Over the past 15 years, I have been creating a body of poems rooted in place. To write these poems, I first experience specific habitats (e.g., the Everglades, Badlands, Okefenokee Swamp, Utah Canyonlands, Alaskan Kenai Peninsula, Canadian Northwest Territories), Antarctica, the Canadian High Arctic and Greenland, observing them with a naturalist’s as well as a poet’s eye and sensibility. I inhabit the place, it inhabits me, and then I translate my findings into poems. In the process I make new discoveries about the nature of nature, ones that are sometimes filtered through an eclectic array of spiritual traditions (shamanic, Buddhist, Lakotan) or from the point of view of another species or natural entity (e.g., a dolphin, a torreya tree, a stone, a river, a dewdrop). The poems are often pro-environment and seek to inspire readers to live a more ecologically engaged life as stewards of the Earth. The poems also embody my belief that poetry furthers the sacred and that there is nothing more sacred than preserving the planet.
Today is our last day at home; we head for points south tomorrow morning at daybreak, a 294-mile run to Carlisle, PA.
But I take a few minutes' rest from the whirlwinds of packing van and trailer, savoring our home on a wintry, gray morning. Beloved husband Roger is off to nearby Albion to tend to repairs on the minivan. Seems after 132,000 miles -- most of it pulling Alis Elizabeth Trailer -- Bore the Van needs new struts and related suspension work. Unplanned, unexpected, this duty calls him off on one more last-minute mission. Men's work.
It gives me some time to bask in the glow of a candle, listening to Simon & Garfunkle's Concert in Central Park in the comfort of the library one last morning. I get to do poet's work. Drafting a sonnet, revising a poem I wrote last week.
And quietly reveling in this morning's good news: Literary House Review has nominated my poem, "According to Instinct" for a Pushcart Prize! A second nomination! Yehaw! Thank you, LHR!
Soon I will turn my thoughts to my winter to-do list. The mundane calls.
Be well, friends and visitors.
May you receive the many gifts of the Universe this holiday season. And fellow poets? Write on!
Monday, November 9, 2009
Godwit: Poems of Canada Chosen for the University of Rochester's Andrew Eiseman Writers Award
On Thursday evening, November 5, I had the honor of receiving the Andrew Eiseman Writers Award at a ceremony at the University of Rochester's Rush-Rhees Library. I was thrilled to the point of tears, an upwelling of emotion that had nothing to do with the $1000 prize.
Poets really do suffer long and hard in the lonely world of words. We really do, I believe, write because we have to. A powerful internal impetus drives us to the blank page. And we write, write, write (and edit, edit, edit) because we feel we must. The spirit moves us; the muse moves us. Occasionally poems see the light of day and appear in journals. And, if we are lucky, the poems make their way into books, which a few people may actually end up reading.
So, to be honored in public with this distinguished award was breathtaking and tear-making.
Once again, I wish to thank many people: Andrea Weinstein of the University of Rochester for all her work in coordinating and planning the award process and Thursday's ceremony; the award judges for believing in my traitorous book; FootHills Publishing, a small press of 20+ successful years that has furthered the careers of poets and kept poetry alive in the world -- I owe so much to publisher Michael Czarnecki; and Bill Heyen, my mentor and friend…who stood at this podium a few years ago -- I was so very, very honored to follow in his footsteps. But most important of all, I offer here my undying gratitude and devotion and love to my husband, Roger Weir, who traipsed with me across Canada to every province and territory in that great country. We are proud to be south Canadians. And I am so very proud to be his wife.
For more details about the award, go to:
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3491
To order your copy, write me at klmerrifield@yahoo.com.
A “quest for the center of poetry itself…” – FootHills Publishing Releases Karla Linn Merrifield’s Newest Poetry Collection
Etowah River Psalms is a chapbook that seeks the primal
Wheeler Hill, NY – “I focus and actually exult” is how poet Karla Linn Merrifield of Kent, NY, succinctly conveys the poetic process of exploring life’s timeless themes – eros, death, time, patience, longing –- in her new chapbook, Etowah River Psalms.
Merrifield’s is a deeply spiritual and sensual collection in which nature is worshiped and the human-as-animal is integrated into the web of life. Thus, in “The Beholder,” two lovers are united under “shimmering light… under the ancient stars above us. And in “Entering the Garden of the Universe,” what is human in the poem’s speaker is part of the fabric of nature in its entirety: “I now choose to live carnally. / Like the ocean, I have no other god / than gravity.”
“In psalm after riverine psalm here, whether her subject is tongue or Indian summer or the eye or box turtle and moon or mountain or love, Karla Linn Merrifield continues her quest for the center of poetry itself, the primal, and we are glad, by way of her voice, to hear and behold, to draw closer, says poet William Heyen, author of Shoah Train: Poems, and finalist for the National Book Award, about Etowah River Psalms.
The collection was inspired by Georgia poet Beau Cutts’s master poem, “The Etowah,” from which she drew lines that became the kernels for all of the poems in this chapbook. Thus, Cutts originally wrote of “cleansing the inner gray” and Merrifield, borrowing the line, created with it the poem “Darkroom Work,” the first stanza of which is:
Cleansing our inner gray, we plunge first into black and white, a glossy emotional tableau of Ansel’s grandest views: mountains, mesas, canyons, coulees. He parses the territory of our great hearts in full moonlight.
Thus, from one poem about a river flowed the many poems of Etowah River Psalms.
Etowah River Psalms (40 pages), with a cover photograph by the author,is available for $10from FootHills Publishing at http://foothillspublishing.com/2009/id63.htm or directly from the poet at klmerrifield@yahoo.com.
I've only been home two weeks from our expedition to the Canadian high arctic and Greenland and already it seems as far away as it is on the map.
But when friends and famiiy ask me, "So, how was it" it's easy to recall. I say, "Bleak, desolate." And, even as I recall the welcoming smiles of so many Inuit in the three villages we visited, I also remark, "Sad."
Everywhere is evidence of global warming. I'd expected that but not the extent of the damage. Until we got far, far north in Baffin Bay, ice was hard to come by. As Jimmy, one of our two Inuit cultural guides on the expedition ship Akademik Ioffe, pointed out when we arrived in his home town of Grise Fjord on Ellesmere Island, the glaciers are decidedly retreating. The massive one behind his town used to come down to their backyards; we craned our necks to see its foot -- easily two miles up into the brown hills overlooking Grise Fjord. Seal hunting has become more difficult for Inuit and polar bear alike. The floes where they hunt are going, going, gone.
The arctic's is a sad history too. Inuit were relocated, their children sent off to "residential schools" far from their parents to be starved, beaten, raped. Whites stole their language by forbidding it. Anglican priests eradicated the First People's shamanic traditions. Thankfully, some restitution has been made; the Inuit are now celebrating the 10th anniversary of the creation of Nunavut, a vast northern territory of Canada that is theirs to govern. And parents and schools are now teaching Inuktitut. Children are learning to hunt; they're learning how to drum and dance and sing once again in their native tongue.
Although whites eventually conquered, theirs is a sad arctic history as well. Shipboard lectures and a subsequent visit to the graveyard on Beechey Island attest to the fatal follies of 19th-century arctic exploration. I've long been haunted by the saga of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845-47. Both of Sir John Franklin's ships went down; all of the 129 men died seeking the Northwest Passage to the Orient. A 150 years later it's pretty much been proven that lead poisoning was the principle culprit -- lead in the solder of the tin cans of food they consumed, ingesting the metal with the meat -- and driven mad by it. Many, many contemporary searchers after Franklin met much the same fate. Their bones are scattered across the brownscape of the arctic and buried in the sands beneath the sea.
I spent considerable time contemplating the fate of Franklin and his men in a series of poems, including the one below in which I imagined what the the fate of the pet dog that accompanied the crew on their journey to an arctic death.
Unleashed, 1847
A frigid ocean away from heathered highlands, one border collie with no sheep to herd aboard the Erebus trotted aimlessly among scurvy-weak sailors, lead-demented officers. But when Jocko, the ship’s pet monkey, nipped her heels and the boatswain’s swift kick clipped her ribs, Neptune let over the rail and followed the trail of arctic wolves into the icy mists— the Franklin Expedition’s sole survivor.
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P.S. Roger took this photo of me at Lemieux Point on Devon Island; the landscape is quintessential high arctic.
Today, August 11, it is warm and sunny along the south shore of Lake Ontario, but the ice is not far away. Just a drive to Ottawa and a flight of several hundred miles north into Nunuvut in the Canadian High Arctic. I'll be there by Friday. On board a ship, the Academik Ioffe, a former Russian reserch vessel that will take me on a vagabond poet's expedition of the polar regions and Greenland--the Far Country
I imagine it, difficult to do with my neighbor's garden awash in floral beauty within eyeshot and the hummingbirds nipping in and out of the lush white Rose of Sharon. Hard to imagine the white of Baffin Bay. Perhaps it will look much like the wonderland in the photo here, one taken from aboard ship in Antarctica, the nether antipode I visited almost two years ago. How will the poles differ? What ice remains? How is the Arctic changing? How will I be changed?
To be continued upon my return from the world that swallowed Sir John Franklin and his crew and his two ships and the dog and the monkey that voyaged with them on that doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845.
As I've made my way eastward across Montana, through the badlands of North Dakota and into the verdant north woods of Minnesota, Wisconsin and now Michigan, I've spent considerably more time pondering the meaning of place.
Many years ago, in my first book, Midst, I mused on my vagabond life and observed:
"I hear voices. It's been happening over the past several years as I have traipsed up the backwaters & into the wilder regions of the North American continent. As I traveled, I left behind Ruskin's pathetic fallacy that had taught me to avoid imbuing the natural world with human feeling. I left behind the work of many modern poets who have used the pathetic fallacy to ironically emphasize the loss of communion between the individual & the natural world. But I stuffed into my backpack the belief that that communion could be regained & that the natural world could imbue me with its feelings. And it did."
By learning to speak cod and halibut, by learning the languages of mountain and glacier, I was able to immerse myself in place, whatever that place might be, whether badlands or Everglades or....
Recent discussions with backcountry ranger John Heiser in Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Unit), deepened my understanding of place and my place in it. He is a man who clearly knows his place, his home, having been born and raised in North Dakota and having served 26 years at the ND park where we met. "Where is your home?" he asked of me one day and again on a second day, along with a dozen fellow hikers, many of whom called that quarter of the state their "home." My answer to John came in the form of a poem (no surprise) with a refrain that hammers home my response:
I am where I am.
In the moment. In the place.
Somewhere in North America.
Since writing that poem, I've continued to ponder the meaning of place, realizing as I've returned to the Great Lakes region -- the Third Coast as it's often called -- that, while I'm at home wherever I roam, I'm most at home on North America's inland seas, if only from habit. After all, I've lived on the south coast of Lake Ontario going on 23 years -- half my life. No wonder it feels familiar, feels comfy.
I also realize now that not all places are equal. Lake Ontario is more home than other homes such as Teddy Roosevelt NP, which was my home this summer for five days for a return visit. The Everglades, where I was national park artist-in-residence last winter, is not so much a second home as it is my holy land, a place where I make an annual pilgrimage to refresh my spirit even while mourning the degradations it has suffered.
A place called Canyon de Chelly in Arizona is also a sacred place that beckons me. It is a place that gives birth naturally to poems as I describe in my essay, "Stanzas in the Stone," that was published this month in the Oregon Literary Review.
Having just spent several days on an island in Lake Superior (conveyed there by the ferry pictured above), today I'm a few miles from Lake Michigan; tomorrow I'll settle in to a campground on the shores of Lake Huron. In another week, I'll tent on an island in Lake Erie. In two weeks, I'll be back "home" on Lake Ontario, a Third Coaster at heart. But add to that tender heart a body and soul and I know I have many places, many homes. I am a creature of an entire continent; I am a being of North America.
Montana greetings from the Vagabond Poet who is just now resurfacing from immersion in mountains and valleys and more mountains and valleys in Glacier National Park. It's a spectacular corner of the country where grizzlies rule and campers are wise to be cautious. We didn't see any of the ursine family in our four days there, but reports came into the campground of encounters -- all of them ending happily for bear and hiker alike. Word from the rangers is that Ursus horribilis is doing well; it's the glaciers that are really suffering. You look out from an overlook at a glacier then down at the roadside exhibit showing what the glacier looked like 10 years ago, 30 years ago. Today's glacier is an icy ghost of its former self. It's in-your-face global warming. It's in-your-eyes cold tears.
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Still, beauty remains, sometimes in the smallest things that often go overlooked. I found my solace in Glacier National Park thus:
