the invisible—just as we
stitch the earth,
it seems to me, each time
we die, going
back under, coming back up….
It is the simplest
stitch, this going where we must,
leafing a not
unpretty pattern by default. But going
out of hunger
for small things—flies, words—going
because one’s body

goes….

Jorie Graham, from "I Watched a Snake," in The Dream of the Unified Field

Jorie Graham may or may not be “our most formidable nature poet,” as I reported in a previous post, but her insights in this book are worth multiple reads.

The simple act of watching a snake offers up, “a disconcerting creature,” a “tiny hunger, one that won’t even press the dandelions down.”

She then uses this hunger, one she is not afraid of anymore, to reconcile us with our own reptilian brains, our own yearnings and passions. The poem is redemptive, and yet light-touch in its compassion.

We are not, were not, ever
wrong. Desire
is the honest work of the body...

This is one of the best examples I know of contemplation in nature revealing, unpretentiously and unselfconsciously, something about the human animal that could only be said in poetry.

And there are many others in this volume. Salmon, “glittering past the importance of beauty.” “Another current, river of rivers, this thrilling third-act love.” Dig in and read.

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.

—Walter Benjamin, from “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations.

Translation is a tricky business. And I often forget that much of the poetry I enjoy reading, poetry that works for me as an entryway into foreign lands of the natural world, has been conjured up from a somewhat problematic relationship in the act setting it in the English language.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

I brush along the side of warm moments,

but I can’t stay there long.

I’m whistled back through space—

I crawl among the stones. Back to the here and now.

Task: to be where I am.

even when I’m in this solemn and absurd

role: I am still the place

where creation works on itself.

--Thomas Tranströmer, from “Guard Duty,” Selected Poems 1954-1956

Where ever we find ourselves, there is a nascent desire to be awake to the nature of self. Aware of our complicity with creation.

The ocean makes it simple for me. In the water, I am a tuning fork. Trees do it for my partner. My sons are at home on granite. Places resonate with internal spaces, and how we treat them reflects our own compassion, fear, delight, anger, hope.

Late on a Thursday night, I’m thankful for Tranströmer’s lines. I’m tired, sitting at the kitchen table in Oakland. Listening to sirens. And still, I feel the hum of being struck. Of being human.

I am “the place."

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

Two girls discover

the secret of life

in a sudden line of

poetry….

…I love them

for finding what

I can’t find,

And for loving me

for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it

so that

a thousand times, till death

finds them, they may

discover it again,….

                                          -- Denise Levertov, “The Secret.” Reprinted in A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, MD; Fari Amini, MD; and Richard Lannon, MD

So begins an ambitious book, already almost a decade old, by clinical psychiatrists pushing the borders of new brain science into areas once fiercely reserved for poets and philosophers.

Finding books like this lying around the house is one of the perks of living with a poet/psychology grad student. And, while I was skeptical of science attempting to find logic in a mystery (love) that seems necessarily beyond logic’s reach, the book yielded some interesting insights into the creative process, into poetry as a form of translation from one brain to another.

Bear with my over simplification. Accept the theory that the human brain is (has evolved into) a “triune” brain—and that’s an interesting and highly substantiated theory. The “reptilian brain” (the one brain reptiles have) is responsible for vital controls (mostly subconscious) like breathing, swallowing, heartbeat, and the startle reflex.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

In the fringe month I hear the new wasps hitting the glass
they have come from the white hem of a dead island sea
a break-through under the sun, an advancing tendril
killing its host in its reach into that
otherness,…

                        —“Species” from Tracer, Richard Greenfield

“Greenfield traces the cracks and fissures of ordinary life,” says Susan Howe in the back copy for this new collection from Omnidawn Publishing.

It takes confidence and skill to navigate that rupture without falling in. Someone with fresh chops, and an ear for the music behind the performance. You can tell, right away, when someone has what it takes.

Photo by Andrew Lyons-Gould

Over the swamps

            a wild

magnolia bud—

            greenish

white

a northern

            flower—

And so

            we live

            looking—

                                                                —William Carlos Williams, from “Perpetuum Mobile: The City,” Selected Poems, New Directions.
_____________

The journal Ecopoetics claims a dedication to “exploring creative-critical edges between making (with an emphasis on writing) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings). 

Some poets I know welcome it; others see it as a glorification of colonial nature, ignoring, as one poet says, “the bulldozer in favor of the beautiful plant.”

The library has also made collections of Muir's photographs, drawings, and journals available online. These collections are free to view; you don’t even need a library card to access them. But beware: You could easily spend hours clicking on images, getting lost in his world.

-- by Julie Littman / photo courtesy of the National Park Service

Photo by Peter Lyons-Gould

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

              --William Wordsworth, quoted in this month’s Poetry by A.F. Mortitz

Poetry comes in a handy, under-sized, monthly-digestable format. It costs $3.50 at the corner smoke/magazine/chocolate shop near my office. I think it’s the cheapest thing in the store—an affordable habit.

The contents are mixed, for my taste—a little too clever (New Yorker comes to mind here) and talky—but there is always something that makes me glad I picked it up: a good translation, a profile of a new or recently deceased poet, or, in this case, a piece of criticism that, despite its flaws (see  “too clever” comment above), puts the ever-challenging dilemma of individual and society front and center.

Photo courtesy Jenny Coyle.

Freedom which does not lead to fixed phases of development, representing exactly what nature once was, or will be, or could be….Freedom which merely demands its rights, the right to develop, as great Nature herself develops.

              —Paul Klee, On Modern Art, Faber Paperbacks.

This freedom Klee describes is what I think is at the heart of good poetry.

Is there such a thing as a “nature poet” or even nature-based poetry? I don’t think so.

Those labels assume that we know what Nature is, and that others like human beings and the urban environment are distinctly separate.

They also assume that the content of poetry defines the deeper issues that poetry wrestles with, and the ineffable ones it intimates.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

We, the mortals, touch the metals,

the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,

knowing they will go on, inert or burning,

and I was discovering, naming all these things:

it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

                  —Pablo Neruda, “XV,” Still Another Day

Nothing is more satisfying, I think, than to read an accomplished poet nearing the end of his life, with no sign of slowing down, intellectually or spiritually.

When I first read Pablo Neruda’s Still Another Day, I was struck by a poet who knew he did not have long to live, and by a body of work with no indication of backing down, or fading into the sentimental or romantic. In two days in 1969, Neruda wrote 433 verses of a sustained and fierce poem that squarely meets nature and the human condition.

Life is fleeting, and nature is both in and beyond us. Neruda gave me a profound insight, and left the mystery still intact. That’s what I want from poetry.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

…fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new age of extinction is / now / says the silence that precedes—you know not what / you / are entering, a time / beyond belief….

   — Jorie Graham, from “Positive Feedback Loop,” Sea Change

Publishers Weekly recently called Jorie Graham, “our most formidable nature poet.”

I got mixed reviews from my poet friends on that pronouncement. And it’s not very surprising.

Poets argue. They fight. At the poets’ café in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheé, they even brawl. Our relationship to the natural world has always been problematic and open to debate.

Thoughts?

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J Gould has been exploring wild places and writing about them since age 6. He was one of the first "beach-watchers" and newsletter editors for NOAA out at Point Reyes National Seashore. He reads sporadically across the spectrum of poetry and poetics, without any discernible pattern, and toils in virtual anonymity as a poet with annual chapbooks and publications in obscure journals -- the first being Toyon at Humboldt State, where he taught and earned an MA in English. Friend J Gould here, and join the Poetry and Nature group to meet others who share your interest.

Hey Trail-heads -- Birding Phil is out today, so I promised him I'd blog about our feathered friends myself. This gives me the great opportunity to make sure you know about one of the coolest-ever books from Sierra Club Books, which just so happens to be about birding.

It's called "Birding Babylon," and it's by a National Guardsman from Connecticut -- Sergeant First Class Jon Trouern-Trend -- who arrived in Iraq for a year's posting in 2004. He'd been a birder since age 12, so when he arrived in Iraq he started looking for birds. He found them -- in surprising number and variety around Anaconda Base in the Sunni Triangle, where he was stationed: old-world warblers near the laundry pond, kestrels at the dump, wood pigeons by the airstrip, owls on the cement bunkers.

When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer the keys to living things…

And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,…

Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.

                              — Novalis, from “When Geometric Diagrams…,” Translated by Robert Bly, News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness
    
Every once in a while, I haul this beleaguered Sierra Club Books volume of poetry out from the shelf—old candle wax and dog-eared pages, notes in my handwriting that don’t sound familiar.

I rediscover an old poet who has something solid to contribute to our modern understanding of the natural world.

Whether they respect Nature’s power and want to be a part of it (Whitman) or fear a source that has the power to kill us (Dickinson), all poets are nature poets. It is our relationship to the natural world, one perceived or inflicted, that defines our work, and our existence.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

There are more fish than there are leaves

on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher

wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.

When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water

remains water—hunger is the only story

he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.

                                     
                             -- Mary Oliver, “The Kingfisher,” Owls and Other Fantasies

OK, so this is an easy one. But Oliver was on my mind after last week’s entry, because she has read at the Tuolumne Poetry Festival.

About a year ago, I drove with a poet friend out to St. Mary’s College, out in the big trees, on windy roads. The hall was packed, and my friend was dubious. She is not usually one for poets with big popular followings. And definitely not sentimental.

I recently came across a blog post that took issue with a Sierra magazine article written by one of the writers of Ken Burns's new series The National Parks.  The article, "Collect 'em All," was about Dayton Duncan's quest to visit all 58 national parks, and the blogger took issue with the idea that the Sierra Club would promote such an activity. So-called park bagging "leave(s) a massive carbon footprint" and is "an elitist pursuit, a game that very few can play," says Keith Goetzmann, an environmental editor at Utne Reader.

Goetzmann raises some interesting points, most notably that we should

get to know the land intimately. Better that we should acquaint ourselves with one, two, or a few parks very well than attempt to superficially survey them all in baseball-card-collector fashion.

And who could disagree? I think we might all agree with Kent Ryden,  who says in Mapping the Invisible Landscape, "A sense of place results gradually and unconsciously from inhabiting a landscape over time, becoming familiar with its physical properties, accruing history within its confines." This sense comes from living on a piece of land, and from hiking the same trails over and over again. It is a worthy pursuit. But one can know the land without being married to it – intimacy in this case does not mean cutting oneself off from other vistas.

Duncan acknowledges in his article that simply passing through a park is no great feat. He quotes John Muir: "Nothing can be done well at a speed of forty miles a day. . . . Far more time should be taken."  And it seems time is really the issue here. For hitting every national park in the span of one, two, or a few years would mean that you would have to travel fast and could only gain the most superficial understanding of these lands. But Duncan made his visits over the course of a half century. Surely there is enough time in five decades to experience both a sense of place in one's home, and to see the majesty of many -- if not all -- of the national's greatest treasures.

But if it is possible in a lifetime to visit all of the national parks, is it not elitist to do so? This question is a good one, and it can be asked to all people heading out into "nature." I don't think there is anything more elitist about the national parks than other lands. Yes, there is a fee to get in, but as we are reminded in Burns's film, the parks are for the people. As Duncan says in his article

these sacred places are not only to be preserved "unimpaired," but are also to be accessible to the people. They are to be shared--shared now, and also shared with the future, just as people from our past shared them with us.

We cannot ignore climate, of course, and it is reasonable to question how much we fly or drive our cars. But in the course of a lifetime, surely there are some pilgrimages worth making. For some it is a holy site in Rome or Mecca, for others the Cathedral in the Desert, and for one man, at least, it is Paka O Amerika Samoa, 7,000 miles from his home in New Hampshire.

Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

 When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

Note: Please welcome J Gould, who will be writing a thought-provoking -- and, for some of us, a poetry-provoking -- blog post each Thursday on Trails.
                                                            -- Tioga Jenny

Who Will You Carry Into the Outdoors?

Photo courtesy J Gould.

The love of books

is for children

who glimpse in them

a life to come, but

I have come

to that life and

feel uneasy

with the love of books.

This is my life,

time islanded

in poems of dwindled time….

                 --  Robert Hass, from “Songs to Survive the Summer,” Praise.

Robert Hass has big, meaty hands that flower around his face like a protea when he’s sitting, contemplating.

I saw him a few years back at the Sierra Summit -- waiting to address a bunch of environmentalists and read some poems. He was calm, magisterial, like you would expect from a former poet laureate.