Each time I click “send” and cross my fingers for the submissions page to say “your work has been sent”, questions run through my mind. [...]]]> As a writer who dutifully submits her work to literary magazines, I often wonder: how do the editors of literary magazines handle submissions? What really goes on behind the scenes?

Each time I click “send” and cross my fingers for the submissions page to say “your work has been sent”, questions run through my mind. Each time I weigh a submission envelope at the post office and check the address and postage, the same questions return:

What happens to my manuscript when it arrives in the editor’s mailbox? Who reads submissions? With hundreds of worthy submissions flowing in, will my work even be read? How do the editors of literary magazines go about the impossible task of selecting submissions?

As the editor of Poecology, I can’t speak for how other literary journals handle submissions. But I know how we do things here. Each submission is read by at least two people, and always by me, the editor-in-chief. I don’t just read the first line of a poem or story. I read every line of every piece. As an editor and as a writer, I wouldn’t do it any other way. It’s my belief that every line, sentence, and page is a work of art. Every piece has potential. And even though as writers we’re told to put the strongest pieces at the beginning of our manuscripts, I’ve often been surprised to find the strongest part of a manuscript tucked away on the very last page.

Submissions for Poecology Issue 2 close today at midnight, and I am left with a conundrum: How do I go about selecting pieces to publish from a treasure trove of poems, stories, and other creative works sent daily over the internet from every corner of the globe? It’s a terribly tough choice, and making these choices takes patience and practice.

Before I dive into the final submissions for Issue 2, I need to remind myself of a few things. The first thing I tell myself: you can’t accept everything. I know I will have to return some work back to expectant authors, along with the inevitable rejection letter. I can only hope that these authors take it not as a rejection, but as an opportunity to return to the work, to re-inhabit it, and send it again.

The second thing I tell myself: Be methodical and slow. Read everything twice, and write down a quick note about the strengths of each piece. Each and every piece I’ve read this year has been strong. But I’ve learned that the job of an editor is not always about choosing the strongest pieces, but about choosing a strong variety of pieces that speak to each other. If there’s one thing I could tell submitters, it’s this: don’t fear the rejection letter. A rejection letter doesn’t always mean that your work isn’t strong. It means try again.

The third thing I tell myself: Let the submission sit after you’ve given it a good read. This is useful advice for writers too. Often a vivid image or passage will follow me wherever I go. If a passage still haunts me several days later, then I inevitably go back and read it again: there’s something there that readers might also be haunted by.

Given all of the things I tell myself, there are still several factors that influence our decision to publish a work:

1. Does the piece fit the philosophy of the journal?
2. Have we already chosen a piece with a similar subject or feel, either for this issue or for previous issues?
3. Have we chosen work from a variety of styles, view points, and lived experiences?
4. Have we chosen work that represents a diverse range of environmental concerns?
5. Have we chosen work from both emerging and established writers?
6. How will readers respond to the work?

Going through this list of questions helps us along in our decision-making process. But we often get stuck. We receive far more worthy submissions than we could ever hope to publish in one annual journal. At this rate, we have enough work to fill up two or three issues a year. If only we had the staff power and resources to pull that off!

As we close submissions for Issue 2, we open them up for Issue 3. We hope you’ll submit again. The backlog of work prevents us from writing personal comments, but rest assured that your work is being read with great care.

Best Wishes,
Kristi Moos and the editorial staff at Poecology

Issue 2 is shaping up to be a spectacular mix of established and emerging writers, and we’re receiving [...]]]> Submissions for Issue 2 are quickly wrapping up! Send us your poetry, fiction, or nonfiction by May 15th, 2012– just four weeks away. If you miss the deadline, your work will be considered for our 2013 issue.

Issue 2 is shaping up to be a spectacular mix of established and emerging writers, and we’re receiving fabulous submissions everyday. More details coming soon.

For a list of guidelines and to submit online, visit the “Submit” tab above or click here.
 

We are asleep with compasses in our hands. ―W.S. Merwin2

The bath cabin where you used to leave your dress / has changed forever into [...]]]> by Kristi Moos

 
Which was more painful, to be a refugee in someone else’s country or a refugee in your own? ―Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief ¹

We are asleep with compasses in our hands. ―W.S. Merwin²

The bath cabin where you used to leave your dress / has changed forever into an abstract crystal. ―Czesław Miłosz, “Elegy for N.N.” ³

W.S. Merwin

Mahmoud Darwish

Czesław Miłosz

Industrialization. Urbanization. Political and environmental upheaval. Two world wars (Or three — or more–?) The atomic bomb. Technology. The past century has displaced and transformed Place in ways never before imagined. And the people of those places? They became exiles, sometimes in their own land. They were psychological exiles. Exiled from Place as it once was, what it became, and is becoming.

Polish poet and scholar Czesław Miłosz (1931-2004) often wrote poetry that meditates on psychological exile. He lived in places morphed for centuries by slippages in cultures, language, and political unrest. His poems recall memories of his youth growing up in rural Lithuania, Poland, and Czarist Russia.

During World War II, Miłosz lived in Warsaw: the city was ravaged by the German occupation. The quiet agrarian lifestyle of previous decades was gone. In 1953, he escaped to France on political asylum– leaving behind a place that would never be the same. Miłosz knew in one sense he would never return to his home. The ground might be there. A church, a road. But Miłosz conjures and mourns a reality that can no longer be in that place. In the poem “Elegy for N.N.” he writes:

We learned so much, this you know well:
how gradually, what could not be taken away
is taken. People, countrysides (71).

These places are taken from him (and the world) but not from memory. The sweetness of Miłosz’s yearning for the place of his younger years is perhaps most poignant in the poem’s following lines:

True, when the manzanita is in bloom
and the bay is clear on spring mornings
I think reluctantly of the house between the lakes
and of nets drawn in beneath the Lithuanian sky.
The bath cabin where you used to leave your dress
has changed forever into an abstract crystal.

This surreal landscape in the rural woods of Lithuania is never again accessible. The bath house is likely gone. His homeland, too — now an abstract in spirit. The idyllic place has become a glimmmer of memory captured in poetry. And poetry, like the land, is now purely imagistic and symbolic, reflecting loss outwards like “a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees” (47).

Israeli-Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) also mourned the loss of his Palestinian homeland. But unlike Miłosz, he fought tirelessly for the right to call it that– a homeland. He called for recognition that this place existed and, more importantly, still exists.

In Journal of an Ordinary Grief, Darwish describes riding from jail in a taxi toward home– to find that all the street names had been changed. Whole villages erased, people removed, a deep relationship to the land– erased. His grief had become ordinary to Palestinians. As Ibrahim Muhawi points out, for Darwish, there is a symbolist equation of himself and Palestine; his identity is ironically bound up in not-being, in placelessness. Muhawi points out that “irony is probably the literary mode most appropriate to exile…from the start, writing has shaped the other form of the homeland, not asking what lies beyond” (XV).

Like Miłosz, Darwish’s exile is deeply personal and psychological: “A place is not a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind; And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood” (15).

Does this mean that the exiled self is always at exile? That Miłosz’s river holds the reflection of childhood, and never childhood?

“What is a homeland?” Darwish asks. “To hold on to your memory – that is homeland” (8).

Memory then, and poetry’s memory, is the one remaining place where the exile may again go home.

What Miłosz and Darwish have in common — exile, and love for place — is preserved in their poetry.
What if they had been silenced? What must be said of the power of poetry to sustain a place that no longer remains? What is lost when “Place memories” (and the collective personal: the historical memory) are exiled, lost?

Here’s where the work of poet W.S. Merwin (1927- ) has an answer.

Merwin was born in New York City and was raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. His family life was scarred by violence and tragedy, past and present. Imagination became a stronghold– a place, as it were, where the world could be imagined and therefore, managed. Merwin moved frequently around the globe, living for spans of time in Spain, France, England, and elsewhere. And yet Merwin’s poetry retains at its core a buoyant spiritual connection to place. He gets there by imagining possibility, as in the poem “A Contemporary”:

What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with no rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass
in a garden in the south when the clouds part in winter
from the beginning I would be older than all the animals
and to the last I would be simpler (222).

Here the poet-self is reconciled to place through imagination. Metaphysics are present, too. Perhaps it was the power of the metaphysical that allowed Merwin to re-imagine his plot of land on the island of Maui, a place ravaged by logging, erosion, and plantation agricultural. When Merwin settled there, he set about to restore paradise to paradise– the simple imagining come to life. And he did just that: he returned the native tropical forests to the soil, inch by inch, with his own hands.

Darwish saw the possibility of transformative reaction and action: “As long as the struggle continues, the paradise is not lost but remains occupied and subject to being regained” (8).

Miłosz was less certain of this possibility. Was the act of mourning his act of agency? Politics marred this reimaginging. Though he returned to Kraków in the last years of his life, he remained partially an exile. He was home, but paradise could not be regained. Nor perhaps should it.

But what Miłosz left behind was a literary legacy that contained both a love for place and a poignant critique of the politics that marred it. He used poetry as a compass– and passed it trustingly on to us.

“We are asleep with compasses in our hands,” Merwin writes. Yes– here we are, well-equipped yet unaware, always with the needle pointing homeward.

—
 
 
^*all of the above excerpts are taken from the following respective works:
 
¹ Darwish, Mahmoud. Journal of an Ordinary Grief Archipelago Books, New York: 2010.
² Merwin, W.S. Migration: New and Selected Poems. Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington: 2005.
³ Miłosz, Czesław. Selected Poems 1931-2004. The Czesław Estate: 2006.

I wanted to take a walk
and think of the city
whose only remaining beauty
is that you wrote about it. 1

This is New York City, East Village, perhaps sometime [...]]]> by Kristi Moos

 
 
Poet Diane Wakoski, in her poem “Walking Past Paul Blackburn’s Apt. On 7th St.”:

I wanted to take a walk
and think of the city
whose only remaining beauty
is that you wrote about it. ¹

This is New York City, East Village, perhaps sometime near or after poet Paul Blackburn’s death in 1971. Years have passed since Blackburn lived there. But to Wakoski, the place will always be his. There will always been the faded memory of seeing his face on the corner of 7th and Avenue A, near Tompkins Square Park. Blackburn had been a central figure in making a “place” for poets in the Village in the 1950s and 60s; he held poetry readings and offered vital encouragement to emerging poets associated with Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York School. For these poets, as long as 7th street still exists, poetry will echo in its windows and doorways. The spirit of the Blackburn’s impact on the place can never fully be erased.
 
 
Leaving a store beneath his apartment, Wakoski writes:
 
 

Paul, I walked out
thinking how you have taught all of us
to dwell in this city and
to make friends with our neighborhoods.

Blackburn’s own poetry was steeped in the streetscapes and ecologies of New York City, where he once wrote “Visitation 1″:

Magic of Morning
 
walking thru the autumn of west 24th St. slowly
                                      late to work
a schoolboy slowness along the sunburst sidewalk
Cold air, sun on the walls
                                      one
:                                      sees
on the walk the broken bits
of color glistening in sun like frozen
smashed Christmas tree decorations or bits of glass
imbedded in cement, that are only paper somehow, only
                                     paper. ²

Blackburn didn’t just write about New York City; he rejoiced in the minute details of the city’s life. Afterall, what is more magical than a walk down a hushed city street in the cold, early morning hours? –Or (for Wakoski) taking that lone walk down the street where a dear friend once lived?

For the poet of place, the answer to that question varies. For Thoreau, the answer lies far outside the city limits. The famed writer of the woods might have scoffed at Blackburn’s admiration for sidewalk concrete and Wakoski’s nostalgia for urban life. Thoreau would have urged them to take a walk out in rural nature:

“When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods; what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?”

Ok, Thoreau was not a celebrator of urban spaces. But in the mid-19th century, it would have been easier for Thoreau to make a clear distinction between human and non-human landscapes, to say “forest” vs. “garden,” “city path” and “nature path.” Consider the following:

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, — even politics, the most alarming of them all — I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. ³

 
What about today? Today, politics occupy all places. No place is left untouched, in some way, by humans. For poet Mahmoud Darwish, a person can never be in a single place in time. Place is forever haunted by people, political systems, histories, and the physical and psychological legacies of each. Darwish’s poetry enters the gap between “the place that once was” and “how the place that once was–is now.” In mourning the loss of pre-modern lands in the poem “Counterpoint”, the individual can never escape memory, can never escape historical loss:

New York, November, Fifth Avenue,
the sun a shattered metal saucer,
I said to my estranged self in the shade:
Is this Sodom or Babylon?

…

I asked: The outside world is an exile
and the inside world is an exile
so who are you between the two? ⁴

Here we are still in New York City, but far from Blackburn’s city. New York is partially erased, and in its place Darwish inhabits an internal (and historical) landscape, one connected to his Palestinian homeland.
 
Joshua Kryah’s poem “Holy Ghost People” which enters the same ground of internal exile that is at once rooted in the self and in place. In the image that follows, Kryah evokes the fall of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11—:

My voice once a city,
a people.

                          Now flames, glass shattering,
                             the huddled and hurrying away—

Ground Zero is symbolic of the destruction of American sense of place. After 8:46 a.m. on 9/11/11, New York City is never the same city. The United States is never the same country.

If Blackburn were present during 9/11, what images would he have used to represent the catastrophe? I think his metaphors would have been similar to Kryah’s, in which the self is transposed on the city and splinters apart with it. Kryah’s poem ends with the idea that the individual voice is lost when the place itself is lost (and, of course, its people):

                                                            no word adheres, no

                                                     amount of thrashing, convulsing

                                                                               can make the body bring it

                                                                                                            (o word, o home)
                                                            back. ⁵

But where did that voice go? Where did New York City go—the city before 8:46 a.m.? Surely the voice isn’t gone. Does it lie in the same place, at exile within itself? Does it lies in the memory, in exile from current experience?

Moving for a moment to the world of fiction: Destruction of place is central to Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, in which New York City is, yet again, destroyed. But in reenacting the destruction, Whitehead is delivering the city to an older version of itself. This partial erasure is also part revelation, part restoration:

“New York is always destroyed…Giuliani and Bloomberg got rid of the old New York. I think each time you destroy a tenement and put up a luxury tower, you’re ruining New York and making some sort of a new version of the city.

I’m walking around with my idea of what New York was thirty years ago, twenty years ago. So is everybody else. And we superimpose that ruined city over what’s here now. It’s cleaned up, but we’re still seeing that old shoe store, dry cleaners, that old apartment where we used to live. So, any street you walk down in New York is a heap of rubble because that’s sort of how we see it if we’ve been here a while.” ⁶

And so, the City of today is an “other.” It is a ruin built on top of a true place in the imagination— For Whitehead, Wakoski, and countless others, it still is, in part “the old apartment where we used to live.”
 
Blackburn spent his last years far from his old apartment on 7th street, far from the city made beautiful, as in Wakoski’s loving poem, because of his presence and his poems. It is fitting, then, that the end of Blackburn’s sixteenth section of “The Selection of Heaven” takes its final leave from place, bringing the song and rhythm of landscape inward:

…
 
Let there be soft
                                    wind
where he is, let him hear gulls cry
above the
bridge,
                                    and be home. ⁷

 
 
 
—–
Notes

¹  Wakoski, Diane. Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975. pp. 48.
²  Blackburn, Paul. “Visitation 1.” Paul Blackburn. ed. Jack Krick, May 2008. University of Buffalo. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/blackburn/blackburn_visitation.html. Accessed December 31, 2011.
³  Thoreau, Henry David. “On Walking.” Thoreau Reader. ed. Richard Lenat, 2009. Iowa State University. http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html. Accessed December 31, 2011.
⁴  Darwish, Mahmoud. “Counterpoint.” New American Writing 27. Mill Valley: OINK! Press, 2009. pp. 1
⁵  Kryah, Joshua. “Holy Ghost People.” New American Writing 27. Mill Valley: OINK! Press, 2009. pp. 71.
⁶  Whitehead, Colson. Whitehead’s ‘Zone’ Is No Average Zombie Apocalypse. National Public Radio, October 17, 2011. http://www.npr.org/2011/10/17/141352394/whiteheads-zone-is-no-average-zombie-apocalypse. Accessed December 31, 2011.
⁷  Blackburn, Paul. “The Selection of Heaven.” Paul Blackburn. ed. Jack Krick, May 2008. University of Buffalo. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/blackburn/blackburn_selection_16.html. Accessed December 31, 2011.

 
Club Fugazi’s sloping red walls and roman columns appear to be stuck between Art Deco and Antiquity. One can see in them the strained elegance of social dances held there in the 1930s and 40s the mixers [...]]]> Snyder and Ferlinghetti Give a Reading in North Beach, November 7, 2011

by Kristi Moos

 
Club Fugazi’s sloping red walls and roman columns appear to be stuck between Art Deco and Antiquity. One can see in them the strained elegance of social dances held there in the 1930s and 40s the mixers put on for Italian-American teenagers with their expectant families in tow. One can hear opera singers and red-curtain entertainers; one can see fan dancers, piano performers and slick-haired crooners performing to well-dressed crowds.
 
Some time in the 1950s, the lights dimmed. A group of young writers took the stage and began reading poetry. What began with locals reading unpublished work quickly grew into something larger. “Carpetbaggers from New York,” as Lawrence Ferlinghetti joked, began arriving. In the blink of an eye, the Beat movement was born.
 
By the early 1960s, Club Fugazi swarmed with literary legends— Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, to name a few, gathered here for literary readings. Sixty years (and many poems) later, Snyder and Ferlinghetti returned to give a benefit reading for the San Francisco Poetry center, filling Fugazi once more with poetry and story-telling that conjured up the dawn of a new generation of literature.
 
The mood of the night was joyous and historic. Ferlinghetti stepped up to the mic in multi-colored street shoes and an electric-red scarf, his eyes aglow with mischief. At age 92, the poet and publisher of City Lights Books told the crowd, “When I arrived in San Francisco in the 1950s, there were two great halls in North Beach: Garibaldi Hall on Broadway and Fugazi Hall. The first time I ever read a poem in public was at Fugazi. I was hooked.”
 
When Snyder, 81, walked out to greet the anxious crowd, this icon of ecological poetry instantly became human: “The last time I was in here,” he said, “was to see Beach Blanket Babylon.”

A far cry from the big hair and theatrics of Babylon, Snyder stood in blue jeans, a pale denim shirt and a loose-fitting vest. He read each poem with great care. Calm, cerebral, and thoroughly Zen, he began the night by reading “What to Tell, Still,” a poem written in tribute to the late James Laughlin, founder of New Directions Press and publisher of his and Ferlinghetti’s work.
 
His second poem, “Mariano Vallejo’s Library”, was a poem of place that revealed Snyder’s knack for story-telling. He talked of Vallejo’s life, a man at the center of California during its last years under Mexican rule. Vallejo never ventured outside of California his whole life. He owned a big ranch in Sonoma County, and had gathered, over the years, what was then the best library “in the Eastern Pacific.” Years later, his house and library burned to the ground; Yankees swept in and the Rancho lifestyle quickly disappeared. For Snyder, it is Vallejo and his adobe that tell the story of California’s transformation and provides partial answers to vital questions like: How can a state so rich in history and tradition withstand continual transformation, with the influx of new people, new plants, new civilizations and new ideas? How is it that California can remain constantly rough about the edges, always in the midst forming new narratives? The poem speaks up, bearing forth its dazzling disharmony:
 

“The old adobe east of the Petaluma River still stands.
Silvery sheds in the pastures once chicken coops,
the new box mansions march up the slope….
the bed of the Bay all shallowed by mining
pre ice-age Sierra dry riverbeds
upturned for gold and the stream gravel washed off by hoses,
swept to the valley in floods.
Farmers lost patience, the miners are now gone, too.
New people live in the foothills.
pine-pitch and dust, poison oak.” ¹

 
Snyder’s love for California, in all its incarnations, remains steady. Rather than disparaging the “new” and its legacies of destruction, he sees renewal. He inhabits the land as it is, and calls others to do the same:
 

“The old ones from the world before taught care:
whoever’s here, whatever language –
race, or century, be aware
that plant can scour your mind,
 
put all your books behind.”

 
Throughout the night, Snyder’s respect for natural ecologies came across clearly in his tone. Poised and deeply edifying, his meditative stance on ecological ruin offers a refreshingly powerful joy to environmental rhetoric. Void of the urgency of anger, his work is urgent only in its desire to appreciate the existing world. His poems recognize places as they once were, but more significantly, as they are.
 
Snyder might say that beauty is the impermanence of nature. He might say that the consequences of human activity, like all things, will sprout up and flow on, and will one day float beyond our reach, as in his next poem, “In the Santa Clarita Valley”:
 

“Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up
hexagonal “Denny’s” sign
starry “Carl’s”
loopy “McDonald’s”
eight-petaled yellow “Shell”
blue-and-white “Mobil” with the big red “O”
 
growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.” ²

 
Snyder describes Santa Clarita as the last watershed valley north of Los Angeles. A few people in the audience sighed. They must have been picturing the valley as a once idyllic gorge, lush and vibrant, now lost to sprawl. The image Snyder lends us is far more surprising: the poem is not about loss, but about enjoying tangible beauty in an altered landscape. In an ironic twist, Snyder asks us to see that the gas station signs are just as fragile as the “wildweed flower.” We see that Interstate 5 is just as susceptible to re-rerouting as the ancient river it uprooted. The poem is whispering: yes, the life of the valley flows into Los Angeles; yes, Los Angeles flows into and through it; that is the natural course of things. Isn’t that lovely, in its own way?
 

“In Goya’s greatest scenes, we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
suffering humanity
…
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in abstract landscapes of blasted trees
…
We are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent” ³

 
After rounds of hefty applause, Ferlinghetti commented, “it turned out to be an early ecological poem.” He was right. Each of his poems contain ecological undertones, but they are often overshadowed by political and sensual overtones. But the ecological element is there, loud and unapologetic. He noted, “Dylan Thomas said there are two kinds of poetry: loud and soft. I should learn to be quieter like Gary, instead of blowing off all the time.”
 
Another poem, “Magic Theater” turned out to be both loud and soft. In it, Ferlinghetti observes a scene along San Francisco’s Embarcadero. He observes the people who come and go, a man with his morning coffee and croissant wrapped in paper. Along comes a woman who sits down on the bench and begins weeping. The man cannot bring himself to speak to her. The man leaves, and then the woman leaves, her wet handkerchief still on the bench. All the while, a ferry comes and goes, “disgorging its humans,” one after the other. Here we see the passing of humanity, like the freeway passing through the Santa Clarita Valley, but this time in miniature: person by person, story by story, each slowing or pausing on their way by.
 

“Bashō would have liked
A lake like this
Back roads
To far towns
Reflected in it
 
As morning
Mocks its flowers
By becoming
Afternoon
 
And when the white furze
Stands up
On the dandelion stem
It is time
To blow” ⁴

“sigh and rise
and stretch her sweet anatomy,
let fall a stocking.” ⁹

Snyder was gripped by the image of “Mu Ch’i’s Persimmons” the painting by the Chinese master, Mu Ch’i:
 

“Napkin in hand,
I bend over the sink
suck the sweet orange goop
that’s how I like it
gripping a little twig
 
those painted persimmons
 
sure cure hunger” ¹⁰

 
The crowd laughed with delight when Ferlinghetti said, “I wrote an email to George Whitman of Shakespeare and Company, saying: “Shake your speare! (with an e on the end).” We chuckled when Gary explained in “How Many” that the word “Subaru” means “a fistful of boys” in the Mayan language. What better way for a girl (or guy) to ride?
 

“…Are there not still fireflies in America?
Is not beauty still beauty
are there not still poets
is there not still a full moon once a month
are there not still fireflies
are there not still stars at night
can we not still see them
signaling to us
some far out beatific destiny?” ⁵

 
For me, “Fireflies” shows Ferlinghetti’s poetic vulnerability, which in this case, is a strength. He spoke the lines in a contemplative mode that echoed the sentiment of Snyder’s poem, “Waiting for a Ride.” Each poem, in its own way, recalls everyday experience in terms of the cosmic, approaching at times, the existential. Are we not still here ourselves? Are we not able to appreciate nature?
 
Ferlinghetti’s moon is always full. Snyder’s moon is slighter, but perhaps closer at hand. Snyder’s moon is a watercolor painting by Japanese artist Chiura Obata, or a faithful companion keeping him company at home, as in “Waiting for a Ride”:
 

“full moon was Oct 2nd this year,
I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck
white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine”

 
The poem ends not with the moon, but with the self, suspended somewhere in between the North star and life back on Earth, which for Snyder is sitting in the baggage claim of the airport in Austin, Texas:
 

“—it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts!
that even our present night’s sky slips away;
not that I’ll see it
Or maybe I will, much later,
some far time walking the spirit path in the sky,
that long walk of spirits—where you fall right back into the
“narrow painful passageway of the Bardo”
squeeze your little skull
and there you are again
 
waiting for your ride” ⁶

“And which side are you on
sang the birds
Oh which side are you on
in the Third World War,
the war with the Third World?” ⁷

 
 
Snyder also read a 9/11 poem, “Falling from a Height, Holding Hands.” ⁸ The short piece depicts a video that circulated on YouTube around the time of 9/11. It showed a couple who had jumped, hand in hand, from one of the burning towers. The poem’s quietude captures the horrific silence of that flight: a journey two hundred people chose to make that day. Yet in the poem, the couple isn’t falling—they are readying themselves for their final, perfect flight:
 
 

“We will be two peregrines          diving           all the way down.”

 
 
I cannot forget the way Snyder paused before the word — “diving”— how he floated before it and landed on the syllables with assurance and buoyancy. The “d” was the foot leaving the building; the certain, forceful take-off into the air.
 
This is evidence of the power of poetry. This pronunciation was an act of understanding. Snyder was giving power back to the people whose last decisive act was to plunge, together, into the next world.
 

“The first fine dawn of life on earth
The first cry of man in the first light
The first firefly flickering at night
The first wagon train westward
The first sighting of the Pacific by Lewis and Clark
The first desegregation by Huck and Jim on a raft at night
The first buffalo head nickel and the last buffalo
The first skyscraper in America
…
The first plane to hit the first twin tower
The birth of vast national paranoia
The birth of American corporate fascism
The next to last free speech radio
The next to last independent newspaper raising hell
The next to last independent bookstore with a mind of its own
The next to last leftie looking for Obama nirvana
The first day of the Wall Street occupation to set forth upon this land a new revolutionary nation!” ¹¹

Gary Snyder and Kristi Moos, San Francisco, 2011.

I first discovered Gary Snyder’s poetry the day after I had my wisdom teeth pulled. With a plastic bag of frozen peas against each cheek, held in place by a black fleece neck-warmer, I reached for the book my younger brother had left on my bed while [...]]]>

by Sylvia Linsteadt

I first discovered Gary Snyder’s poetry the day after I had my wisdom teeth pulled. With a plastic bag of frozen peas against each cheek, held in place by a black fleece neck-warmer, I reached for the book my younger brother had left on my bed while I was napping: Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History and Prints, by Tom Killion and Gary Snyder. Killion’s luminous, carefully layered woodcut prints of Mt.Tamalpais, each capturing the spirit of a hillside, canyon, or vista with the all the grace of poetry, were flanked by Gary Snyder’s words to the mountain.

I re-entered a place I had wandered, longed for from far away (while living on the East Coast), and practically revered since age fifteen, through someone else’s heart. Snyder’s words beside Killion’s woodcuts knew my secret—they caught the way the dust smelled on a summer’s day on Old Railroad Grade, the red tangle of manzanita branches at sunset, the flicker of fence lizards between sticky-monkey flower and coyote brush. I recognized the bends and trees of the bald, gold Bolinas Ridge in Killion’s prints. And just out of view, the place my best friend Elsinore calls “the Birthday Walk,” where her family goes with thermoses of tea, a little cake—rain or shine—on each birthday. For Elsinore, in April, the blossoms of small lupines are always opening, dew-filled, blue. The steep hills are bright green, the fog is caught in the scattered dark patches of California bay laurel. The Pacific Ocean stretches, almost too beautiful to look at, like a great, silver skin puckered with waves. Sometimes, the Farallones are clear like woodcuts themselves against the horizon. In Killion’s print, they rise out of a mist. Elsinore and I have walked there on birthdays since we were little, our skirts always muddy, our hair sometimes damp with rain.

And just beyond the slopes of that print is the place my brother calls “the Sunset Spot,” where the sea opens far below in every direction and often the fog comes in and covers it up completely by dusk, so it seems like we are looking out at a landscape of clouds. To the left, a circle of granite rocks twined with bay trees. I named these “the Druid Rocks,” because the ring feels like a place of worship. On a summer day, the grass pale and dry with heat, my boyfriend and I found a perfect, egg-shaped nest fallen in the center of the rocks, woven from the golden hills. It sits beside our bed.

Snyder walked those paths, smelled the precise mixture of dust and coast-live oak, stopped at the landscape of fog over the ocean:

Walked all day through live oak and manzanita,

Scrabbling through dust down Tamalpais—

Thought of high mountains;

Looked out on a sea of fog.

Two of us, carrying packs.[1]

In writing and etching these ecosystems, trails and serpentine outcrops I knew so well, Snyder and Killion turned Mt.Tamalpais sacred and then lowered it down to earth again. They reminded me that it is the specifics of our landscapes, both the animal, plant, and stone stories that they hold, and the places where our own memories and feet have touched them, that are sacred, and deserve our reverence, our art, and our mindful interaction.

Still aching and slow, I spent the next several days sitting on the chamomile lawn in my backyard with Snyder’s No Nature and my own notebook, for copying out my favorite poems, cradled in my lap. The sun dipped in and out of clouds, shading and illuminating the pages. Crushed chamomile under my calves smelled medicinal and sweet. The poem I wrote out with the most care made me pause, and shiver, and wonder:

In the blue night

frost haze, the sky glows

with the moon

pine tree tops

bend snow-blue, fade

into sky, frost, starlight.

The creak of boots.

Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,

what do we know.[2]

The paw-prints of animals are their own narratives, their own languages of flight, forage, fecundity. Snow, stars, moon, the way pines, the very oldest of trees, bend against the sky— these all possess their own narratives.

Snyder asks us to reexamine what it means to be human, what it means to “write about nature,” what it means to use language. Snyder knows the names of the non-human beings around him, that they have their own perfectly wrought and utterly wild languages, of which we know next to nothing, despite what we would like to think, despite our attempts to order, civilize, and control. He knows that language evolved out of specific interactions with elk, chaparral, grizzly bear and huckleberry. He knows that our words are as wild a system as a bayside marsh, a redwood forest, a tide-pool near Duxbury Reef. In A Place in Space, Snyder writes:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination and language are fundamentally wild. “Wild” as in wild ecosystems— richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex.  Diverse, ancient, and full of information. […] Languages were not the intellectual inventions of archaic schoolteachers, but are naturally evolved wild systems whose complexity eludes the descriptive attempts of the rational mind.[3]

Poetry, then, by its very nature, is a wild, natural expression, like the patterns lichens make on Douglas fir trunks. When we write poetry, we engage the linguistic ecosystems that have been born out of our human past. We engage our very natures as human-animals that evolved for thousands and thousands of years as hunters. Carefully, reverently, we watched ungulate herds and fellow predators— wolves, lions— and the places they fed, migrated, birthed, died.

According to Paul Shepard, author of The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game and Coming Home to the Pleistocene, it is not our emotional relations to kin, clique, clan, or peer group that spurred the evolution of spoken language—other primates organize themselves in social hierarchies and have no need for complex grammars. It was our interest in the non-human world, Shepard argues, that necessitated words—

Perhaps language is associated with this extension of intelligence, with the need to label, analyze, store and retrieve that information which carries relatively little emotional charge. […] It is an adaptation to the enlargement of attention to the non-human environment […] As an instrument of intelligence it allows us to discriminate, differentiate, and remember. These are exceedingly valuable abilities for hunters.[4]

Language, then, is by nature born out of our observations of nature. The concept of ecological poetry is nothing new. Words as a means of understanding, of entering into and following the rich complexities of the non-human world, is as old a concept as humankind itself. Words-as-art resonate remarkably close to their very origins. As Snyder writes,

Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read ‘language’) a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? Observation, reflection and practice show artistic process to be the latter.[5]

Those prints and poems of Mt.Tamalpais that I encountered on a swollen summer’s day got to the grain of things literally and figuratively. They measured, explored, and mapped the chaos of natural systems that I knew and loved and urged me to do the same. The holes left in my mouth by molars that I have supposedly evolved out of needing were filled by Snyder’s meditations, who has since taught me much about what it means to be human; what my own evolution has bequeathed me.

His work taught me that poetry is a means of engaging with the world around me—human, animal and mineral. With poetry, I learn my way into a place through the doors of reverence, like a hunter singing to the elk he has shot, saying— let my song be my thanks. Tell the other elk of our music. Poetry can be a means of paying homage: of saying—here are my words, let them be part of you. They always have been. Our languages—our grammars and stanzas—are part of our landscapes. Let them lead us back in again.