Tag Archives: poetry

WINTER AND WHITE SPACE

WINTER IS A GREAT TIME FOR NOTICING the little things. Maybe a clump of snow dropping silently from a bough. Maybe a red fox trotting up the driveway. Maybe the shimmering snow crystals called “diamond dust” that sometimes, on very cold days, drift down from a blue sky.

WinterWhite-lowres

art courtesy of Glenn Wolff
visit www.glennwolff.com

For years I’ve been trying to simplify my life in an effort to be more aware of such things, but I haven’t made much headway. The effort always makes me think of Thoreau, in Walden, where he famously scolded us to “simplify, simplify,” then proceeded to weave a deliciously complex tapestry of a book. It’s as it should be. The most enduring books, like natural communities, are made stronger by their complexity. Those tens of thousands of words in intricate arrangement focus our attention, expand our view of the world, and remind us that we’re surrounded every moment by an unimaginable abundance of things. Surely our greatest achievement has been to make language a proxy for the stars in the sky, for snowflakes and flocks of birds and people on a street, for the countless sensation-packed moments that make up our lives.

Maybe we seek the spare and elemental in nature for the same reason that the protagonist in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis reads poetry: “He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space…Poems made him conscious of his breathing.” What if the simple life—the only one we can hope to find—is found within the white-space of the world?

But of course we’re not simple creatures. Bare moments don’t hold our attention for long. Eventually most of us require more than white space and cloud spout; more than the twice-warming flames in a fireplace; more than the monkish austerity of a single room, a candle, and a few books. Thoreau’s enthusiasm is infectious—“Think of our life in nature…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!”—but I suspect that we’re more interested in his boldness and passion and the complexity of his mind than in the simple life he espoused. The louder Thoreau crowed in praise of simplicity, the more convincing became his argument against it.

Yet there’s the winter landscape. This morning, after a night of fresh snow, the field behind my house was almost nothing but white space, with only a few stems of dried knapweed and goldenrod rising above it. The stems marked the snow like ink scratches on a sheet of paper. It was the sparest poem imaginable: a single letter at the top of the page, a slash in the middle, a comma near the bottom. I almost couldn’t bring myself to spoil it. But then I set off across the field in my clumsy boots, thinking of this and that––and left a meandering trail that will be there until the next good snow erases it.

(This essay first appeared as a “Reflections” column in Michigan Blue Magazine. Copyright 2016 by Jerry Dennis )

WHAT’S LIGHTING US UP: KEITH TAYLOR’S GLADNESS

I WAS A FAN of Keith Taylor’s nature essays and poetry for years before we met, so it’s probably not surprising that I liked him from the first time we shook hands. It was at the first Bear River Writers Conference, on Walloon Lake, Michigan, in 2000, and I liked him so much that I decided we would be friends for life, whether he wanted it or not.

We’ve been pals ever since, and my appreciation for his work just grows stronger. Every Keith Taylor book is extraordinary for its openness, candor, and clarity, and his observations are always sharp and fresh. Consider this, from his new chapbook, Fidelities:

GREEN LIGHT

just for a few weeks, from full summer

into September, on quiet days,

warm, humid but not hot—and the light

above the river turns green, like leaves,

reeds, water weeds or water itself

on its gently inexorable

slide through hills to the blue lakes beyond.

 

Keith travels widely, reads everything, and is one of those people who thinks deeply about the world and our place in it, so I’m always interested in what’s on his mind. I asked him to tell us what he’s been enthusiastic about lately, and his response is pure Taylor:

Oh, I wanted it to be something big! A big book that I could feel was changing my life even as I read it. Proust or Wittgenstein or something! Or something cool out there in the popular culture—a song, a movie, hell, I’d settle for a television show—so I could establish some kind of cultural cred. Or an adventure, undertaken or just planned. Australia, maybe. South Africa. Uzbekistan. Somewhere. Or a poem, one of those that came out of nowhere and just picked up the world, moved it a quarter of an inch, and changed everything (“We must have/the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless/furnace of this world.” Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense.”). I wanted it to be my rage at oppression and prejudice, but this week I just feel tired. I’m sorry. I’ll be outraged by something next week, I’m sure.

But, no, all I got was one tiny little bird, barely two inches long in a beat-up city park next to a freeway and a factory. A Northern Parula Warbler. A blue-gray back broken around the shoulders by a greenish haze. Two shades of yellow on the upper breast separated by a deep orangish/red band. The lower belly a pure white. It’s song some musical chips followed by a buzzing call. You can see and hear it here: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Parula/id.

It landed just above my head in an invasive honey-suckle early Monday morning, just before a rain shower. It was on it’s way from somewhere in the tropics to its breeding range in the Upper Peninsula or north of Superior. It sang and sang, right into the rain. I had to leave and it was still singing.

And its light has filled me for the past two days. I’m sorry but that’s it. One little bird I saw when I was alone.

—Keith Taylor’s most recent chapbook is Fidelities: A Chronology (http://www.alicegreene.com/publications/fidelities-a-chronology/). He teaches a little at the University of Michigan.

 

WHAT’S LIGHTING US UP: Mike Delp’s “Work”

Every week, starting this week, I’m asking friends to comment on the books, movies, music, art, natural events, and creative projects that they’ve been finding most interesting and inspiring.

For the first post, I’m honored to present a powerful new poem by Michael Delp. Mike’s an old friend and fishing pal and a terrific writer who spends part of every year in his cabin beside the Boardman River. What’s lighting him up lately? Here’s Mike, in his own words:

“This is the beginning of a series of new poems about the value and necessity of doing work with the hands. I’m talking about what Jim Harrison calls, ‘making the long thought’ which comes to us doing boring, hard manual labor. At a young age, my father taught me tools: saws and hammers, drills and bits, how to work wood into a boat that would actually float. I spent hundreds of hours as a kid weeding, mowing, trimming Christmas trees and later, in college, running an 80 lb air hammer in the summer. I have unloaded boxcars of dried milk, 75 lb bags and a full boxcar, all day in the summer heat, enough time to kill yourself, if you desired. I know what it’s like to dream with weight on the back, and an ache in the arm from pounding nails through two sheets of roofing steel building a pole barn. It all comes down to doing the work, and working the work to make the mind a healthier place where anything, even a poem, might enter into that brief instant of time between the lifting of the hammer and the explosion of the nail into the wood.”

 

WORK
by Michael Delp

Wondering how it felt for my step-Grandpa, Eby, to see two of his fingers
sliced off in a press at the Lansing Drop Forge,
dancing, he could have thought, in that instant before pain,
to the music of factory vibrations,
while behind him, men at other presses
never stopped or heard his screams over the pounding of their own work.

Wondering how it was that my own father, his heart stuffed with
engineering equations and cigar smoke came home from his office every night,
and helped his only son learn how to run a table saw,
each time teaching, testing the blade’s teeth with his right thumb.

Wondering how his father, an alcoholic sheriff’s deputy stumbling home at night from a
job in what must have seemed like life in a tunnel with no exit,
a black locomotive with a light like God’s eye about to plow him down,
work him into the gravel bed between the tracks.
But this man, my dad’s dad, knew how to build stuff.
He taught my father the value of hands and how they did work.
For six weeks my dad and his two brothers, both younger, tore down
a neighbor’s house and saved every nail and straightened every nail.

And I remember this now, watching him lift a deck board, hand it over to me.
He’s 94 and still in the work. He could do this blindfolded, this work done by hand,
setting wood and nailing it in place, and when I slip my hammer past an 8D sinker,
wrench it almost double
he bends to pick it up,
hands it back and I do what I learned:
set it down and put it back to the shape it was
when I first laid my hands on it.

And both of us, an old man and his son, growing older,
turn again to bend our backs into the work.
And when I say into it, I mean down our arms and through our fingers, the tools working
as if they had blood inside them.

 

(Michael Delp is a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction whose works have appeared in numerous national publications. He is the author, most recently, of the limited-edition letterpress chapbook, The Mad Angler Poems, published by Deep Wood Press, and of a story collection, As If We Were Prey (Wayne State University Press). His other books include The Last Good Water (Wayne State, 2003), The Coast of Nowhere (Wayne State, 1997), and Under the Influence of Water (Wayne State, 1992). He recently retired from teaching creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he received several awards for his teaching. Mike invites you to visit his Facebook page.)

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