Three small poodles pop:
brisk white roil of kernel-corn
in picture window
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
After reading a good deal of nature poetry lately, I've been wondering how I can write about nature here in the suburbs while still maintaining some integrity. I think you've achieved a burst of that here.
ReplyDeleteWe suburbanites are cowed, aren't we, by the fear that our nature is necessarily less natural and thus less poetic. This fear is most acute in me after I read The Morning Porch!
ReplyDeleteAt best, however, our glimpses are surrounded by framing that may lead to interesting leaps. At worst, our view admittedly is of other species bent into human interstices like unrecognizable paperclips. But even the worst is the extant (although sad/doomed) world.
In a dystopic short-story lost to me, the narrator worries that poetry cannot possibly survive in his world's lifeless concrete ghettoes. His hope is then revived, when a small child utters a metaphor based upon a living creature. "The bus is a cockroach" can't be our only poetry, but surely it is valid.
Thoreau walked home for lunch. I think that we also can write with integrity about the life around us - littered with human activity as it may be.
So who all are you reading?
Three weeks ago, when I should have checked back to see if you had responded to my comment, I think I was reading Hopkins and Charles Wright. I don't remember who else, but how could I forget? I'd hate to think I was lying.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading a lot of Wright for the past few months. Now there's a guy who manages to use the fact that his nature poems are written about the suburbs. I've always tried to airbrush the manicured lawns and ornamental cherries out when I've tried writing about nature around here, but not Wright:
Uneasy, suburbanized,
I drift from the lawn chair to the back porch to the dwarf orchard
Testing the grass and border garden.
A stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise,
Bell jars the afternoon.
Leaves, like ex votos, hand hard and shine
Under the endlessness of heaven.
Such skeletal altars, such vacant sanctuary.
(From "The Appalachian Book of the Dead" in the book Black Zodiac.)
I think I could figure out his metaphysics if I read enough of his nature poems (and most of his poetry is suburban nature poetry, it seems), but I'll never read enough of it for that. I just keep reading poems in the same two volumes over and over.
And, like you I suppose, I love the Morning Porch. I experience a similar feeling, though, as you do when I'm reading it. Mine goes like this: What makes me think I can write about nature? If it weren't for the possibility that I may wish to try writing a poem about a tree or bird one day, I couldn't care less about its name.