Tag: Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau, Nature and Poetics and a New Podcast

March 24, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Henry David Thoreau

I have written about science and poetry on this blog before, all the way back from when I published my first book of poetry, Why Photographers Commit Suicide, a book part science poetry and part science-fiction. I'm always interested in breaking down the divide between literature and science. In that spirit, The Atlantic magazine published a great article tying Henry David Thoreau to this, "What Thoreau Saw" by Andrea Wulf.

Here are some pertinent quotes:

"Thoreau was staking out a new purpose: to create a continuous, meticulous, documentary record of his forays. Especially pertinent two centuries after his birth, in an era haunted by inaction on climate change, he worried over a problem that felt personal but was also spiritual and political: how to be a rigorous scientist and a poet, imaginatively connected to the vast web of natural life. Thoreau’s real masterpiece is not Walden but the 2-million-word journal that he kept until six months before he died. Its continuing relevance lies in the vivid spectacle of a man wrestling with tensions that still confound us. The journal illustrates his almost daily balancing act between recording scrupulous observations of nature and expressing sheer joy at the beauty of it all. Romantic predecessors like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, centuries before that, polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci thrived on the interplay between subjective and objective exploration of the world. For Leonardo, engineering and math infused painting and sculpture; Coleridge said that he attended chemistry lectures to enlarge his 'stock of metaphors.'"

…"For Thoreau, along with his fellow Transcendentalists, the by-now familiar dichotomy between the arts and the sciences had begun to hold sway. (The word scientist was coined in 1834, as the sciences were becoming professionalized and specialized.)"

… "Crucial though the data and reports are, they eclipse precisely the sort of immediate, intuitive, sensual experiences of nature that are, in our Anthropocene era, all too rare. For Thoreau, a sense of wonder—of awe toward, but also oneness with, nature—was essential. We will, he understood, protect only what we love."

… "Attention to the pivotal moment when he began to use his journal as he never had before. On November 8, 1850, a year or so after his naturalist’s regimen had begun"…

…“And this is what truly staggers the mind,” Walls goes on. “From this point, Thoreau did not stop doing this, ever—not until, dying and almost too weak to hold a pen, he crafted one final entry."

…."Steeped in the sciences, Thoreau emphasized that orderly data needn’t be dead. Carl Linnaeus’s binomial system for classifying plants was “itself poetry,” and in the early 1850s Thoreau jotted in his journal, “Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds.”

…"Still, Thoreau felt the limits of disciplined scrutiny. 'With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?'"

… "The following summer he summed up the dilemma. 'Every poet has trembled on the verge of science."

Good stuff.

Poetry Unbound

My friend Kalisha tipped me off to this new podcast, Poetry Unbound, which is beautifully produced and digestible in short ten-ish minute podcasts. The first one I listened to was this poem by Raymond Antrobus, "A Poem About When We’re Disbelieved" posted on March 16. This podcast not only asked listeners to complete some homework at the end but made me quite emotional.

More good stuff.

Review of Favorites, the Anthology of the Aurorean Journal

July 7, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 3 Comments

Fractions are killing poetry: fractions of the time the world has available to devote to reading it: books, anthologies and journals. Journals above all seem to bear the most of a slim readership. But they do the Lord’s work, big and small, famous and obscure, as a magnet for culling new poetry out from the wilderness. The great thing about a journal anthology is that we are able to read the best of the crop from all the sweat and labor of a journal’s works. It’s condensed goodness.

The Aurorean journal has published over 50 issues in the past 15 years and featured over a thousand poets. Editors Cynthia Brackett-Vincent and Devin McGuire have now compiled their Greatest Hits, an anthology called Favorites which is divided into sections that show exactly what subjects this journal specializes in: seasons, meditations and New England. Brackett-Vincent’s introduction provides and interesting tale of how she came to found and produce this poetry journal and the transformations the project has made over the years.

The Seasons section is full of “frost-warped” leaves and frozen ponds and starts strong with a poem by Lillis Palmer called “Planting Bulbs” where we find ourselves “breathing the humus-sweet cold air” as she describes bulbs who have a secret faith. I also loved Michael Macklin’s “The furrows” about the dead under our plows and Judith Tate’s “Yard Work.” I enjoyed Susan Wilde’s “when the television goes off in winter” and Virgil Suárez’s “El Hermitaño, My Friend Ryan Who Believes He Roamed Like Locust in a Previous Life” where the locusts can be heard in the fields like “strewn punctuation.” Monica Flegg’s “A Winter Farewell” was my favorite of this section, where emptiness feels like:

…a loss
a snowflake sized one
buried deep in this blizzard of a lesson.

The Meditations section struck me as primarily one of death poems. I liked Cynthia Brackett-Vincent’s “Kodi Ball,” especially as I believe there truly can never be enough dog poems in this world and Cathy Edgett’s “Healing:”

I drank grief like tea in Tibet,
Holding the cup with both hands

Meditations boast poems with dedications to a menagerie of inspirations, including poet Allen Ginsberg, Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas and Lake Superior and includes a variety of tributes to mothers (some departed), including the mother-ode I loved the best by Dellana Diovisalvo, “I Say Mother.” The section also includes one of the most tastefully poignant eulogies to the victims of 9/11 who felt compelled to jump from the burning towers, Clemens Schoenebeck’s “For the Angels, Unwinged.”

Since New England is commonly associated with the four seasons, the first and final sections have plenty of overlapping images of stone fences, frosted windows, sun-bleached shells, an interesting number of references to lichen, pitched roofs, harvests and one mention of Mount Washington I liked very much, Michael Keshigian’s “Upon The Roof” where:

above green challenging the edge
I spin quickly
to view the world in a glance

I lived in Stow, Massachusetts for 5 months in the spring and summer of 1995 working at the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy, then returning often for visits after I started attending Sarah Lawrence College from 1995 to 1999; and this anthology reminded me of New England’s solid pastoral beauty, the salty Atlantic seashores, the bitter winter wind and the upstaging panoramas of leaves. The Aurorean tends to publish very compact poems, (many are thin and long, none are longer than a page), setting a serene descriptive scene or a moment’s reflections on a landscape, a general array of gentle points and soft landings. The book is full of quiet pools of thought or contemplations where you can, as Anne Dewees writes, “feel the earth breathe.”

I turned to my archaeologist husband to explicate the final brilliant poem of the book, one called “Faith” by Robert M. Chute. It was about Henry David Thoreau and arrowheads and faith. I loved it so much I copied it out of the book for taping up on my office wall.

To buy this anthology
To visit the Aurorean