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By Simmons Buntin, April 27, 2010 8:37 pm

By Caleb Beissert

The tremors that ravaged the beautiful face of Chile, from the curved coasts of Valparaíso to the green hills of Temuco, were a direct hit home for me, as a translator of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Chile, where is your poet son when you need him? Where is Pablo Neruda? He lives on in his words of poetry on the tongues of the Chilean people in the wake of devastation left by these recent quakes.

When I first heard the news, my mind snapped to a quote from Neruda’s poem “Insomnia,” in which he asks, “What will become of my poor, dark homeland?” (Memorial de Isla Negra, 1964). While that line more directly relates to Neruda’s legacy as champion of the Chilean people, at the time it took on another meaning, and I mouthed it aloud in shock. Neruda has other poems that now seem almost prophetic, such as “Earthquake,” which I have translated from Canto general, originally published in 1950:

I awoke when the ground of dreams gave way
beneath my bed.
A blind column of ash was staggering in the middle
of the night,
                 I ask you: have I died?
Give me your hand in this rupture of the planet
while the wound of the bruised sky makes stars.
Aye!, but memories, where are they?, where are they?
Why does the earth boil, filling with death?
Oh, masks under curled dwellings, smiles
that fright had not yet reached, beings torn
under the beams, covered by the night.

And today you dawn, oh blue day, dressed
for a dance, with your golden queue
on the subdued sea of debris, fiery,
looking for the lost faces of the unburied ones.

Neruda pivots on this chilling scene before resting on the picture of a beautiful new day dawning, yet it is bittersweet as the daylight searches out the faces of the deceased. As this poem begins while the speaker is still asleep, so did the late February earthquakes that shook many Chileans out of their beds that dark Saturday morning.

Chile is alive with seismic activity and has a long history of deadly earthquakes, and Neruda knew their destruction firsthand.

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake and aftershocks that struck offshore in proximity of Concepción killed more than 800 people, reports Chile’s National Emergency Office. The initial earthquake was so strong that, according to NASA, the city of Concepción moved some ten feet to the west, and the Earth’s diameter contracted ever-so-slightly to shorten the length of the day by a fraction of a second.

The earthquakes also occurred amidst heated political elections, another subject about which Neruda was passionate. He was a political figure and an unwavering supporter of left-wing, communist government in Chile. The government has again fallen into the hands of conservative leadership, but regardless of politics, everyone now must focus on rebuilding.

Pablo Neruda’s birthplace, the city of Parral near Santiago, was among those places hardest hit by the initial earthquake, though his homes in Isla Negra, Santiago, and Valparaíso were unharmed.

Neruda loved his country, and if he were alive today, he would surely be at the side of his people, offering not only his poetry, but his profound leadership. Leaders have often turned to the words of poets for comfort and hope in times of disaster. John F. Kennedy often quoted Tennyson and Yeats. Che Guevara was known to recite Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” at length.  In fact, Che even may have turned to Neruda’s poetry for strength in trying times, as he was said to carry a copy of Canto general at the time of his death.

When ordinary words cannot express the intensity of our emotions, we must turn to figurative language, imagery, and metaphor: poetry. Poetry has a healing quality. Not only can poems spread messages of sympathy, love, and hope, but the rhythm of the words can be like mantras, like hymns—soothing and strengthening the reader and the greater human condition.

Neruda’s poetry can be warmly reassuring, such as his poem from 1952’s Los versos del capitán “The Mountain and the River,” in which he offers these lines:

Who are those who suffer?
I do not know, but they are mine.

Here, Neruda gives a voice to the suffering people, beckoning them to come with him. He continues:

the struggle will be hard,
the life will be hard,
but you will come with me.

At the most desperate times, simply knowing that someone hears your plight and that you have support can comfort.

Poets throughout history have been inspired to compose some of their greatest work out of the darkest of times—civil oppression, unrequited love, the horrors of war, and natural disaster.

In Neruda’s poem “To the Air in the Stone,” from Las piedras de Chile (1961), he admits, “Everything changes skin hour by hour,” and he means “everything,” even the face of the earth itself, even those things which we perceive to be stable. The title of the poem implies that even rock is not as solid as it may seem.

As the Chilean people begin to rebuild their cities, they will draw on the creativity that is key to their culture. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda proclaimed, according to the Swedish Academy’s Karl Ragnar Gierow, “I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed, and rainy. But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope” (1971).

Neither should his fellow countrypersons lose hope now. They must put their trust in people, the people of Chile and the helpers from around the world who will rebuild that unique region. While the Chileans will never forget what has happened, never forget those who died, the catastrophe will make them stronger and more resilient yet. I hope that disaster becomes the fodder for an artistic outpouring, healing the hearts of the people, in the tradition of Chile’s beloved poet.

~~~

Caleb Beissert is a poet, writer, and translator of Spanish poetry living in Asheville, North Carolina. His work is featured in Tar River Poetry, Beatitude: Golden Anniversary, 1959-2009, and Pisgah Review.

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By Simmons Buntin, April 21, 2010 11:41 am

I’ve been a big fan of Sandra Steingraber ever since reading her book Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, a beautiful, resonating, and timely book. I was doubly fortunate to have the opportunity to interview the biologist and poet for Terrain.org’s 20th issue [read interview]. And then I finally met Sandra, and her exuberant son, when I attended the Wildbranch Writing Workshop back in 2008.

She is as beautiful, passionate, and concerned in person as she is in her writing and interviews. That is, she is a real person working hard to raise a family while raising our consciousness about the dubious impacts of chemicals on the environment and our bodies.

In 1997, she published Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, in which she travels from hospital waiting rooms to hazardous waste sites and from farmhouse kitchens to incinerator hearings, bringing to life stories of communities in her hometown and around the country as they confront decades of industrial and agricultural recklessness — including her own cancer in her twenties. Now in its second edition, Living Downstream offers updated, meticulously researched science that strengthens the case for banning poisons so pervasive in our air, food, and bodies. Because synthetic chemicals linked to cancer come mostly from petroleum and coal, Sandra shows that investing in green energy also helps prevent cancer. Saving the planet becomes a matter of saving ourselves and an issue of human rights.

One of Sandra’s goals soon after publishing the book was bringing its lyrical and critical message to a wider audience through film. After a decade of work, the Living Downstream feature-length documentary, produced by The People’s Picture Company, is now available for film festival and theatrical screening. Learn more about the film here, and watch the trailer below:

Interested in learning more? Then advocate for a screening of the film near you.

And also tune into Sandra Steingraber’s Weekly Essays, published on the Living Downstream website and the Huffington Post. There you’ll find eloquent essays such as “Life After Cancer — The Identity That Has No Name” and “Earth Day — The View from the F Terminal.”

As advocates for environmental and cultural consciousness and equity, we have a lot vying for our attention. If you’re keeping a list, put Sandra Steingraber on top — your attention will be well-placed and well-rewarded.

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By Brian Awehali, April 19, 2010 4:35 pm

“The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.”

– Wilhelm Reich

Young girl in interesting alleyway, Chengdu, Sichuan, China, 2010.

Here is a girl, standing at the end of an alleyway in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province in southwestern China, in the early days of the Gregorian year 2010. The longer I look at these photos the more love I feel for her.

What will she become, and what will life in the place and time she was born into allow her?

When we first made eye contact, she made a grim face, turned abruptly, and marched with purpose the other way. Then she stopped, executed a surprisingly martial turn, and stood surveying me for a pregnant moment. I waved, and she seemed not to respond at all; just stood there stone-faced, or so I thought at the time. After a moment of standing there like an absurd soldier, she vanished into the doorway of what I assume was her home.

In this moment, so many things went through my mind: My god the Chinese are rigid: even this little girl in pink and turquoise walks like an expressionless soldier! What a dirty alleyway; aren’t they loathe to hang their clothes outside in this grime after they just washed them? What is she thinking about me?

When I got the chance to look at these pictures in more detail, I saw that there was a glimmer of a smile on her face, mostly around her eyes. I have very poor vision, and my camera, with its optical zoom, sees far better than I do.

Yes, the Chinese are, for the most part, quite rigid. But you would be too if you lived in an authoritarian state (it’s not communism; never was) where creativity and dissent are often punished, and you knew almost from the start that you were going to have to compete against billions of other people if you hope for any control over the terms of your life. Authoritarianism and a crushing of people’s ability to dream and define the terms of their own lives is mutilation and psychic murder. The Chinese people make the best of the lives their government allows them, and this little girl is a great example of why it’s important to oppose governments and corporations, not peoples. The Chinese people are not to be feared or damned for the vehicle they’ve been shoved into. Their spirit in trying to advance and overcome is to be respected and admired.

This little girl’s alleyway holds several things of interest and relevance. To touch on the simplest one first, the grime is a byproduct of industry and sheer population density, and industry is, in our globally metastasized consumer culture, how people raise their standards of living. And maybe the U.S. didn’t invent it, but we sure did refine it, give it some steroids, and begin exporting it to the world on a massive scale. There are great and obvious distinctions to be made between the U.S. And China of course, but perhaps the largest and most important, as cartoonist, author, and occasional New York Times essayist Timothy Kreider observed recently, is that in China, the government owns its corporations, while American corporations own our government.

Second among the things that interest me in this alley is the red and gold tracksuit, probably an older brother or cousin’s national team uniform. It takes passion and determination and focus to excel in the athletic arena. That’s why governments and businesses spend so much money and time on their sports teams. It creates a strong emotional bond between the athletes and those who admire them. It’s an entirely natural thing, the same way one might admire a swift or elegant bird. Then those natural human feelings are appropriated and welded to artificial jingoism. This little girl’s likely older brother or cousin (the one-child policy, while powerful, is not as rigid as is commonly reported) probably takes order and discipline very seriously, and if he’s on a national team, it means he’s achieved some level of recognition for his efforts in a highly competitive society. Even before politics and ideology, this little girl is surely absorbing these things like a sponge: How does one make sense of the world, how does one find one’s way through it? You learn from what’s closest to you. You don’t have to understand ideology to be shaped by it.

As a counterpoint, consider the blue jeans. What do blue jeans mean to the Chinese? Although it’s a glib generalization to talk about “the Chinese,” in much the same way talking about “Americans” is somewhat foolish, asking what blue jeans means is not a silly question to ask in an age of mass-produced culture and mediated conceptions of identity. We live, after all, in an age when people see nothing weird or immediately sad about expressing aspects of themselves through the choice of which mass-produced item they selected for purchase.

And “America,” among many other things, is a brand, embedded with all manner of code that is exported aggressively to the world. “Freedom,” “happiness,” and “opportunity” are its dominant brand values. Consider how identified with “America” blue jeans are, and then further consider that the Chinese word for America is meiguo or “beautiful country.” I have been called meiguoren (literally, “beautiful country person”) probably several dozen times in my short time here, and it always makes me feel a stab of pain that’s related to the pain I feel when I look around at the ubiquitous Western beauty ideals on display here. Really?, I think, a 5000-year old culture of several billion people with a staggering amount of cultural achievements and its own beautiful people and land can’t think of anything better to aspire to now than material wealth and the trappings of hyper consumer culture? They want to be like…. us?

Why aren't there more affordable, non-polluting electric bikes in the U.S.? Also: note this woman's Team USA track jacket.

The Chinese also enjoy being lazy sometimes.

Even a cursory study of China makes it obvious how much yearning and rage course through the people, much like an underground waterway. One of my all-time favorite songs, “Once in a Lifetime,” by the Talking Heads, has a line about there being “water under the water, carrying the water,” and I think it describes the humanity and dogged spirit of the people laboring under the yoke of Chinese government and now-ascendant commerce quite well. They yearn, they long, and, when it boils over, they can exhibit shocking rage. The surface is not the reality.

To tie this all back, looking at the picture of the little Chinese girl at the top of this post, caught between repulsion and friendliness at the sight of me, I think: Love is both dangerous and beautiful, and sometimes you have to zoom in and pay attention before you can see it looking back at you.

~~~~

Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt (anthology: Tipping the Sacred Cow, AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, and Mongolia, writing diffusely about culture, sustainable development, and emerging “green” technologies. He curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing. He is a half-Irish member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

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By Simmons Buntin, April 17, 2010 11:06 pm

The Tivoli at Auraria Campus, site of the Terrain.org / Hawk & Handsaw reading. Photo by Lisa O'Neil.

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference in Denver April 7-10 was, as expected, fantastic. Not only did the majority of Terrain.org’s editors get together (a rarity given their geographic ranges), but we also met many contributors (and hopefully future contributors) at the Terrain.org table at the AWP bookfair, and got to rub elbows with the good folks at Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability and The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts.

The highlight for us was the Terrain.org / Hawk & Handsaw “Wild Lives / Raucous Pens” reading at the Tivoli, a historic brewery near downtown. Many thanks to Jake Adam York, University of Colorado – Denver, and Copper Nickel for helping us with the space, which was a beautiful room with a wrought-iron balcony, exposed brick walls, large copper vats in the back, and a bank of windows overlooking downtown behind the readers.

We’ve posted a slideshow of 27 photos recapping our visit to Denver. Check it out at:

http://www.terrain.org/img/2010/awp/

And don’t forget about our inaugural contests in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with an August 1 deadline!

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By Simmons Buntin, April 16, 2010 1:28 pm

Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town
by Susan Hand Shetterly
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010

By Claudia Broman

Along Maine’s coast there is a rural place where plants, animals, and people make up a community, where town flows into wild places, and where what is wild comes to town.  In Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town, Susan Hand Shetterly shares a chronology of personal essays that depict experiences in that rugged place.

What is most striking about Settled in the Wild is Shetterly’s skill in describing community.  The people and wildness around her home are depicted in ways that demonstrate a way of life; even after two readings I could not find a single instance of anthropomorphism.  While each person and each creature is given the space to be their own, these individuals also contribute to an evolving system – a holistic way of communicating and existing with one another.

Shetterly marks time through the interactions she has with others, whether living in a rustic cabin with her husband and children, discovering a cricket “bite” with her son, rehabilitating and relating to a young raven, or appreciating a dead pine in a field.  Shetterly honors her revealed past through the equal attention she pays to the beautiful and the ugly.

The care with which Settled in the Wild is written is testament to the concern Shetterly has for place.  Her essays inspire consideration of what relationships exist in our own communities, what access to wildness we have, and how compassion can better connect us to the places where we live.  The essay collection is Shetterly’s first in 20 years, and it’s well worth the time to read.

~~~~

Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, April 5, 2010 11:55 am

Join Terrain.org at the nation’s largest literature conference: the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ annual conference and bookfair this week, April 8-10. AWP 2010 will be held in Denver, at the Colorado Convention Center, and you’ll be able to find us there, as well.

Here’s what’s going on for Terrain.org:

Table at Bookfair

Join us at Exhibit Hall A, H9 from Thursday through Saturday. We’ll be right next to the table for Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability, and we’re also dedicating a corner of the Terrain.org table to The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts.

Wild Lives / Raucous Pens: Readings from Terrain.org and Hawk & Handsaw

Join us Thursday evening, April 8, from 8 to 9:30 p.m. (reception with free beer/wine begins at 7:30 p.m.) for a joint reading held at the Tivoli at Auraria Campus (Adirondacks Room).  Facilitated by Hawk & Handsaw editor Kathryn Miles and Terrain.org editor Simmons Buntin, the reading features Patrick Burns, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Scott Elliott, James Engelhardt, Suzanne Frischkorn, Andrew Gottlieb, Luisa Igloria, John T. Price, Ben Quick, Suzanne Roberts, Jeffrey Thomson, and Arianne Zwartjes. View flyer, with walking directions.

We hope to see you in Denver!

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By Simmons Buntin, April 4, 2010 1:28 pm

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is now accepting submissions for the following upcoming issues:

• No. 26: The Signal in the Noise, publishing mid-September 2010 and including the winners of our inaugural contests in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry
• No. 27: Entropy, publishing mid-March 2011
• No. 28: Image, publishing mid-September 2011 and including the winners of our 2nd annual contests

We are seeking submissions of poetry, essays, fiction, articles, and reviews (query first for the latter). We are also seeking the UnSprawl case study (query for that one, too). Our reading period closes on August 1.

Visit www.terrain.org/submit for submission guidelines, and visit http://sub.terrain.org when you’re ready to submit. Information about upcoming themes is available at www.terrain.org/submit/themes.htm.

And don’t forget about our inaugural contests in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry! They share the same submission deadline (August 1) and theme (The Signal in the Noise). Learn more.