Can Poetry Save the Earth?

As this year’s National Poetry Month comes to a close, we’ve pulled an especially apt volume from the Land Library’s shelves: John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. From Wordsworth and Whitman, all the way to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder, Felstiner devotes forty insightful chapters to poets clearly captured by the natural world.

Awareness seems to be a consistent theme throughout this book. The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote in 1923: “There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world.” John Felstiner continues, by way of introduction to William’s most famous poem: “Nothing so marks Williams, over five decades, as this urge to cleanse our consciousness.”

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

As Felstiner adds: “So much depends on seeing the things of our world afresh by seeing them anew.”

So what’s the answer to the question posed by this book? Not to spoil an ending, but here’s how John Felstiner closes his book: “Can poetry save the earth? For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken.”

pictured above: Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems by John Felstiner, along with artist Ann Atman’s delightful homage to William Carlos William’s iconic poem.

Here’s just a few of the poets discussed in Can Poetry Save the Earth?



Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, John Haines, W.S. Merwin, Robinson Jeffers, Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, and Emily Dickinson. For more on each of these poets, plus many, many more, visit the terrific website of the Poetry Foundation!

We also love this photo of the good doctor of Rutherford, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams!

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Neglected Histories, Moral Uncertainty, & the Harvesting of the West

This is what Ivan Doig had to say about Mark Wyman’s new book Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West:
“This profoundly researched book is itself a rich harvest, bringing to life forgotten workers of the field and forest in the days of riding the rails. Mark Wyman has mastered the epic of an America unable to do without migrant laborers but often morally unsure what to do with them, a story that goes on to this day.”

Farms followed the railroads west, making way for Kansas wheat, Colorado sugar beets, and Washington apples. But with this new agriculture came the need for harvest workers. Mark Wyman: Later scholars would define them as “agricultural nomads” …. They often carried a rolled-up blanket known variously as a bundle or “bindle” — hence their nickname, “bindlestiffs.: And they were also called “hoboes,” “fruit tramps,” “harvest gypsies,” “floaters,” “transients,” “drift-ins,” “apple glommers,” “almond knockers,” “and “sugar tramps.”

Whatever their name, Mark Wyman tells the migrant worker’s story with real insight and sensitivity, laying the groundwork for future harvests ahead — from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Movement.

The Land Library has hundreds of books on farms & farmworkers in the West, and here’s just a few that cast more light on Mark Wyman’s Hoboes:

The Harvest Gypsies by John Steinbeck, Bull Threshers & Bindlestiffs: Harvesting & Threshing on the North American Plains by Thomas D. Isern

Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West by Mark Fiege, The Likes of Us: Photography and the Farm Security Administration by Stu Cohen

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The Poetry of Birds

Thanks to the generosity (and imagination!) of a Land Library supporter, a few times each year we receive a shipment from an English bookseller. As you can imagine, we’re always excited to open a well-traveled box of new and used books, containing treasures we have never before seen, this side of the Atlantic.

More on these deliveries in a later post, but as National Poetry Month winds down, we wanted to sing the praises of one very special book from the UK — The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee. What a wonderful anthology!

The editors have arranged their collection by bird type, not poet. There’s Sylvia Plath on the shrike, Elizabeth Bishop on the sandpiper, Robinson Jeffers on hawks, John Ashberry on orioles, W.S. Merwin on crows, Edward Thomas on lapwings, Kathleen Jamie on the dipper, and Wallace Stevens on the red-winged blackbird. There’s certainly a wide range of birds written about in this 384-page collection, and just of few of the other featured poets include Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, Marianne Moore, Paul Muldoon, Alice Oswald, John Clare, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and many, many more.

And here’s a very fun link to The Guardian, which lists Simon Armitage and Tim Dee’s Top 10 Bird Poems, starting with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover: ” a poem that enacts as well as describes, as if Hopkins were channelling a kestrel hovering 100 feet up in the wind; it is mind-blowing no matter how many times you read it.“

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The Wolverine Way

It’s always a fun occasion at the Land Library when a new Douglas Chadwick book arrives. Douglas is a wildlife biologist who has studied mountain goats and grizzlies in the Rockies, elephants in Africa, and whales in the world’s oceans. Each book (shown below) is inspired by Chadwick’s long-term field studies — and his latest is no exception.
The Wolverine Way is largely based on the ongoing northern Montana Glacier Wolverine Project, and it’s the only book-length natural history of this elusive creature that we know of. As usual, Chadwick’s writing is quite timely, as the wolverine’s future is in doubt, due to global warming and habitat change. H. Emerson Blake, editor of Orion magazine writes: “Is there an animal that embodies the spirit of wildness more than the wolverine? Chadwick’s account of these remarkable creatures and the people who study them expresses the environmental crossroads that wolverines — and all of us — stand at.”

And here’s a few of Douglas Chadwick’s earlier works — all classic field studies!

The Fate of Elephants, True Grizz, The Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye with Whales, A Beast the Color of Winter: The Mountain Goat Observed

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The Black Arts Shouldn’t be Such Fun

When we read Galway Kinnell’s poetry, we often come back to one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ odd phrases: There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. Both poets live in a “world charged“, and both find great joy in the sensuous feel of words. Here’s Galway Kinnell at his most sensuous — and seemingly having enormous fun:

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched or broughamed,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry eating in late September.

Galway Kinnell, from A New Selected Poems

For more on Galway Kinnell (& Gerard Manley Hopkins), here’s a few volumes from the Land Library’s poetry shelves!

A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, Strong is Your Hold by Galway Kinnell, Mortal Beauty, God’s Grace: Major Poems and Spiritual Writings by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Chiura Obata (1885-1975)

One of the most moving parts of Ken Burns’ recent PBS series on the National Parks, focused on the Japanese-American artist Chiura Obata, and his life long devotion to Yosemite and the High Sierra. Obata’s first trip to Yosemite in 1927 marked the rest of his life’s work. If you have five minutes to spare please take a look at the PBS clip posted below. It swept us up with feelings of hope and a real admiration for people who fall head-over-heels for a particular landscape.
Seeing Ken Burns’ sensitive portrait had us reaching for a few books off the Land Library’s shelves. For more on Chiura Obata, an excellent volume (full of his sumi ink paintings, watercolors, and woodblock prints) is Obata’s Yosemite: The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata from his trip to the High Sierra in 1927.

In some ways, perhaps even more remarkable is the following book, which tells the story of the Obata family’s internment during World War II. Not to be undone, Obata organized Art Schools in each camp he was sent to, and personally produced a remarkable body of work:

Chiura Obata’s alien registration card, Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment, edited by Kimi Kodani Hill, Moonlight over Topaz, 1942.

And here’s a very special book, from our Waterton Canyon Kids Library:

Evening Glow of Yosemite Falls, 1930, Nature Art with Chiura Obata by Michael Elsohn Ross, Death’s Grave Pass & Tenaya Peak, 1930

Obata teaching a children’s art class, Tanforan Detention Center, California, August 1942.

Upper Lyell Fork, near Lyell Glacier, Lake Basin in the High Sierra.

Chiura Obata sketching in the High Sierra, along with untitled painting.

It’s hard not to be inspired by Obata’s life story, and the work he produced. We also love what he wrote in 1965: “You must always see with a big vision, and if you keep your mind calm there will be a way, there will be a light.“

Please enjoy this wonderful clip!

Haruko & Chiura Obata, San Francisco, 1912.

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Prairie Voices: Red Cloud and Beyond

Yes, we’d love to travel to Africa’s Serengeti, or the Tibetan Plateau, but there’s a town in Nebraska that is also high on our list. Set deep in the Nebraska grasslands, Red Cloud is home to the largest living memorial to an author in the entire United States. Literary pilgrims from all over the world find their way to Willa Cather’s prairie homestead, and the surrounding Cather Prairie. For more information on Red Cloud & Willa Cather, visit the information-packed Willa Cather Foundation website!

And to grasp the depth and diversity of prairie literature, the best place to begin may be A Great Plains Reader, edited by P. Jane Hafen and Diane Quantic. This hefty anthology contains over 100 selections drawn from the works of authors such as Mari Sandoz, James Welch, Kathleen Norris, Loren Eiseley, Black Elk, O.E. Rolvaag, Linda Hasselstrom, Dan O’Brien, Wright Morris, and of course, Willa Cather.

The Land Library hopes to strengthen its Prairie Library little by little, more and more — building on great grassland books such as these:

Local Wonders by Ted Kooser, A Gravestone Made of Wheat by Will Weaver, Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains by Merrill Gilfillan, American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa
And be sure to check out our previous prairie posts:

–The People of the Prairie
– The Natural History of the Plains

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Floating against the vast backdrop of space

A memorable passage for Earth Day 2010:

Bill McKibben’s new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet makes the harsh but necessary case that we are all living on a fundamentally altered world. Early in his book, McKibben describes the “sweet spot” the Earth had always been. We were struck by this wonderful passage:

In December 1968 we got the first real view of that stable, secure place. Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon, the astronauts busy photographing possible landing zones for the missions that would follow. On the fourth orbit, Commander Frank Borman decided to roll the craft away from the moon and tilt its windows toward the horizon — he needed a navigational fix. What he got, instead, was a sudden view of the earth, rising. “Oh my God,” he said. “Here’s the earth coming up.” Crew member Bill Anders grabbed a camera and took the photograph that became the iconic image perhaps of all time. “Earthrise,” as it was eventually known, that picture of a blue-and-white marble floating amid the vast backdrop of space, set against the barren edge of the lifeless moon. Borman later said that it was “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was simply black or white. But not the earth.” The third member of the crew, Jim Lovell, put it more simply: the earth, he said, suddenly appeared as “a grand oasis.”

How fortunate are we? And what can each one of us do to pass this world on to the next generations?

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth by Robert Poole

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Earth Day, Every Day

The environmental movement of the past fifty years has fought an uphill battle against complacent societies and industries wedded to the status quo — in other words, us!

On the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day (pictured above), PBS’ American Experience has been broadcasting a look back at the dawn and development of the modern environmental movement. Here’s a 2 minute peek at Earth Days:

As we all continue to realize, real change is seldom pretty, and often comes with a struggle. Maybe that’s part of the value of special days like Earth Day, Cesar Chavez Day, and Martin Luther King Day — they remind us of the hard work that’s been done, and challenge us to find a way to do our part for the future. There’s lots to be done!

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William Stafford: Inviting the Quiet

James Dickey considered William Stafford (1914-1993) a “born poet”, whose “natural mode of speech is a gentle, mystical, half-mocking and highly personal daydreaming about the western United States.”

For that reason alone, William Stafford has gained a shelf to himself at the Land Library. But we also have a personal affection for a poet who could write lines like these:

–the greatest ownership of all is to look around and understand.

–Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.
(Two inspiring lines for any institution devoted to learning, and to the appreciation of the world as it is!)

We also like Stephen Corey’s words: “Stafford’s dogged faith in the teaching power of nature has been matched by his persistent demand for a plain spoken poetry.” The following poem makes Corey’s case:

Listening

My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.

More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind;
we would watch him look up and his face go
keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.

My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.
–William Stafford

To read more of William Stafford’s poetry, a great place to start is The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems (pictured above). And here’s just a few more volumes from the Land Library’s poetry collection:

The Rescued Year, An Oregon Message, Even in Quiet Places

For even more on William Stafford, here’s two excellent links:

– The Poetry Foundation

–William Stafford Archives

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