The great American poet

 A note about the canon of great literature reminds me that there’s an interesting symposium in Plough magazine on “Who is America’s Homer?” The subhead frames the question: 

If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have? Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?

 

People made cases for names you’d expect (Whitman and Frost) and for some you might not (Tracy Chapman). I was pleased that William Carlos Williams came up.

But it seemed to me that the best arguments were made by those who said America doesn’t have a Homer. 

Christian Wiman, a poet I admire, mentioned a more recent set of poets that included Heaney of Ireland, Milosz of Poland and Akhmatova of Russia. As Wiman put it, “all of these writers speak from and to a coherent culture.”

The notion that American culture could be coherent was intriguing.

• Source: “Who is America’s Homer?”; Plough, June 24, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.plough.com/articles/who-is-americas-homer

A recipe for carp bait

 The commonplace on The Compleat Angler is that everyone knows about it, but nobody has read it.

I took my time getting to it. I read an excerpt in college. I read it cover to cover at 70.

It’s a strange and wonderful book, especially for someone like me — a person who is interested in the sense of place and who is prone to say that wild places, natural places, are better than the places you find in town.

Izaak Walton believed that was true. After reading The Compleat Angler, I am having second thoughts, which is another way of saying I have recognized the need for better thoughts about wild places.

The book passed a critical test for me: It provoked some thoughts of my own.

But I don’t know what I’d say if someone asked if it belonged in the canon of Great Books or the Almost Great Books. Should everybody read it?

I think I’d reply that in the chapter on carp, there’s a recipe for a paste that you can use as bait. You mix up a goop, roll it into little balls and put them on your hook. The recipe begins:

 

Take the flesh of a Rabet or Cat cut smal …

 

I’m not competent to say about what an educated person should read. But The Compleat Angler is not for everyone.

• Source: Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 91.

The art of the note to readers

 I admire Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler on several counts. But his introductory note to the reader is the gold standard. If you’re a writer and might have to write a note to readers someday, you ought to have a look.

Here are the highlights:

• Walton admits the book has errors but doesn’t drag out the apologies. It was written by a human, after all.

• He says that he wrote it to give pleasure. “I have made a recreation, of a recreation,” he says.

• He says just enough about the controversial subject of advice. My friend Melvyn and I argued the topic for a decade. Melvyn, a teacher of medical students, maintained that people don’t want advice, run from it and accept it only when there is no alternative. I argued that everyone who goes to Paris carries a guidebook, fearing that without some guidance they wouldn’t find a good place to eat. Advice is a touchy subject, full of paradox. Here’s the gist of Walton’s remark: Angling is an art, and no art can be taught by words. To learn an art, you’ve got to love the game, and then you’ve got to go into the field or studio or lab and look for yourself. Then it helps to take counsel with others who are studying the art.

• Finally, he gives the reader a blessing:

 

… but for this time I have neither a willingness nor leasure to say more, then wish thee a rainy evening to read this book in, and that the east wind may never blow when thou goest a fishing.

 

Maybe that’s not your cup of tea. But writers put a lot of things into books these days in the name of “added value.” I liked getting a blessing. And I got my rainy evening.

• Source: Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 20.

Search and conference

 Reading literature from the 17^th century doesn’t exactly restore my soul, but it does restore my sense of proportion.

I’ve been reading Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. The book spends a chapter on each type of gamefish. (Trout are so wonderful they get two chapters.) Walton’s character Piscator, who is teaching his scholar the art of angling, gives us the natural history of each fish and then tells us how to catch it. Sometimes we get recipes.

The first edition was published in 1653. Pliny’s theory that worms generated spontaneously from natural decay was still popular. So was the view that pike sometimes spring from pickerel weed.

Some of the confusion about natural history can be dismissed with a smile. But it would take an expert to sort out some of the muddles.

Some immature forms of salmon were thought to be trout in those days. And what are we to make of the observation that some eels don’t hatch from eggs but are born live? Today, I think — but am not certain — that an expert would say that eels hatch from eggs, but some fish that look like eels have young that are born live. I don’t have the expertise to handle that question. I don’t have the expertise to handle half the questions the book raises about the biology of fish, worms and flies.

The interesting thing is not that one of the culture’s great books on fishing is wrong. The interesting thing is how hard we humans have to work to get things right.

I’m constantly reminded how little I know about the natural world. Had I lived in Walton’s day, I’d have been catching young salmon and calling them trout. But I’m also determined to make myself a little less ignorant. I make it a point to get into the woods regularly. I want to look for myself and bring back questions to research.

Walton called that kind of learning “search and conference” — taking a look for yourself and then having a conversation with others who were seeking answers. He called it one of life’s pleasures.

• Source: Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.

'The Fifty-Year Texas Road Trip'

 Randy Mallory’s The Fifty-Year Texas Road Trip is a record of a place I know.

Mallory’s first job out of college was with a magazine for customers of rural power co-ops. He did stories, which included photographs, of a lot of places that are off the main highways.

Mallory spent decades as a writer and photographer. When he donated his archive to the University of North Texas, the university’s press decided to publish a book.

I’m looking and reading slowly, with delight.

I come back to this question often: We all look at the world. Why is it that some people see so much more than others?

It’s a theoretical question, but Mallory has a practical answer.

Mallory says that, at the beginning of his career, he went to a seminar to improve his photographic skills. He took to heart a bit of advice: When you go to an assignment, make it a point to look for something specific. Wherever he went, Mallory looked for brooms.

When you are looking for something specific, you tend to see things you might otherwise have missed.

• Source: Randy Mallory, The Fifty-Year Texas Road Trip; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2025.

Nostalgia

 Scott Russell Sanders points out that the Greek roots of the word nostalgia mean return pain. He says the pain is from the longing to return, rather than the return itself.

Longing to return home is one way of relating to a place. It struck me as an odd place to start an inquiry into a sense of place, but Sanders makes an interesting point.

 

The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 as a medical term, to provide an equivalent for the German word for homesickness.

 

The word started out describing a condition that might require treatment. There’s truth in that, I think.

We can have such grief over the loss of the old home that we can’t do much with the home we’re in.

• Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 14.

Becoming an inhabitant

 One of the themes of this collection of notes is a sense of place. I’m interested in how some people develop a sense of being part of a place while others seem to have lost it.

The essayist Scott Russell Sanders said that when he thinks of the cosmos, it seems more like a mind than a collection of material objects.

His line came back to me when I went fishing. I first went to an enormous store, which had myriad material objects, including some fishing lures I wanted. When I got to the river, it didn’t feel like big collection of objects. It seemed less like a store than a home — a place to live that was big enough for countless plants and animals, including me.

Sanders said we have a longing to be at home. He said:

 

I aspire to become an inhabitant, one who knows and honors the land.

 

I like that word inhabitant. I like thinking of the cosmos as a place to live — not just a place to conduct some business.

• Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. xiii.