A good writer, a good listener

 Someone said that the writer William Trevor listened so well he could recommend a good book for you.

He listened so carefully to what you were saying that he could recommend a book that might shed light on the situation you were describing. It was almost as if he were physician writing a prescription after examining a patient.

Trevor described himself as a short-story writer who turned out a novel occasionally. He emphasized the writer’s role as an observer, rather than a participant. He made it a point to listen.

A poet and a cold front

 I could tell you that I lit a fire in the fireplace for the first time this season, but this is better: 

The first cold front came in

whining like a carpenter’s plane

and curled the warm air

up the sky: winter is

for busy work; summer

for construction.

 

That’s Alan Dugan, 1923-2003, a native of New York. Down South, the concept of seasons is a bit different. I’ve saved some of the heavy work for cooler weather. Dugan and I agree that spring is for planting and fall is for harvest.

Dugan is a new poet for me, and I’m still poking around the Poetry Foundation’s site. Thanks, Christopher, for providing the introduction.

• Source: Alan Dugan, “Winter’s Onset from an Alienated Point of View”; Poetry, April 1963, Vol. 102, No. 1, p. 11. It’s here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=102&issue=1&page=17

Books on Wittgenstein

 The debate with myself: Whether to buy yet another book on Wittgenstein.

The argument against: The limits of my own interests. I’m intensely interested in Wittgenstein, yet my interest is narrow. I am interested in (1) Wittgenstein’s thought and (2) how his thought shaped his life.

Wittgenstein’s thought is clearest in his own writings. If you are looking for a place to start, I like On Certainty.

The best biography is Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. It’s a wonderful book, but I am interested in the narrower question of how Wittgenstein’s thought shaped his life. The best account on that point is Norman Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir.

Monk’s biography is 704 pages. Malcolm’s memoir is 100.

I am glad there are scholars in the world. I love Monk’s book. But I am not a scholar, and I am interested only in parts of what almost has become an academic discipline. I was interested in Malcolm’s 100 pages. I was interested in about the same number of pages in Monk’s book. I also was interested in about the same number of pages in Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rush Rhees. The star of that collection is M. O’C. Drury, one of Wittgenstein’s students.

• Source: Nikhil Krishnan, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy is Daunting. This Biography Makes Him Human”; The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2025. It’s a review of Anthony Gottlieb’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2025.

Listening to the bells

 Harper’s has a piece about the controversy in England over the new rules for bell ringing.

When I was a young man, I once sat outside with my brother and listened to the bells of a church in the Cotswolds.

If there are five bells in the tower, and you start in order — 1,2,3,4,5 — how many different possibilities are there? How many sequences could the ringers go through without repeating themselves? How long would that take?

As I sat, listening, I slowly became aware of the subtle changes in the sequences. I sensed a pattern. I started to anticipate the next note and was pleased when I heard the expected note. Is that what music is?

Bells are an ingredient of place in England. Villages, parishes in cities and university towns are places in peculiar ways. Bells are a part of those peculiar ways. I left England with a lifelong interest in bells.

In earlier times, the bells celebrated coronations and national victories. They also delivered the news. Here’s a bell ringer, speaking in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield:

 

The bells tolled for death when I was a boy. It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, “Hullo, a death?” Then the years of the dead person’s age would be tolled and if they went on speaking, “seventy-one, seventy-two …” people would say, “Well, they had a good innings!” But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty, a hush would come over the fields.

 

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York: New York Review Books, 2015, p. 87.

Veronique Greenwood, “A Change of Tune: a revolution in English bell ringing”; Harper’s, October 2025. It’s here:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/10/a-change-of-tune-veronique-greenwood-bell-ringing/

The way the news is told

 Suppose one of the richest men in your town got into a dispute with city hall.

This fellow claimed he’s owed a ton of money. He runs for mayor. When he wins, he installs his friends and former employers in key posts. After they express gratitude for the cushy new jobs, he tells them he wants them to give him the money he claims he’s owed. He doesn’t want to hear criticism about the claims being on the dubious-to-bogus end of the scale.

Suppose you were reading this story in the local paper. How long would it take you to realize that the taxes you pay on your house are going to pay off the mayor?

If you’re thinking about the Current Occupant of the White House and his demand that the Justice Department pay him $230 million, we are of like minds.

I wish the newspapers I read had told this story in a different way. When I read accounts of the news, I read about unprecedented ethical conflicts and about how this development has no parallel in American history.

The instincts of the journalists I was reading was to find the abstractions. I think they’d have written better stories if they’d found the ordinary, the everyday.

If this had happened in the town we all live in, we would see it for what it is: not an unprecedented ethical conflict but a heist.

'The partial truths we humans mostly live by'

Julian Barnes said that William Trevor “is the subtlest purveyor of the partial truths we humans mostly live by.”

I like that line. I think most of us have some general principles that guide our lives, but our day-to-day behavior isn’t governed by some grand ethical theory. We limp along with partial truths — our grandfather’s maxims, our professor’s proverbs, our drill sergeant’s standing order. Trevor gets his finger on these partial truths. His stories often show how our reliance on them can go wrong.

More than one writer has noticed that Trevor is a master at giving readers information without letting them know. If you’re a reader of Trevor’s stories, you find that you know things about the characters without having been explicitly told.

That, to me, is writing.

• Source and notes: Julian Barnes, “Julian Barnes on William Trevor’s final stories — a master of the short form”; The Guardian, 19 May 2018. It’s here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/19/last-stories-william-trevor-review-julian-barnes

Trevor: ‘The Crippled Man’

 The crippled man in William Trevor’s story lives on a pension. He lives on a farm with his “cousin” Martina, an interesting character who wants the house painted. 

But the story is about two stateless brothers who come to paint the house and are sidelined by days of rain. Because they have no legal protections and can’t complain if they are mistreated or cheated, they watch every move their employer makes. They look for meaning in every gesture and review every conversation as if they had a transcript. They read between the lines.

 

Survival was their immediate purposes, their hope that there might somewhere be a life that was more than they yet knew.

 

I have known people like that in this country. I think Trevor captured them in one sentence. 

• Source: William Trevor, Selected Stories; New York: Viking, 2010. “The Crippled Man” is on pp. 10-33. The quotation is on p. 17.

Arabia Mountain, October

 The leaves are turning and falling. I can’t imagine how you’d give an account that was measurable. Are a-third of the leaves gone? A-quarter?

You can see further through the forest. We were tramping around Arabia Mountain and could see outcrops that had been hidden two weeks ago.

I also don’t see how anyone can give an account of the changing colors by species. We paused under a  sweetgum that had all the colors. Some leaves were green, but others were yellow and a few were red. But there were other tones, all the soft shades of pink you see on peaches, on the same tree.

It’s hard to account for autumn.

People call this an oak-history-pine forest after the dominant species. In fall, I tend to notice the other players in the orchestra: the elms, common persimmon and red mulberry. The reddest red we saw was a black tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica.

Public wilderness

 Thoreau thought each place should have a public wilderness: 

I think that each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses — a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.

 

He asked why we would fund public education and destroy the best school.

• Source: Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits, edited by Bradley P. Dean; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000, p. 238.

Training and self-improvement

 In 1958, Gary Snyder gave American readers an account of a week of intensive Zen training at the great temple in Kyoto.

Students went through extended hours of meditation and sleep deprivation. They were given koans, which they would meditate upon. Occasionally, the student would give an account of his koan to a Zen Master in a practice called sanzen — “a fierce face-to-face moment where you spit forth truth or perish.”

The week-long sessions, called sesshin, were led by a senior monk who wacked the plodders and sleepyheads with a stick.

When I first discovered the wonders of a university library, I was fascinated by monks, Zen and Christian, and the idea that one’s character could be worked on, adjusted, even improved.

I had grown up among believers who went to church three times a week without fail, and the idea that something as individual as a self or soul or person could be improved through a group practice seemed  improbable to me. Yet parts of our character are improved in groups. Players get better at baseball practice. Children learn at school. Recruits get stronger and more disciplined at boot camp. Some traits can be cultivated in groups.

But it seems to me that the most problematic characteristics we have — the most difficult to change — are deeply personal, that is, deeply imbedded in our individual personalities. I don’t see how you can get to those traits by working in a group. It seems to me that a person must do some work alone.

I have an easier time with the stories about the hermits on the mountain. The stories about the monks in the temple or monastery are harder.

• Source: Gary Snyder’s essay “Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji” is in Gary Snyder: Essential Prose; New York: Library of American, 2025, pp. 35-43. It’s available through Library of America’s Story of the Week:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/05/spring-sesshin-at-shokoku-ji.html

Writing and making a living

 The writer Thomas McGuane worked at gas stations when he was a kid in Michigan. He dreamed of being a cowboy out West, but he learned to do brake jobs.

He pursued his dreams, going to Wyoming to be a cowboy. Ranchers quickly figured out what he could and couldn’t do. McGuane went from ranch to ranch doing brake jobs.

The best literary interview I’ve read in a while appeared in Anglers Journal. McGuane was friends with Jim Harrison, and the two corresponded for decades. I hope one day to read those letters. But the best part of the interview was McGuane’s recollection of how he’d gone to graduate school and had planned to make a living teaching. He had $600 left from his fellowship, so he went to Montana to fish until he was offered a job. 

 

I thought at some point I’d figure out where I was gonna live and what I was gonna do. I had applied for teaching jobs at about 30 places, and I got not one reply. But then my first book came out, and it made a little bit of money. There was a movie sale. It allowed me to avoid making a decision. And 50 years came and went.

 

He’s 85, still in Montana, still writing, still fishing. 

• Source: Callan Wink, “A Conversation with Thomas McGuane”; Anglers Journal, Aug. 7, 2025. It’s here:
https://anglersjournal.com/people/a-conversation-with-thomas-mcguane/

What would Henry David do?

 Sometimes, when the Current Occupant of the White House seems overwhelming, I wonder what Henry David Thoreau would say.

Perhaps this:

 

The attitude of resistance is one of weakness, inasmuch as it only faces an enemy; it has its back to all that is truly attractive.

 

We commoners should resist tyranny. We also should think beyond resistance.

The Current Occupant sometimes has such a grip on the news, on our attention, that we focus on resistance, rather than on upholding what’s good. His ironically named Make America Great Again movement has destroyed some of what’s good about this country.

Henry David reminds us that the challenge is not just to resist but to rebuild — and also to go on with the business of building new goods.

• Source: Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits, edited by Bradley P. Dean; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000, p. 165.

On the Yellow River in October

 The Yellow River was green, as green as the Guadalupe in Central Texas.

We haven’t had rain, so the river, while low, was clear. And the autumn light comes in low.

We walked to the shoals south of the Rockbridge and just listened.

I thought of two poets and an essayist:

• Norman MacCaig said stones in the throat make the burn sing. It’s the obstacles in the current that give the river its voice.

• Kim Stafford said that when someone says something hurtful you can go sit by running water and let the lovely sounds carry the hurt away.

• Roy Bedichek said you don’t have to be a naturalist to enjoy wild places. Contemplation — as opposed to intellectual effort — comes naturally. You just drift along, “currents of musing.”

Clotheslined

 In his poem “Why I Became an Earth Dweller,” Kim Stafford gives a lot of reasons, each beginning with “because.” Today, I like this one: 

Because dawn spiderwebs

across my path meant no one was there before me.

 

On a walk through the garden, I blundered through several. One, made by a Joro spider, was like a clothesline across the throat. 

If you think like a biologist, rather than as a poet, you think that now’s the time to conduct a survey of spider populations.

 The Joros I’ve been watching, like many other spiders, build webs all year long. But the big webs appear in the fall.

It’s just part of the lifecycle. These spiders overwinter as eggs. They hatch in the spring, and their early webs are child’s play. The spiders mature in summer. In the fall, you don’t have to work to see — or feel — the artists’ mature work. One of the spans in the garden was more than 20 feet. I don’t have any idea how that’s done.

I’ve seen holes in these webs — about the size of a baseball — and had thought that some bird, like me, had blundered through.

But Robert W. Pemberton of Atlanta has reported seeing cardinals feeding on Joros. He confirmed those observations by tethering spiders and recording the results. Those cardinals at your feeder love the seeds, but they are omnivores.

• Sources and notes: Kim Stafford, As the Sky Begins to Change; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2024, p. 33.

Robert W. Pemberton, “Cardinal predation of the invasive Jorō spider Trichophila clavata (Araneae: Nephilidae) in Georgia”; Florida Entomological Society, Jan. 17, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/flaent-2024-0068/html

Obituaries and other news

 When people who live significant lives die, you expect the newspaper to carry an obituary. You expect the obituary to capture at least a bit of what made this one life significant.

Yesterday’s note was about John Searle, one of the more interesting philosophers of our times. After seeing the obituaries, I’d say that newspaper folks hadn’t followed Searle’s thought.

The writers grasped part of what Searle had to say — the part that kicked up a controversy among those who think that computer programs are good models for the human mind. But the obituaries had little to say about Searle’s view on why scientists have been unable to give an account of consciousness.

Francis Crick, one of the great scientists of our times, said there were only two questions that interested him: how can we account for life and for consciousness?

After playing a role in explaining how DNA works, Crick famously promised a similar breakthrough in our understanding of consciousness.

We’re still waiting, and people are still looking for an answer. Searle offered a clear explanation why, given the limits of how we think about science, that’s not possible.

Artificial Intelligence is in the news. I can see why obituary writers would report what Searle had to say on the topic. I can’t understand why anyone would think that’s the most important work he did.

The student journalists at the University of California, where Searle taught, tried to give us a sense of his personality. But the facts they mustered — that he lost his emeritus status because of sexual harassment allegations and that he was unpopular with some graduate assistants — don’t explain the significance of his life. They don’t explain why we ordinary readers on the other side of the country are reading, hoping to find some insight. I don’t know why anyone would read about the life of someone who’s best known for being fired for being a jerk.

The work of writing takes many forms. Newspaper work might be the humblest and lowliest. But news reports from these lowly sources are important. They come into your house with the comics and box scores. In small, humble ways, they influence the way people see the world.

I’m sure all of us who ever worked for a paper thought we should raise the standards. We erred in many ways.

But it seems to me that the central problem is finding people who like to think, who like to do the difficult work of understanding what challenging thinkers are saying.

Even the small communities — especially those that have a college — have thinkers who have new ways of looking at problems we all face. I think newspapers should find writers who can understand what those folks are saying. That is news, and we should be slipping a little of it into the community conversation, along with the comics and box scores.

John Searle, 1932-2025

 The philosopher John Searle died at 93. He was an interesting thinker. 

The obituaries mentioned his “Chinese room” argument, an attempt to get people, including students, to see why the kind of things that computers do is not comparable to the kind of things that human minds do. The argument, since it involves artificial intelligence, made a dent in popular culture. But Searle’s work on consciousness was better, I think.

Searle talked and wrote prolifically on the topic. I hope this is a fair summary:

• The problem of consciousness sounds like a scientific problem, but it’s not. It’s a conceptual one.

• Many people, perhaps especially scientists, think “consciousness” is hard to define. It’s not. This will do:

 

Consciousness consists of states of awareness or sentience or feeling.

 

• Consciousness has four salient features:

— Conscious states are qualitative. A conscious state has a certain quality. There is something that it feels like.

— Conscious states are subjective. They are experienced by a subject. They don’t exist independently.

— Conscious states come to us in a unified conscious field, except in pathological cases. I can taste my coffee, be annoyed by a headache and take in the view from the window without having to change channels.

— Conscious states are usually about something. Philosophers call the aboutness “intentional.” (If I’m worried about an exam, the anxiety is conscious — I’m aware of it — and intentional. If I’m anxious but it’s not focused, the anxiety is conscious but not intentional.)

As Searle pointed out, the traditional materialist view of the world can account for none of that. If you treat it as a scientific problem, there’s no place to start.

• Source and notes: John R. Searle, “Consciousness: What We Still Don’t Know”; The New York Review, Jan. 13, 2005.

Searle studied at Oxford with J.L. Austin, who appears often in this collection of notes and was interested in some of the same problems. A good place to start would be “Rowe: J.L. Austin,” Jan. 2, 2024.

Joros and orbweavers

 Two years ago and new to Georgia, I saw my first Joro spider along the Yellow River. Trichonephilia clavate is a beautiful spider, with gold bands at the joints of blue-black legs. It’s also from Asia. It’s an invasive species first seen in this region in 2014.

In the past two years, I’ve seen more Joros. On Sept. 25, I posted a note about finding a mantis, a fearsome predator, trapped in a web. I’ve been wondering what Joros have been doing to the native wildlife. I’ve been wondering particularly about the native spiders, the orbweavers.

Robert W. Pemberton of Atlanta published a paper that answered that question.

Using a technique called a Pollard Walk, he surveyed spider populations in 25 forests around Atlanta for three years: 2022-24.

The basic idea of a Pollard Walk is to imagine that you are in a 5-meter box. You walk along a set course on a schedule and record the species of interest you see in your box.

Pemberton found that the number of Joro spiders increased 50 percent a year. The number of orbweavers declined 40 percent a year.

Pemberton’s paper is so simple and elegant, it’s a thing of beauty to me. But it’s disturbing. What is the ethical thing for a householder to do? Let nature take its course or intervene on the side of the natives?

• Source and notes: Robert W. Pemberton, “Explosive Growth of the Jorō Spider (Trichonephila clavata (L. Koch): Araneae: Araneidae) and Concurrent Decline of Native Orbweaving Spiders in Atlanta, Georgia Forests at the Forefront of the Jorō Spider’s Invasive Spread”; Insects. 2025 Apr 23;16(5):443. doi: 10.3390/insects16050443. It’s here:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12112690/

For my first encounter with a Joro spider in Georgia, see “A spider that poets loved,” Oct. 9, 2023.

 

Protest poems and songs

 Here’s the opening stanza of a protest poem by Kim Stafford: 

1. Seeing a child weeping alone, would you:

a. bow close to ask what’s wrong …

b. shout for the parents …

c. call ICE.

 

It’s from “The Fauci-Trump Scale of Human Character.” It made me furious and it made me laugh.

One section of Stafford’s latest book is a collection of poems about current events. The poems protest the violence, racism, greed, ugliness and stupidity that pervades public life.

It seems to me that protest poetry is a symptom of the underlying health of the democracy. If people were lying down and taking it, you might worry that the patient was terminal. But people are not lying down and taking it.

I mentioned that theory to our son, who plays and writes music. He queued up a concert of protest songs. It was a long concert, but I remember Carti Blanton’s “Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch,” Jesse Welles’s “War Isn’t Murder” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.”   

Rage is an odd thing. If you bottle it up, it will exhaust you. If you share it, it gives you energy, adds fuel to the fire.

• Sources and notes: Kim Stafford, As the Sky Begins to Change; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2024, p. 49.

Leaf fall and legend

 Leaves are falling in the woods around Stone Mountain.

The naturalist in me wants to hear about marcescence — how some deciduous trees hold on to their dead leaves through winter while others shed them.

Instead, I’m thinking of a Cherokee legend about when the earth was young. The people who were here before us said that all the trees were assigned a seven-day vigil, much like the trial that Cherokee boys faced as a rite of passage. All the trees were told to keep watch. They would get sleepy, but when they were exhausted, their medicine would come to them.

Only a few made it to the end. The pine, cedar, spruce, laurel, holly and their brethren are evergreen, a reminder that endurance is rewarded.

What to make of it? I love the legend, and I am amused that one voice in my head prevailed over another.

I’d say my sense of place is maturing, developing, ripening. At least I hope that’s true.

• Note: On the outside chance you really do need an explanation of marcescence, see “And baffled by the beeches,” Feb. 7, 2023.

New Echota

 The Trail of Tears began in New Echota, which was the capital of the Cherokee Nation. It’s 85 miles north of Stone Mountain, a short trip, but one that demands your time and thoughts long after you’re home.

New Echota was once a thriving community, with a statehouse, supreme court and The Phoenix, a bilingual newspaper. It’s now a state historic site. The quiet is part of the charm. It’s a sobering charm.

The Cherokee adopted European technologies. The reconstructed houses, cabins, barns and corncribs were familiar to me. Buildings like that were still in use when I was a boy. My grandfather farmed with mules in a way the Cherokee would have understood.

The Cherokee also used European legal devices and strategies to try to keep the people of European descent at bay. American populism is old and ugly, and one of its ugliest eras was a period of land grabs, one after the other. There was nothing profound or great in this story. It was greed and theft.

People today wonder how Americans could have been so unjust. Americans had a system for seeking justice, and a court upheld justice in this case — ruling in favor of the Cherokee.

But Americans sometimes indulge a taste for “strong” presidents who ignore court orders and simply do what their followers want. Andy Jackson was one. If you can’t think of another example, you’re not paying attention.

On the grounds of New Echota is a marble marker next to a tree planted in honor of the 4,000 people who died in route to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. That appalling number included new mothers, day-old babies and people who were too old and sick to walk from Georgia to Oklahoma.

Etowah

 The mounds at Etowah were made by people of one of the regional branches of the Mississippian Culture. They were built between 1000 and 1550.

Etowah is about 60 miles northwest of Stone Mountain. 

The mounds are flat-topped pyramids with four sides. The largest is 63 feet tall — as tall as a six-story building. It covers three acres at the base. Its top once held a temple and the ruler’s residence.

The ancestors of the Muskogee people built the mounds at Etowah, though there has been some confusion. There are mounds throughout Georgia. When Europeans asked Native Americans who built them, the answer was usually “our ancestors.” It was assumed that the ancestors of all Native peoples had built mounds.

The border between the Muscogee and Cherokee peoples in Georgia was fluid. When Hernando de Soto visited a town called Itaba in 1540, he was among the Muscogee. When the English settled Georgia almost 200 years later, Etowah was in Cherokee territory.

Since visiting the site, I’ve wondered about cultural identity.

I had thought of the Mound Builders as an earlier people and was curious about how the historical tribes, such as the Cherokee and Muscogee, had emerged as distinct groups.

That’s not a good way to look at the picture.

If you were a Martian explorer and visited New York in the 1800s, you might describe the New Yorkers as a horse-and-carriage culture. If you were another Martian explorer and visited  New York last week, you might describe the New Yorkers as a car-and-subway culture. But you’d be muddled if you worried how one culture had replaced the other, or how one had emerged from the other. It’s the same people who’ve adapted to new technologies. 

The Mound Building culture was a broad identity which included many groups with distinct customs and languages. The culture they shared was agriculture — many diverse peoples learned to grow beans, corn and squash. The agricultural technology included beliefs about how gods and spirits nurtured or damaged those crops.

The largest mounds in the United States are at Cahokia, Ill., near St. Louis, Mo. Archeologists have found trade goods from the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, evidence of a vast trade network. They’ve also found the remains of people who were sacrificed.

The large mounds at Cahokia might remind you of the even larger pyramids in Mexico.

This broad culture was declining before the Europeans arrived. When de Soto and his troops marched through Georgia, the Native people were interested in their technology — especially the firearms and horses.

• Sources: Lewis Larson, “Etowah Mounds”; New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Oct 13, 2021. It’s here:

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/etowah-mounds/

The website for Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site is here:

https://gastateparks.org/EtowahIndianMounds

Writing and publishing

 The first section of Kim Stafford’s book As the Sky Begins to Change is called “Earth Verse.” The poems are filled with images of the natural world.

I’m a walker of the woods, and I read Stafford’s “Earth Verse,” looking for language for the things I see. I see the world with a naturalist’s eyes, and the language that occurs to me is often the jargon of biology. I’m grateful there are poets in the world.

The book has other sections reflecting Stafford’s other interests, his other recurring themes. Stafford is outraged by the violence of our times. The protest poems are collected in the section “Plum Trees in War.” 

This structure suggests the way Stafford goes about putting a book together, a process that’s distinct from writing.

Stafford writes daily. He calls it a practice, and I don’t think he’d object if we thought of it as a spiritual practice.

The writing is part of his life. He writes as an everyday activity, the same way one cooks as an everyday activity. You cook breakfast for the household today, not for the ages. Stafford doesn’t worry about writing for the ages. He gives family, friends and other readers a poem in the same way that someone who’s good to you might give you breakfast.

To write daily is to write a lot, and the question is what to do with all those poems.

Stafford starts local. He publishes some individual poems online. He collects poems with a common topic or theme and makes a chapbook. He produces those himself and sends them to friends. Friends who offer encouragement are a good thing, and friends who have questions might be better. The chapbooks become the bases for the sections in his books published by Red Hen Press.

Stafford has used the image of rivulets running into streams, creeks, rivers and finally a big river that runs into the sea. If you are a spring, it’s probably more helpful to think of yourself as the source that feeds the local rivulet, rather than as the source of the Mississippi. Maybe something astonishing will happen, but it’s probably more helpful to focus on the daily practice of writing and let gravity take its course.

• Sources and notes: Kim Stafford, As the Sky Begins to Change; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2024.

Kim Stafford discussed his latest book with Amy Leona Havin in an interview published as “Poet Q&A: Kim Stafford finds poetic fodder in nature, war, boyhood, and writing in new book, ‘As the Sky Begins to Change’”; Oregon ArtsWatch, June 13, 2024. It’s here:

https://www.orartswatch.org/poet-qa-kim-stafford-finds-poetic-fodder-in-nature-war-boyhood-and-writing-in-new-book-as-the-sky-begins-to-change/

Kim Stafford, the son of William Stafford, has written about his father’s writing practice. For an earlier note, see

“William Stafford's writing practice,” Jan. 17, 2024.

Stafford: ‘Resilience’

 Here’s the opening of Kim Stafford’s poem “Resilience”:

Is resilience being strong

as iron, or perennial as grass?

Is resilience standing fast

in storms, or seeking to understand

how old trees, deep-rooted, bend?

 

Stafford says that grass and old trees don’t win. They may be trampled on or blown around. In contests with other forces, they don’t win — they prevail.

I like that image. It reminds me that though this country’s democracy is going through dark times, it rests on countless ordinary people who love self-rule. It will take a while before the hard blow passes. But when it does, I believe the old tree with deep roots will still be standing. 

• Source and notes: Kim Stafford, As the Sky Begins to Change; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2024, p. 16.

A poet of hope

 Kim Stafford’s book As the Sky Begins to Change begins with this: 

Some people presume to be hopeful

with no evidence of hope, to be

happy when there is no cause.

Let me say now, I’m with them.

 

That’s the opening stanza of the poem “For the Bird Singing Before Dawn.” The image is of a little bird in a dangerous, dark, cold world. It ventures a peep and a warble and then belts out a song. The sun comes up.

It reminds me, when every word of news seems to be bad, that this darkness will pass.

Kim Stafford, like his father, William Stafford, appears often in this collection of notes.

Poetry can do a lot of things, some of which are barely believable. It seems almost a miracle that a book of poetry could lift anyone’s spirits in dark times. But Kim Stafford’s poetry does that for me.

• Source and notes: Kim Stafford, As the Sky Begins to Change; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2024, p. 15. For more his poem “Citizen for Dark Times,” see “Consulting a poet,” Nov. 7, 2024.

Chestnut oaks on steep slopes

 The acorns of chestnut oaks look like chestnuts. I had to look twice when I thought I saw chestnuts on the ground, albeit without the hulls.

Quercus montana is not found in Texas so it’s new to me. People say it’s a ridgetop tree, and I could see why.

The acorns are round and big: if you played marbles as a kid, you’d call these taws or shooters. The slopes on the mountains of North Georgia are steep, and these big round acorns roll. I found several in fissures. They had “planted” themselves about as snugly as a farmer could have done it.

I’m not sure that’s the story I’ll find when I check the scholarly papers. But it seems like an evolutionary advantage to me.

I found Quercus montana in bunches on the steep slopes around Amicalola Falls.

Among the October blooms:

• Lobelias, with lovely tubular flowers. The ones I saw were lavender. I know they are in genus Lobelia — the trumpet flowers had five lobes, but I’d be guessing on the species. 

• Common jewelweed, Impatiens capensis, with deep orange flowers.

• Turtleheads, in genus Chelone. The common name comes from the flower’s shape. You can imagine a turtle sticking its head out of its shell. The common species in Georgia, C. glabra, is white. The flowers I saw were purple-pink-magenta and white.

Amicalola Falls

 Imagine that you’re on a ridge in the southern Appalachians. The ridge drops sharply — not 90 degrees but close — and the next ridgeline is miles away. Now imagine a creek running over the edge. It seems like the water is running into air, but you know that’s not true because it’s noisy.

You have to go down the trail and look up to see Amicalola Falls in North Georgia. But I can’t get over that place the natives call Top of the Falls, where the water seems to disappear.

The Wise Woman, who is a better observer of people than I am, said everyone on the trail stood and watched a long time and finally left with enormous smiles. She struck up a conversation with a woman who has been walking the trail with her husband for years. They once lived nearby and walked the place often enough to have seen a black bear. They now live in South Carolina, but they drive two hours, about once a month, just to see the place.

The Wise Woman, who comes from a long line of Cherokee and African-American herbalists, thinks such experiences are healing in a way we perhaps don’t understand.

Little things suggested by genius

Thoreau felt a little guilty about going cranberrying. You can ruin a good walk by looking at the world with utilitarian eyes.

But he made a good argument about portion control: A pocketful of berries does not set you up in business. And a pocketful will give you a taste of the place.

 

Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man’s genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy.

 

When we speak of having a sense of a place, we don’t often mean taste or smell.

I feel a little less guilty about sampling the late blackberries.

• Source: Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits, ed. by Branley P. Dean; New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000, p. 166.

The problem with media

 I read an article that claimed that myths have sustained the American republic and that the collapse of those myths wouldn’t have been possible without social media.

I was interested but skeptical. Most of what’s said about new media doesn’t age well — the phrase “old as yesterday’s news” comes to mind. But I love this line about the constraints of media by the novelist George Gissing:

 

Everything must be very short … their attention can’t sustain itself … Even chat is too solid for them; they want chit-chat.

 

Gissing was complaining about the mass-circulation newspapers of the 1800s. I don’t think he’d have been astonished by Twitter, now known as X, but I don’t think he’d have liked it either.

• Source: The line is from Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, published in 1891, but I found it in Frank Muir’s An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete History of Almost Everything; New York: Stein and Day, 1976, p. 168.