“…..and this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.”
Excerpt from Wendell Berry’s poem To My Mother written in 1987 and published online by the Poetry Foundation.
“…..And so I ride (which is my metaphor)
A full-sailed ship upon an endless sea,
A universe where nothing stays the same,
Sea, sky, wind, earth and time forever changing –
Time like a river in its ceaseless motion;
On, on, each speeding hour cannot stand still,
But as waves, thrust by waves, drive waves before them,
So time runs first or follows forever new;
The flying moment gone, what once seemed never
Is now, which vanishes before we say it,
Each disappearing moment in a cycle,
Each loss replaced within the living hour.
…..Though all four are of different place and kind,
Each comes from each, and to each returns:
Loose earth becomes a fluid, and as it flows
To water, water itself will change to air,
And air to fire which rises over it
To climb the highest reaches of the heavens.
They then return, last first in backward order,
Fire in smoky air, from air to water,
And waves changed into marshes turn to earth.
Nothing retains the shape of what it was,
And Nature, always making old things new,
Proves nothing dies within the universe,
But takes another being in new forms.
What is called birth is change from what we were,
And death the shape of being left behind.
Though all things melt or grow from here to there,
Yet the same balance of the world remains.
…..And now the measure of my song is done:
The work has reached its end; the book is mine,
None shall unwrite these words: nor angry Jove,
Nor war, nor fire, nor flood,
Nor venomous time that eats our lives away.
Then let that morning come, as come it will,
When this disguise I carry shall be no more,
And all the treacherous years of life undone,
And yet my name shall rise to heavenly music,
The deathless music of the circling stars.
As long as Rome is the Eternal City
These lines shall echo from the lips of men.
As long as poetry speaks truth on earth,
That immortality is mine to wear.”
Excerpts from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses Book XV, the doctrines of Pythagoras and the Epilogue translated by Horace Gregory (New York: Viking Press, 2009) from pages 413 – 437.
“What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how badly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page – for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love, which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its successes or failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity…”
Excerpt from a broadside by Wendell Berry produced to honor the legacy of North Point Press, 1980 – 1991.
We were afraid to go back
afraid to listen to the stories
ash and bone might tell
We wanted to believe our lives were immutable
untouchable by nature, fate or disaster
At twilight we skirted the base of the first burned hill
reclaimed her scorched shoulder
her ruined slope
The ground beneath our feet released puffs of smoke
like ancient ghosts they rose up around us
to disappear into wind…..
Excerpt from the poem “After the Fires” by Devereaux Baker published in California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology edited by Molly Fisk (p.15)
“When Sir Francis Drake spent a month in 1579 repairing his ship in the bay that now bears his name, the hills and ridges to the east would have been mostly open grassland or coastal scrub because of the Miwok’s liberal use of fire as a key tool of their ecological management and because of grazing by herds of elk, which benefited from the anthropogenic burning. The same was true when Sebastian Ceremeno, a Portuguese navigator and explorer sailing on the Manilla galleon route, was shipwrecked in Drakes Bay in 1595. Richard Henry Dana, visiting San Francisco Bay in 1840 described the herds of elk he could see on the open headlands.” (p.84)
“The [Mt.] Vision Fire started on October 3, 1995, and burned for about a week in an area mostly designated as park wilderness, eventually burning almost twelve thousand acres. Some local boys apparently thought they had drowned their campfire, but they hadn’t. It’s a story that reminds me of Henry David Thoreau; on a camping trip with a friend in April 1844, their campfire got out of control and almost burned down their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. Many years later, that experience led Thoreau to investigate the fire ecology of his local ecosystem. He recognized the influence of past Native American burning on the landscape and became essentially the first published fire ecologist through his writing on the subject. The Vision Fire burned an area partly dominated by bishop pine, Pinus muricata. Bishop pine became so familiar with fire that it evolved a relationship that could be called “friends with fire.” (p.86-87)
Excerpt from the chapter “Making Friends with Fire” published in Bruce Byer’s book titled Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast.
“After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a
part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us
overhead.
When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are
renewed.
There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart
might be just down the road.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindness of the
earth and sun; we exist together in a sacred field of
meaning.”
Excerpt from Joy Harjo’s poem Talking with the Sun published in her book titled Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (2015) (p.31)
Liberty for the few
Equality for the many
The criminal copies the oligarchy
Which is an international fold of moneys
The gulls of New England
Close their bills against the oil
Spills. At night pleasure rocks
In chairs and harbors
Wine colors contort on the goblets
From Selected Poems (2000) by Fanny Howe (p.105)
*****
“With [Charles] Olson his identity with the place, with Gloucester, give his major work, The Maximus Letters, a deep emotional center. The only other American writer who gives me the same sense of responding to a place, in both an historical and philosophic sense is Thoreau in his first book, A Week On the Concord And Merrimack Rivers.”
“Olson, in one of the Letters’ most persistent themes, uses Gloucester as a poetic expression of the realities of history…..the sense of place in the letters is – in a final sense – so compelling because what Olsen is trying to hold on to is the sense of place in time, as well as the sense of the immediate place of Gloucester.”
“The Letters become less of the poet’s expression and more the historian’s as they go on, even though the history is handled as poetic material. In any of the single Letters the history is almost without meaning – odd facts, lists of provisions, inserted paragraphs on the fishing industry – but with the growth of the poem as a whole it is clear that something else is involved.”
“Sometimes I find myself thinking of Olson as an artisan, a worker with his hands, a carpenter, New England journeyman…..It is difficult to be both a historian and a poet, but by using some of his materials as an artisan he is usually able to keep the two together within the poem.”
“The fullest aspect of the poem is still its involvement with Gloucester, but it is also about the painter Marsden Hartley – the period of his work in Gloucester, the powerful, mythic, almost folk paintings of the 1930s. The emphasis of the Letter is still circular – within, from, and to Gloucester – but Olson has separated out a part of this experience, and given it a distinct, separate identity outside of the main currents of the rest of the Letters.”
“I’ve never decided whether or not Olson considers his poems difficult to follow or if he cares, but he is difficult, one of the most difficult of the modern poets to follow…sometimes as in the inner references of Letter 7 its because he doesn’t give enough away – at other times, as in the overall structure of the Letters, because he includes a maze of only distantly related material.
“The glimpse that Olson gives of Hartley does have its inner intensity. Is it only for someone who knows the paintings? Who is already familiar with Hartley’s life? It could be. The response to anything in Maximus has to be personal. For someone already deeply familiar with the painter and his work Olson’s poem, with all it’s rambling and discursion, is a sensitive, moving portrait…..whatever someone decides about the poem any American poet beginning to sort out his poetic background will have to find his own place in the Letters – to find his own place in the American vision of Charles Olson’s Gloucester.”
From Young Tom and Charlie: Two American Poets at Home in Gloucester Seven Poems by T.S. Eliot and Charles Olson and Two Commentaries by Amanda Cook and Samuel Charters Selected with an Introduction by Ann Charters (p.72 – 81)
The quotes are from the commentary by Samuel Charters.
“…Beauty in the Song is clearly not the idealized, symmetrical, or abstract beauty of the Greeks, although occasional references to symmetry occur as in the images of twin gazelles and twin teeth (4:3, 4:5, 6:6, 7:4). The poet presents impressionistic images rather than a definitive likeness. Beauty in the song is visual, aromatic and tactile; it is textured and complex – a synesthetic experience. Beauty is a function of the abundance of the natural world. It is a function of aliveness. Beauty only becomes intelligible through the Song’s figurative language, which collapses the distance between the lovers and the land they inhabit. What beauty actually looks like in the Song is a luxurious land, alive with sheep grazing on hillsides, gazelles bounding through mountains, and trees laden with fruit.” (p.22)
An excerpt from Rabbi Ellen Bernstein’s Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading The Song of Songs in the Age of the Climate Crisis
“His father owned watermills and windmills; he understood
weather from childhood.
Of hail squalls in spring he had this to say: ‘The clouds
accumulate in very large masses,
And from their loftiness seem to move but slowly; immediately
on these large clouds
Appear numerous opaque patches, which are only small clouds
passing rapidly
Before them. Those floating much nearer the earth may
perhaps fall in with
A stronger current of wind, which drives them with greater
rapidity from light to shade
Through the lanes of the clouds; hence they are called by
wind-millers and sailors, Messengers,
And always portend bad weather.’ Therefore Constable learned
the craft of chiaroscuro.” (p.46)
Excerpt from Ciaran Carson’s poem John Constable, Study of Clouds, 1822 published in his book Still Life
“[J.M.W. ] Turner was well aware of the differences between painting and poetry, but he was also keenly aware of their affinities – as indicated in his 1812 assertion that ‘Painting and Poetry, flowing from the same fount mutually by vision…reflect, and heighten each other’s beauties like…mirrors.’ ” (p.6)
Excerpt from Robert K. Wallace’s Melville & Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright
“Ut Pictura Poesis.” A phrase used by the Roman poet Horace (circa BCE 20) ‘meaning as painting, so is poetry’…..the relationship between the two arts is usually said to lie in their imitation of nature (see mimesis).
Tracing the way back home here,
I might round North Mountain
on roads hung along cliffwalls,
timbers rising in switchbacks,
or I could take the watercourse
way winding and circling back,
level lakes broad and brimming,
crystalline depths clear and deep
beyond shorelines all lone grace
and long islands of lush brocade.
Gazing on and on in reverence
across realms so boundless away,
I come to the twin rivers that flow through together.
Two springs sharing one source,
they follow gorges and canyons
to merge at mountain headlands
and cascade on, scouring sand out and mounding dunes
below peaks that loom over islands swelling into hills,
whitewater carrying cliffs away in a tumble of rocks,
a marshy tangle of fallen trees glistening in the waves.
Following along the south bank that crosses out front,
the snaking north cliff that looms behind, I’m soon
lost in thick forests, the nature of dusk and dawn in full view,
and for bearings, I trust myself to the star-filled night skies.
Poem 36 by Hsien Ling-yun (385 – 433) a buddhist poet who loved mountains and streams
from Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China
Translated by David Hinton
Mt. Morrison & Owens River in April 2022 and February 2023, Robin L. Chandler.
Vast and majestic, mountains embrace your shadow;
Broad and deep, rivers harbor your voice.
Home Again Among Fields and Gardens
Nothing like all the others, even as a child,
rooted in such love for hills and mountains,
I stumbled into their net of dust, that one
departure a blunder lasting thirteen years.
But a tethered bird longs for its old forest,
and a pond fish its deep waters — so now,
my southern outlines cleared, I nurture
simplicity among these fields and gardens,
home again. I’ve got nearly two acres here,
and four or five rooms in this thatch hut,
elms and willows shading the eaves in back,
and in front, peach and plum spread wide.
Villages lost across mist-and-haze distances,
kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,
dogs bark deep among back roads out here,
and roosters crow from mulberry treetops.
No confusion within these gates, no dust,
my empty home harbors idleness to spare.
Back again: after so long caged in that trap,
I’ve returned to occurrence coming of itself.
*****
T’ao Ch’ien (365 – 427)
The rise of wilderness poetry in the early 5th century C.E. was part of a profound new engagement with wilderness that arose among Chinese artist-intellectuals for several reasons: the recent loss of northern China to “barbarians,” forcing China’s artist-intellectuals to emigrate with the government, settling in the southeast where they were enthralled by a new landscape of serenely beautiful mountains…..born into the educated aristocracy, T’ao was expected to take his proper place in the Confucian order by serving in the government. Accordingly, he took a number of government positions. But he had little patience for the constraints and dangers of official life, and little interest in its superficial rewards, so he finally broke free and returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on the family farm at his ancestral village of Ch’ai-sang (Mulberry-Bramble), just northwest of the famous Thatch-Hut (Lu) Mountain…..this was not a romantic return to the bucolic, but to a life in which the spiritual ecology of tzu-jan was the very texture of everyday experience. This outline of T’ao Ch’ien’s life became a central organizing myth in the Chinese tradition: artist-intellecuals over millennia admired and imitated the way T’ao lived out his life as a recluse, though it meant enduring considerable poverty and hardship…..this commitment, so central to the rivers-and-mountains tradition in poetry, was the one honorable alternative to government service for the artist-intellectual class…..represented a commitment to a more spiritually fulfilling life in which one inhabits the wilderness cosmology in the most immediate day-to-day way…..if Tao’s poems seem bland, a quality much admired in them by the Sung Dynasty poets, it’s because they are never animated by the struggle for understanding. Instead they begin with the deepest wisdom.
Verse, poem, and biography from Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China translated by David Hinton
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