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By Simmons Buntin, February 23, 2010 10:47 am

From Terrain.org’s Issue No. 8 (Autumn 2000) comes one of my favorite Scott Edward Anderson poems. And that’s saying something, considering how many times he has graced our pages. You may read this poem and a couple others — plus find links to newer work — at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/8/anderson.htm:

~

Day of the Earth, Night of the Locusts

by Scott Edward Anderson

Owlspent, our days are numbered,
we count them in their passing
with eyes closed, and night comes
easily to those who sleep
with blinded eyes wide open.
And double-talk is all we get
from those whose hands hold fate.

In the larkspur
at the grove’s end,
pagan by rite,
we suss the folly of symbolism
and awaken
to the owl’s haunting.

Eyespeak, our gods implore us
to look beyond our smugness.
And there, we find
our temples
are burdened by wreckage
and our own misdeeding.

Do we good justice by our actions:
Uneducated stewards, electable
guardians of a lackluster paradise.
The apples bruise to the grasses,
blades fat as a night-sweat.
The others have little say,
our own descent is a cant—

The question is:
Can we be faithful stewards
when there is no bounty?

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By Simmons Buntin, February 16, 2010 4:07 pm

The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems
by Bill Holm
Milkweed Editions, 2009

By Claudia Broman

Death eventually comes knocking, but before it does, a person might as well pass the time writing poetry. Bill Holm implies as much in “Ars Poetica,” one of his many until-now-unpublished poems included in The Chain Letter of the Soul, printed and posthumously distributed by Milkweed Editions in October 2009 after Holm passed away unexpectedly earlier that year from pneumonia.

Along with new work by Holm, The Chain Letter of the Soul recounts treasures from some of his previous works, The Dead Get By With Everything, Boxelder Bug Variations, and Playing the Black Piano. The book itself is named after a phrase in an application Holm made to the McKnight Foundation to support the time he spent crafting his final batch of new poems: “I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.”

Serendipitous and poignant, many of the poems track Holm’s own emotional negotiation of life, death, and infinity. Through images steeped in landscape, people, wildlife, technology, and music, he questions why death is difficult to accept, what mundane day-to-day moments can teach, and what it means to be human. Take the outset of one of the last poems he wrote, “I Began the Day in My Sixty-Fifth Year,” in which Holm says he asks “himself questions that nobody else has bothered to ask.” By sharing these intimate exchanges with readers, Holm seems to have understood – even if intuitively – how his creativity would continue to resonate much farther than his own abruptly ended life.

The Chain Letter of the Soul is an appropriate entry point for those unfamiliar with Holm, and it offers touching closure for readers already acquainted with his work. The book holds nearly 100 previously unreleased poems, well worth the investment, even though the end of the “Storm Coming to Seattle” section seemed a bit rushed. Please consider The Chain Letter of the Soul as highly recommended and especially so while enjoyed aloud with Mozart or Beethoven, preferably performed on piano, playing in the background.

~~~~

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, January 11, 2010 6:18 pm

Not long after Deborah Fries submitted to Terrain.org, and we included her work — such as the poem below from Issue No. 7 — we knew a lasting relationship was developing.  Several years later, we reviewed her excellent first book of poetry, Various Modes of Departure, and then invited her to join our editorial board and write a regular column, Plein Air.

In reviewing the wonderful poetry from that issue, it seemed remiss not to first highlight one of our favorites:

Alone on Más a Tierra

Immediately our Pinnace return’d from the shore, and brought an
abundance of Craw-fifh, with a Man cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who
Look’d wilder than the firft Owners of them.  He had been on the Ifland
Four Years and four Months, being left there by Capt. Stradling
In the Cinque-Ports; his name was Alexander Selkirk.
                                                                  — Woodes Rogers

Imagine the turquoise horizon.  Days you saw a lozenge of grey, thought it a sail,
knew better.  No one would come.  Alone on Más a Tierra, you were everything
to yourself:  grocer, governor, butcher, tailor, surgeon, shepherd, pastor, lover. 

Imagine the loss of language.  Years without speaking, not even calling the cats
to supper:  Ben Feet, Ol’ Soot, Cap’n Cook, No Whiskers, Johnny Boy, Ratso. 
The motley kittens with no names sleeping against your face.  And in dreams,
old friends speaking without words.

Consider the beach after the storms.  Bits of ships that never reached you. Mounds
of shellfish and kelp. The blue French bottle you thought a jewel. The groves
of broken palms and a good white goat floating in the tidal pool.  No one to clean up
but you and God. 

Consider the animal you became.  Faster than the others.  A quick and clever
carnivore without salt or bread, sugar or silver.  A man who took a goat,
and then another.  A man who whimpered in his sleep, dreaming
of the chase:  the green forest, the flashes of brown and white and grey.

Remember the nights you went out of yourself and looked down
at the island, ringed with phosphorescent spawn.  And back again
in your dark shack,  tried to recall music and the smells of tobacco and soap
to forget what would happen when the Spaniards found you.

Remember the cabbage and pimento trees, the yellow snails and parrots;
the hot, white sun. All this beauty is mine, you thought.  A Scottish mind
abandoned off the coast of Chile.  You colonized the cats, governed the goats,
made linen shirts, grew rich and brown.   The gentleman.

Imagine the day Woodes Rogers arrived.  England had come for you.  And without
words or fine clothes you needed England to understand how you had made
Más a Tierra home.  Tour guide to your house of skins, the hoards of cats,
your worn Bible, the gracious uses of a common nail.

Imagine the stories they would tell.  Peculiarities of your ordeal: the man
who had forgotten ale, waltzed with tabbies,  run down prey.  A character,
and bigger still.  Even as guest, sharing Christmas goose and sherry, they would see
you as the story man:  voracious, unclothed, indifferent to a well-set table.

~~~

View more of Deborah Fries’ poetry at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/7/fries.htm and http://www.terrain.org/poetry/15/fries.htm, and look for new poems in our next issue, No. 25.

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By Simmons Buntin, December 11, 2009 6:05 am

From Issue No. 5, featuring three poems by Peter Huggins (who is a regular poetry contributor to Terrain.org):

"Pocahontas" by Robert Matthew Sully, 1842.

Thomas Rolfe on Pocahontas

by Peter Huggins

My mother was a princess,
Daughter of Chief Powhatan,
And Lady Rebecca at court.
I believe King James would have
Married her himself.  She was
That beautiful.  And brave.
She stopped Smith’s execution
By placing herself in the axe’s
Path and implored her father
To spare Smith’s life.
I love that story.  It does
Her justice and if I could dance
As well as she, I’d dance
That story all the time.
Even when she was held hostage
To force peace between Powhatan
And the Virginians, her grace
Pulled her through.
She captivated her captors,
My father included, and fell in love
With him.  Who couldn’t love her?
I thought my father would die
With her when she contracted
Smallpox before we left England.
He was never the same.
After I finished my education,
I couldn’t remain in England.
Virginia called me home.
Virginia is where I belong.
I see my mother everywhere,
In tree, field and stream.
When I see the tall-masted ships
Put into port, I wonder she didn’t
Stay in the forest forever.

~~~

View this poem and two others by Peter Huggins at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/5/huggins.htm.

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By Simmons Buntin, December 8, 2009 7:10 pm

Hummingbird. Photo by Simmons Buntin.

From Terrain.org’s fourth issue:

Accidental Birds

by Cathy Mellett

Two hummingbirds
spring from the holly bush
outside my window.
First, one. The other follows
as if to make sure I’ve seen
what I’ve seen.
Why are they still here
in the thick of winter.
And how did I go from peeling apples
to putting this pie in the oven,
remembering so much of my life
but none of the steps between.

~~~

Read this and another poem by Cathy Mellett at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/4/mellett.htm.

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By Simmons Buntin, November 25, 2009 7:58 pm

Rope
by Alison Hawthorne Deming
Penguin Poets (Penguin Books), 2009

From the publisher:

Alison Hawthorne Deming’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, an experimental forest, and the search for extraterrestrial life. These disparate interests are linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity — virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem, “The Flight,” inspired by the inclusive poems of A.R. Ammons, is a 21st century epic poised on the verge or our discovering life beyond Earth.

Quoth Christopher Cokinos, editor of Isotope and writer of poetry and prose:

“Alison Deming seems in this book like a poetic delta in which run the rivers of Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, May Swenson, and Frank O’Hara. This book pitches into chant, slides into talk, candles the self and finds the solitary paths we’re all on. ‘Mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn,’ she says — and poetry this fine is a form of mercy too, I think, an act of compassion, a gift.”

Sample poems (with audio):

Read (and listen to Alison Deming read) three poems from Rope also in the current issue of Terrain.org:

“Pandora on Prozac”
“Specimens Collected at the Clearcut”
“Glooscap in Wolfville”

Terrain.org micro review:

As the old adage goes, we live in interesting times — we always do, of course, and yet doesn’t it seem that with technology’s exponential growth, global climate change, globalization in general, and the profusion of literature and art that in fact we do live in the most interesting of times?  Literature and art, in fact, may be the best indicators, and if so, then Alison Deming’s newest collection of poems, Rope, is a bellwether.

Rope not only brings together an amazing array of topics — the publisher’s summary above points those out — but weaves those topics into politics, passion, and perspective wholly uniqe and yet universal. Folks who have read Deming’s poetry (or prose) know of her curiosity for and allegiance to the workings of our natural world, and beyond. What makes Rope so delightful, and so important, is how Deming crafts that curiosity: there’s both caution and candor, verve and nuance — always elegant, often pointed.

I think this is particularly true with Deming’s longer poems — “Definition of Disaster,” which takes a sort of artist/scientist systems approach to the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina; “The Andrews Forest Quintet,” a series of five poems written while at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest; and perhaps most surprisingly (and stunningly) “Works and Days,” a 45-part prose poem that ranges as only a true artist’s mind can.

The worry with such a far-ranging collection is that it could come across as scattershot — too much of everything, not enough of anything. But that’s not the case with Rope, because even the shorter poems fit like a cog into the larger system of the book. And the longer poems help bound the overall set, so that reading Rope is like following a pathway that meanders but maintains direction. The direction is not just forward but up — the mountains, the sky, the stars.

If we live in interesting times — and we certainly do — then Rope is a worthy and essential guide.

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By Simmons Buntin, November 18, 2009 5:50 pm

Yesterday I had the privelage of having lunch with Bill Keener, a senior attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency focusing on borderland issues. He was down in Tucson from San Francisco. Bill, writing as William Keener, has three poems in the current issue of Terrain.org that you shouldn’t miss: read and listen to them here.

We were hoping that Alison Hawthorne Deming, who also has poems in this issue, would be able to join us.  But alas, she couldn’t make it. I think they’d get along splendidly — they have a lot in common. And that strikes me as true of many poets who likewise write of science and environment. What is it that draws us together? Ideology, passion, scientific understanding, constant pursuit of truth and justice, a love for art and an acknowledgement that art and science are fundamentally linked? That’s why Terrain.org resounds, I think. It’s about nexus. In this case, the nexus between art and science, environment and humanity — the places real and virtual we all coexist, even if we don’t completely understand them.

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By Simmons Buntin, November 7, 2009 6:50 am

The editors of Terrain.org are pleased to nominate the following contributions for the prestigious  Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses:

• “Positioning,” essay by J. David Bell
• “Night at the World’s Largest Atomic Cannon,” essay by Christopher Cokinos
• “A Short History of Falling,” poem by Pamela Uschuk
• “Outside Tapatio’s Bar,” poem by Sue Swartz
• “Fog,” poem by Joe Wilkins
• “Night (Geopolitical?) / Noche (¿geopolítica?),” poem by Tedi López Mills, translated by Wendy Burk

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By Simmons Buntin, October 20, 2009 4:44 am

Over the years, Terrain.org has featured several long poems from Ohio poet Robert Lietz, a poet whose work seemed to embrace the idea of hypertext even before HTML came onto the literary scene (or, perhaps more appropriately, before literature came onto the HTML scene).

“Practicing Down,” a 9-part poem, appeared in our second issue. Here is the first part:

Practicing Down

Practicing Down (1)

Once, I think, for good. Then the story-line divides.
Too many clouds. Too many pieces to see fit. And
then the day builds over us — stretched /skewed /strung –
the intimacies restored to all of their hard uses.
And more — as the moonlight frays — in the births
and star-crossed weddings Time conspires — more
as the story-lines divide — the frogs and the strung birds
vanishing — and the ghosts of husbands
target-shooting in “the Swedes” — finding their ways
by heart /and by the heart of her instructing.

I think of the counter and caught breath — phlegm
cleared to tell — of that cold cold well
and chiarascuro deepening — of two in Alaskan light — coaxed
to the evening’s violet hues and primaries –
and two — and we — there where the waters rose –
where the woes flared plausibly and healed –
coaxed by interiors to forms and by the hard play of desire –
practicing down /down — stroked by the shade
and light and stories she would sieze on — blind –
or blind almost — bored as she was by weeks and weeks
of library recordings.

I think how the wind-lifted late-winter limbs lift over them.
And over the dreams we’re drawn to — and
then — in an instant — gone — and then — in an instant –
finished with — alive in this knowledge visiting.
I think of the cold and costs of living alone and centermost –
a chamber as still as love and children in good favor —
considering that slipped deliberated shell — and — troubles
enough /God knows — and then — in that instant –
gone — conceding this much to lungs to finally concentrate –
practicing down /down — given these first
cold rains and end of season freezes.

And more — as the light /the vibrancies /the story-lines
spin down — over the macabre carpeting — stroked
to another poetry — stroked by this cold
/cold hand I brought my own to trembling — remembering
the light-gathering /light-lettered consequence –
the terrible and compounding valentines — that troubled
but hard resilience in so many plastic things –
and — once — I think — for good — given
that colt-quick and icy siring — instructing love
/inviting love in as accomplice.

~~~

Read the full poem at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/2/lietz.htm.

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By Simmons Buntin, October 15, 2009 7:08 pm

R. T. Smith. Photo courtesy University of Arkansas Press.

Beginning with this entry, we plan to post a poem from Terrain.org’s archives once or twice a week.  Let’s start with a poem from our first issue, which launched in the summer of 1998:
 

Patois

by R. T. Smith
 

Haze in the orchard
white as a harp’s voice.
Each word has fluent
roots, and we love
to believe in the way
syllables flower, how
each noise arises
from the Latin, Saxon,
African and Norse,
the manner of wood
forming, sleek apples
like hearts or a legion
of lance-pointed leaves.
Formal, the marriage
of blossom to blossom,
the priest bee transforming
pollen.  From each branch
a single soloist stepping
forth from the chorus,
a bird sowing melody,
quick weft threading
the orchard’s warp,
one verb in its slow arc
entering the soil,
smooth as a seed.

~~~

View this poem and R. T. Smith’s poem ”Grackle” in the original issue at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/1/smith.htm.