Pre-Post week 7--Responding to Hass, Snyder, Stafford

Pre-Post Week 7

Responding to the readings: "State of the Planet" by Robert Hass, excerpts from Writing the Australian Crawl by William Stafford and Danger on the Peaks by Gary Snyder

After the intense experience of Mary Oliver, I felt like I was carrying her with me into this new material. It was nice remembering a strong Christian perspective expressed in a warm, woman’s voice as I listened to these men.

“State of the Planet” by Robert Hass, who is now 70, was powerful poetry woven with painful scientific facts. I like how he used a schoolgirl as a real life connection to the litany of objective facts that hurt me to read and reflect on--

Topsoil: going fast. Rivers: dammed and fouled.

Cod: about fished out. Haddock: about fished out.

The book will tell her that the gleaming appliance

That kept her milk cold in the night required

Chlorofluorocarbons…

And it reacts with ozone. Where oxygen breeds it

From ultra-violet light, it burns a hole in the air.

His ending really gets my attention when he writes about dreams—“all of it/ a dream, and we live somewhere, somehow outside it/ Watching.” Here he seems to be using a dream as an unreal illusion—not able to be fully grasped. Then in his last few lines he switches the meaning of dream to be a vision or hope we need to have “…the earth needs a dream of restoration—“and he gives us that hopeful, beautiful hope—“She (the earth) dances and the birds just keep arriving, Thousands of them, immense arctic flocks, her teeming life.”  (Note: It was incredibly powerful when Paul read these lines aloud to a group of SEU students in the middle of a field trip to Circle B last year. In his introduction to that shared experience he pointed out how Circle B had been rescued from years of abuse, and the dramatic gift of restoration had resulted in the return of the birds—Wow! I hope we do the same poem when we visit there.)

Gary Snyder’s assorted prose and poetry excerpts from Danger on the Peaks were a delight to read and consider. I couldn’t help but smile when the intro bio said “…he has lived in the watershed...” What a great detail for us to recognize.

The first poem that stood out to me and made me smile was “How.” “…from bough/to bough to bough/ to bough to bough to bough” This is, of course, exactly how it is done, and in these few words I was with him.  His prose intros to his poems were an unexpected feature and a bit awkward to read, but I adjusted quickly. I have to admit my favorite part were the poems that looked and sounded like poems. I particularly liked “Cormorants.”  “Toes writing in water” (I actually saw this yesterday and so I got excited when he described it this way.) The ending was great “…(cormorants) talk about art, lecture the/clouds of tiny fish” Another wonderful poem was “The Great Bell of the Gion.” The ending seemed to celebrate deep listening which could mend our fragile hearts. Yes!

William Stafford’s Writing the Australian Crawl was filled with wit and wisdom about writing (and
life, which is how I think real wisdom works).  Wit: “A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.” “And if someone else says, ‘I don’t like that poem,’ you can say, ‘Well, it’s my life.  That poem was in the way, so I wrote it.”  Wisdom: The correct attitude to take about anything you write is “Welcome! Welcome!”  His whole attitude seemed so healthy and helpful, and I can hear Mary Olive agreeing. Remember how she reminded us that writing isn’t a completion—just patch the pieces together.   The title to that poem is “Praying.” And I am adding my own Amen!