My
last post, “How environmental themes entered my writing” dealt
with fiction. I didn't mention my poetry writing and the “how”
often happening from walking or hiking. Environment and poetry seem
to have such an obvious relationship that I left it out.
Although
I tried many sports, swimming and walking were my regular activities
in adult life. Hiking was the term we used then but I found,
living in the Twin Cities, that city hiking was stimulating too.
Walking around the lakes there was a social exercise. I also liked
walking to Lake Calhoun and back, clocking about four miles. In
Duluth, the shoreline of a great lake, creeks and woods in the parks,
and stands of trees in neighborhoods are in the walking panorama.
Working with used books, I've converted to early morning walks when
garage or estate sales are within my range.
I've
liked seeing gardens and architectures, lawns that were allowed to go
wild, the crow supervising the gathering squirrel, the expressiveness
of trees, finding the woodpecker making the noise, raccoons, and
does with fawns.
Once
I began writing regularly, I found that walking both relieved tension
and kept the creative breezes flowing. Many famous writers regularly
took a morning or an afternoon walk.
These
walks, though, made me more of a poet, not just an inspired poet but
a poet who feels thematic and then writes more regularly. Walking a
few miles opens up the awareness and associations. I tended to see my
fiction from an inner view like film. Poetry was that moment a
photographer catches except that the poet has their inner awareness
and associations, those creative breezes that pick up images like
seeds. Writing that
draws a
parallel, a metaphor. Nature becomes a cohesion of forces, scientific
included but not the prevailing attitude.
When
the digital camera came along, I often simply stopped, took a
picture, and put it on Facebook. It was a moment that seemed unusual
and revealing. But writing a poem usually happened within a system, from the soil of associations. The challenge was to find out
whether you made sense to a reader while giving a personal
perspective.
Being
out-of-doors and becoming a part of that causes a pensive mind to
wonder about systems. With poetry, I liked to find parallels for
human life. It was a coincidence that I was moving, my apartment
emptying except for a couch, when a swarm of monarch butterflies
decided to rest in the trees outside the window. It seemed like magic
but then it made me more enthusiastic about writing poetry.
Ever
since Wordsworth in western culture, after poets began writing on a
subject rather than relating a story worthy of a novel or play,
nature for the sake of nature came to the forefront. Poets have
looked at the environment in a different way, and usually as a system
that affects and even directs man.
I've
seen in recent journals some superb poetry that, unfortunately,
mourns the present situation with environment while it celebrates the
naturalistic world. Many of my poems led to an environmental
perspective and were published in literary journals, listed on my
website. In recent years, I was proud to have poems published in Review Americana, Cider Press Review, ArLiJo,Wilderness House Literary Review,
and The Adirondack Review.
Recently, a poem of mine was included in New Poetry from the Midwest 2018,
published by New American Press.
Literary
journals can focus on regions or what gives a sense of place, the
land we live on. I continue to explore them at New Pages.
