More than two years have passed since my last post. The reasons are multiple, some good, some not so good. In 2017, I undertook a natural history project that required daily attention. From the first day of January to the last day of December, I went outside, photographed what animals and plants I happened to encounter, then wrote about what was observed. 365 days in a row. Much of this was done in real time through the iNaturalist platform: uploading the photo observations, posting the day’s writing. I ended up submitting observations for 1,905 observations. Close to 1,000 different species of animals and plants, the majority being insects. During the subsequent year, the journal entries were typed up, edited, and gathered together as a book. On January 1st, 2019, Following the Earth Around: Journal of a Naturalist’s Year was published. This was a big project and I’m quite pleased with how the book turned out. Now I can return to some smaller writing projects, including some essays which will be posted here, having to do with books and bugs of course.
Three additional books found their way into print during this interval as well:
Rice County Odonata Journal: Volume Four (March 2018).
Field notes about dragonflies and the pursuit of dragonflies. Volume Four covers the year 2011 and includes accounts of trips to the Tallgrass Aspen Parkland in northeast Minnesota in search of Red-veined Meadowhawks, Persian poetry, Minnesota Odonata Survey Project work weeks, an up-to-date Minnesota Odonata species checklist and a species index.
Brevities (May 2018)
A collection of small, imagistic poems influenced by Basho, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Thomas McGrath and others.
Dragonflies and Damselflies of Minnesota: Atlas and Annotated Checklist (July 2018)
PREVIEW EDITION: Contains maps and flight season data for each of the 149 species of dragonflies and damselflies known from Minnesota. Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes and 149 species of dragonflies and damselflies. This atlas and annotated checklist is a summation of a century of observations and research. As such, this book is intended as a quick reference to the current flight data and geographical distributions for each of the recorded species in Minnesota. [An updated edition is planned which will be fully annotated, with descriptions and identification tips for each of the species.]
Nine contains a sequence of thirty-six poems written in 2012, during the months of February, March, and April. The poems celebrate and try to capture some of the day-to-day life of my daughter when she was nine years old…thus the title. The poems cover a range of topics such as losing teeth, listening to Shostakovich, and imagining an icicle as a magic wand.
Green with Beasts, W. S. Merwin’s third book of poetry, was published in 1956 by Knopf, and was written when the poet was not yet thirty years old. My well-used reading copy is of the British edition, published that same year in London by Rupert Hart-Davis. Dust jacket curled at the edges, lamination stripped and blistering, it doesn’t matter if the dog steps on it or a few raindrops constellate a page—a good reading copy as they say. And though the interior remains nearly perfect and unmarked, blue and black blotches of ink identify several previous owners: Stepney Public Libraries and Shoreditch Public Library (wonderful name Shoreditch). On the verso of the title page, in small print, I read that the book was printed “by the Ditchling Press Ltd., Ditchling, Sussex” (not only is Ditchling another wonderful name but it is also the village where type designer Eric Gill and poet David Jones once lived).
The poems in Green with Beasts are not easy to read, at least not for me. And because of the difficulty, and because it is a collection I return to, the poems have become something of a gauge to my progress as a reader of poetry; the language—steeped as it is in the old ways of biblical English, of Latinate manuscripts, and of classical verse—remained impenetrable to me as a college student in my twenties when I had a working knowledge of mathematics and engineering but no knowledge of the rhetoric, the grammatical inversions, or the ambiguously woven syntax that textured the tapestry of these poems. Nonetheless, in a few of the shorter poems and in certain passages of the longer poems, I could glimpse, momentarily, lands and animals and people I wished to know, as through a dusty pane of glass. Over the years, as I’ve acquired a hard-fought familiarity with our literary traditions, its techniques and its stories, the poems have opened up, as if waiting patiently for me to catch up, remaining where the poet placed them: “in a still place of perpetual surprise.”
detail from title page
Two of the poems, ‘The Mountain’ and ‘The Station,’ have been long time favorites of mine, having listened to them innumerable times as recordings. This time, after reading through these favorites, I find my way to the poem ‘The Wilderness’ and read it through a number of times, familiarizing myself with its inversions, following its switchbacks and switchforwards as if climbing a footpath into the mountains. Formally, the poem is a sonnet—its fourteen lines cut into two four-line stanzas and two three-lined stanzas. In subject the poem sets out to explore our need to experience wilderness, maybe even our need to invent the idea of wilderness.
The romantic idea of wilderness as sublime landscape, ideally isolated and without humans, is a kind of Eden with Adam and Eve cast out. Experience and common sense, on the other hand, informs us that we cannot enter a wilderness without diminishing it; we cannot even look upon it without taking something. For one as “hungry to look” at the world as I am, almost gluttonous for dragonflies and wildflowers, the final stanza contains a difficult remonstration:
“And famine is all about us, but not here;
For from the very hunger to look, we feed
Unawares, as at the beaks of ravens.”
The poem warns that we are never detached from what we observe, be it a butterfly or some human tragedy, that there’s no such thing as a purely objective observer. Even if we believe we are moving about the world without the appetite of a consumer, we are still connected and sustained by it, even if “unaware” of what we are consuming. And so, to some extent, we are implicated in the death of wilderness, or at the very least the death of the idea of wilderness.
H. L. Hix, in his excellent study Understanding W. S. Merwin, emphasizes the themes of ecology, of ecological apocalypse, and of myth that enter into Merwin’s poetry at this time…and never leave. One of the reasons I’ve kept an interest in the writings of W. S. Merwin is this unabated passion for this world. Reverence would be the proper word for it. Faced with the tragedy of numerous ecological and political crises—think of the well known poems ‘The Last Ones,’ ‘For a Coming Extinction,’ ‘Losing a Language,’ and ‘Unchopping a Tree’—so many of his poems are elegies and lamentations, though they are also joyous, humble and full of reverence.
“Listen: more than the sea’s thunder
Foregathers in the grey cliffs: the roots of our hair
Stir like the leaves of the holly bush where now
Not games the wind ponders, but impatient
Glories, fire: and we go stricken suddenly
Humble, and the covering of our feet
Offends, for the ground where we find we stand is holy.”
– from ‘White Goat, White Ram’ in Green with Beasts
And as we know from Karl Marx (if not from our day to day experience), “All that is holy is profaned.” But how exactly is this holy ground profaned? One way is through the practice of private property and the economic pressures that force owners into production. With capitalism so rampant at present it’s hard to imagine a world without private ownership of land, but it is well worth the effort to think along these lines and to work at relieving the legal pressures binding the land into production.
“From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, the must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”
– Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3 (pg 776, International Publishers, 1981)
W. S. Merwin, caring for the land he possesses in Hawaii, has made a point of leaving it for the next generations in an Improved condition. In 1977, he purchased nineteen acres of spent agricultural land. Over the intervening years, he has gardened and planted and nursed the land back to forest, indulging his passion for propagating and rearing endangered palm trees. In 2010, Merwin partnered with the Hawaii Coastal Land Trust to establish The Merwin Conservancy, which will safeguard the land for generations to come.
“They knew themselves tenants, merely, till the country
Turns from them to their children. You feel they would never
Say the place belonged to them: a reticence
Like love’s delicacy or its quiet assurance.”
– from ‘In the Heart of Europe’ in Green with Beasts
Bert Meyers (1928 – 1979) remains one of my favorite poets, and among the handful of poets I turn to again and again. ‘Because there is so much speed’, the first poem in his first book, Early Rain, is perhaps the poem I am most grateful for of all poems I know. If you know his work, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, you owe it to yourself to look him up. Luckily we now have his collected poems, In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat, available in a handsome hardcover edition from the University of New Mexico Press (2007).
Often referred to as a surrealist, his use of metaphor and simile is masterful. Because a lot of the surreal images that he places in his poems draws upon the natural world, he could be considered to be a naturalist as well. In the way William Blake, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Mother Goose might be considered as naturalists. Here’s an example from the sequence poem ‘Postcards’:
Of Books and Bugs 