Posts Tagged Nature poem

In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

Here in the North Country, the juncoes have moved north and red-winged blackbirds are singing again in the cattails. A warmer than normal spring has become suddenly cool. Frost warnings have apple farmers scrambling and city folk turning their furnaces back on again. But since the sun is out and the days are growing longer, it is hard to complain.

James Wright spent a great deal of time in the North Country. He knew the want of hard-winters as well as the bountiful beauty of easy springs: physically, spiritually, and emotionally. (Wright, like so many poets – all poets – suffered from depression.) Many of his best poems are about the beauty of nature… at least, many that I like best.

Wright was an innovator in every possible way. One of the ways he pushed at the edges of things was in the way he titled his poems. The official title of today’s poems is “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me.” Even if the poem were not so good, I would love it for the title alone

“Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry…” comes from Wright’s 1963 volume of poetry entitled, The Branch Will Not Break. It seems like the perfect poem for a spring day.

Enjoy!

Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry,
I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture
and Invite the Insects to Join Me

Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.
I climb a slight rise of grass.
I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Carrying small white petals,
Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them.
I close my eyes for a moment and listen.
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins
In the maple trees.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

 I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Carrying small white petals,
Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them.

Wright has written some of the most luminous lines I know. This is one of those lines. So is the final line of the poem. These luminous lines… unlike the lines in the book of bad poetry that occasioned this poem… are like “small white petals” casting “shadows so frail” that we “can see through them.”  They are what poetry is supposed to be.

____

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
~Wallace Stevens

I have been reminded of Stevens’ famous quote a number of times in the last few months as I have been working on my own poetry and as I have been reading the poetry of others.

In November at MontanaWriter, we have been focusing on poems about stars. Keats’ poem “Bright Star” seems like the perfect way to end the month. But for that, a Keat’s poem would be the perfect way to end any month.

To our modern ear, some of the flourishes of the Romantic style can seem overwrought. Our ears and hearts have been hardened from hearing too much bad poetry that has tried to copy the Romantic style. It is easy to forget what great poetry can sound like… feel like.

Enjoy!

Bright Star
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
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–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

The feelings encompassed in these lines are universal, having been felt by countless lovers for countless generations. In Keats, we find the perfect expression of love. So perfect that it cannot be paraphrased or ignored… only read and felt and enjoyed.

____

Heron (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Looking through old papers, I came across some poems that I first wrote 25 or 30 years ago… poems I thought I had long ago tossed away. Poems I had intended to return to the Great Silence from whence they had so imperfectly come.

Reading them now, I find myself surprised to discover that they do not embarrass me quite as much as I thought they would. They are also not as different from what I am writing today as I had assumed they must be.

To read a poem you wrote three decades ago is an odd experience to say the least… and an illuminating one. I know the poets I was reading when I wrote the poems and can see the clear influences of theme and direction. Any yet… I am not ashamed of most of them.

When I started MontanaWriter less than two years ago, I was reluctant to show anything I wrote to anyone at all. And now I am posting my own juvenilia. This is either a sign of healthy personality growth or of increased delusion. I will let the reader decide.

In the meantime, three decades after watching herons and egrets fish along the Gulf coast here is, “The Lonely God.”

Enjoy!

Reddo 

The poem that once 
appeared in this space
is being re-drafted
and re-typed.

It will be re-posted
someday soon
at MontanaWriter.com.

Stay tuned!

____

Humble larches reflected in a lake

The idea for this poem was first suggested to me almost 30 years ago when I worked trail crew for the United States Forest Service in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness. The wilderness ranger and I were standing together after work one evening near a solitary larch that overlooked a mirror-still lake just below the Continental Divide.

“I like the Latin name for a larch better,” he said. “It’s a better fit.”

I had intended to include “Larix” in Montana Poems but never did. It never felt “finished enough.” It still doesn’t. But after working for close to 30 years on some version of this poem, I am ready to let it go… irony and all.

Enjoy!

Reddo 

The poem that once 
appeared in this space
is being re-drafted
and re-typed.

It will be re-posted
someday soon
at MontanaWriter.com.

Stay tuned!

____

Thom Gunn was born in Britain but is associated more often with San Francisco and the excesses of American bohemianism than with the country of his birth. Yet his poetry has always seemed to me to be uniquely influenced by his British roots. It is something in both his word choice and his perspective.

Gunn wrote in both traditional poetic forms and free verse. He seems equally at home in either… remarkably so. One of the many signs marking Gunn as a very good poet.

Gunn suffered through many tragedies and many demons. These sufferings and demons are reflected in his work in the usual ways. Yet what shines through in his poetry is his poetic ability: his ear and eye.

“Considering the Snail” is typical of one kind of Gunn poem. The rhyme scheme is so loose and lightly rendered  that a first you do not notice it. And yet it holds the poem together,  like the unseen frame of a house, hidden behind sheet rock and stucco: “green” rhymed with “rain,” “progress” with “across.”

The words Gunn chooses to describe “the life” of the snail complete the poem: desire, passion, fury, stirring…. so much emotional language and urgency for a creature so utterly without urgency and passion. In an ordinary moment recreated by the poem, observer and the observed, reader and snail, merge into one in an extraordinary way.

Enjoy!

Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

____

Ranier Maria Rilke

On another snowy Minnesota morning, this poem by Rilke comes to mind as we “walk” into another new year. In my early 20s, Rilke was a favorite poet. In the many moves I made in those days, I lost a number of those dog-eared volumes. I still do have two of his books: Selected Poems of Ranier Maria Rilke translated by Robert Bly and Letters to a Young Poet. The latter especially shows the effects of time and usage.

In my early 20s, I lived in Chicago and Michigan, two places greatly influenced by German immigrants. It was the perfect time and place to read Rilke, like it was to read Kafka and Mann and Hesse.

Metaphor is important in Rilke’s poems. Some re-occur often so as you read his poetry those metaphors gradually take on weight and freight. Rilke is not a Symbolist but he is sometimes something very near to that.

Rilke has been translated by both Robert Bly and Galway Kinnell among others. I have read a few of Kinnell’s translations and like them very much. I am more familiar, though, with Bly’s. Bly is the translator of this one.

I like the image in this poem of walking toward a sunny hill with the wind on our faces. Enjoy!

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

_____

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Galway Kinnell has always professed to being a great admirer of Walt Whitman. In some of his more well-known poems, you can see the influence very clearly. But for that, you can see Whitman’s influence on all American poetry.

I do not know if Kinnell is a practicing Catholic or any kind of Catholic at all. His name makes me assume that at least somewhere in his near or distant past ancestors held fast to that faith. I do know though that at his best, Kinnell can transform a natural, earthy moment / experience into something spiritual. It is a movement that can only be called one of transubstantiation. His most famous poem, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” shows this well. As does the poem I am highlighting today.

Read the poem “Blackberry Eating” aloud. Feel and taste the collision of consonants, the slip-sliding syllables that transform the memory of eating blackberries in the fall into something sacramental.

Enjoy!

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry — eating in late September.

_____

On a cold November morning, I find myself dreaming already of spring. Winter used to seem merely a nuisance but as I have gotten older it has turned more and more into a cross… one I very reluctantly bear.

Wendell Berry’s small poem “Woods” seems like the perfect tonic on a day like today. Berry’s poetry at its best bears witness to the three part relationship between Creator and creation and creature.

On this cold Thanksgiving morning, a poem about spring, and God’s wonderful and “wild blessings’ seems like a natural fit. Enjoy!

Woods

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

_____

Donald Hall

Donald Hall is, unfortunately, an under-appreciated poet. While his prose works like LifeWork and Ancient Glittering Eyes represent his greatest strengths as a writer, he remains a marvelous poet.

“Names of Horses” is one of my favorite Hall poems. Here Hall remembers the history of his Eagle Pond family farm by remembering the horses that lived and died working the land. Hall’s connection to his family and his family farm is a theme in much of his best writing: poetry and prose.

In “Names of Horses” everything that makes Hall an outstanding poet is in evidence: the carefully crafted yet “spoken” language, the personal and lyrical contextually, and the unbridled Americanism.

I hope you enjoy!

Names of Horses

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

_____

Robert Frost, that most American of poets, is famous for saying of free verse poetry that it is “like playing tennis without a net.”

As a poet who writes almost exclusively in free verse, I suppose I should take exception. I do not. I understand his point, though I do not accept his analogy. Like many analogies (maybe all) Frost’s poet/tennis comparison is more sleight of hand than pulling aside a veil.

His famous Yankee ear lets him write in a way that traditional and non-traditional rhyme-forms fit best. It is a gift he maximizes as well as any in the 20th Century. Since Frost was a tennis player, a better analogy may have been: writing free verse for Frost would be the same as asking him to play baseball… or basketball… any  sport that he was not so gifted at.

All poets naturally move in a direction that emphasizes their strengths and hides their deficiencies. This is in part what poets mean when they say “finding their voice.” Frost is very aware of his own strengths as a poet… as well as his limitations.

“Dust of Snow” is familiar to anyone who ever took English 101. It is one of those poems that bad English teachers use to display a reading a poem in a way that emphasizes the poetics of hidden meaning,  loaded-language, and literary detective work above all else. For that reason, its true beauty is obscured more often than not for most “well-educated” readers.

“Dust of Snow” is a poem that should be savored above all for its for its language and mood. It is a perfect poem for a November day.

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

_____