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For a long time I have
wanted to create a space to put up poems that are significant
to me, many of which have been written by unknown writers or which lie
outside the canonized bodies of work of more famous writers. Many of the
poems I am drawn to are wildly discursive, and that usually means long,
but I have also been meaning to prod myself to develop a larger mental
data base of poems, and shorter poems seem more ammenable to memorization by heart. So this will be a sort
of mish-mash: memory poems, forgotten poems, never even remembered poems,
unanthologized poems Friday, April 17, 2009
One of the reasons I haven't written anything here is that for the past year I've been writing on a web site/blog that is devoted to a great blue heron rookery (nesting area) in my neighborhood that is threatened by development and which state biologists hadn't been aware of. The result is that the developer must build in such a way that minimizes impacts to the herons (which are not endangered). And the primary victory is that herons continue to nest there despite logging of the development site and the access road to the development, which runs through the rookery.
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Here is a poem about the GBH that someone made me aware of when I was blogging for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Turns out that it is Portland's official bird, and William Stafford was commissioned to write a poem about it. Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron" by William Stafford Out of their loneliness for each other two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch forward and become suddenly a life lifted from the dawn to the rain. It is the wilderness come back again, a lagoon with our city reflected in its eye. We live by faith in such presences. It is a test for us, that thin but real, undulating figure that promises, "If you keep the faith I will exist at the edge, where your vision joins the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light, feet that go down in the mud where the truth is." This anthropomorphosizes the bird a bit more than I would like, but I think it is terribly difficult to write "the civic poem." Labels: stafford |
