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.