Update

I’m reviving this blog, and the first thing I’d like to do (after giving it a bit of a facelift…the theme I was using seemed to no longer be supported, and things in widgets were overlapping, etc.) is announce that I will no longer be judging the poetry contest at Goodreads. Instead I’ll be serving the literary community as the third editor at Poets for Living Waters. This makes me very happy, because I can not only serve the literary community, but the larger community of the biosphere, which is my ultimate mission.

Another thing that made me very happy: performing several of my poems, and my favorite poem, “Flight of Swans,” by Robinson Jeffers, recently as part of Spring Writes. I participated in a reading of contributors to IthacaLit, where I had three poems published this past winter in their spirituality issue. Around the same time, another poem came out in Antiphon, an excellent journal out of the UK. Ooh, does that make me an international poet?

Juvenilia: Evidence

My daughter, who is 13, when she believes in God at all, is usually angry at Him. (I’d say Her, but usually her anger is directed at a Patriarch, so Him fits.) She’ll say, for example, about the fact that my father died on the morning of my first wedding anniversary, “Yeah, nice timing, God.” And I was thinking about this recently, and remembered this old poem, included in my college’s literary magazine from my junior year, which is evidence not only that I can sympathize with her anger (though it no longer holds me in its sway), but also that I used to use commas at the end of lines.

The Scavengers

Someday, when I am nothing but old bones –

my hip, like a dinosaur’s thigh, jutting

from a boulder, my shoulder left alone

among rubble, rocks, my teeth cutting

nothing but mold, and all these bones

whitened by ages of suns and waters running,

when my last bleached bone is beached

on some ancient shore, and every core

and solid place has been bored and breached

by a gluttonous worm

 the gods will want more.

And I will offer up my old bones, saying

Take this, all of you, and eat–there is no more.

But those damned insistent deities will say

“Quit playing! We’ve watched you for a thousand

years as you took your time (such sloth!) decaying.

We’ve watched your flesh rot, eyes, tongue,

ears, all your atoms danced away to feed

the ever hungry universe, yet we fear

you’ve held something back we desperately need.”

Ah, I’ll say, you must mean my heart.

So you, in all your eternal greed,

miss that little thing? I kept it from

the start preserved in hate and disillusion

in hopes that you would spare me that one part

left me in this nothing. Pardon my confusion.

Take it, then. Take it, my last Communion;

though it’s bitter, and heavy, and smooth

as a stone. Eat it, take a bite, break a tooth.

The Heresy of Homophobia: Checkmate, Hatefreaks

All right, hatefreaks. You know who you are. Or maybe you don’t, but you’re the ones who voted for Prop 8 in California, and you’re the ones who just passed Amendment One in North Carolina. You’re the ones who don’t believe homosexuals are full human beings with full human rights. You think they’re an abomination. They give you the creeps.

You say it’s a violation of your religious freedom to protect kids from bullying if they’re perceived as gay or transgender. Because the Bible says you should feel that way, and you’ve got to share your religion, right? After all, there’s that bit in Leviticus, and all that stuff Paul said. But here’s the thing: those verses don’t actually say what you want them to say, or what you’ve been convinced they say by some homophobic preacher. Read this excellent exegesis (you do know what exegesis means, right? I mean, you study the Bible, right?) and you’ll discover that you (or your preachers) have been doing it wrong. And what’s more, by reading the Bible through your lens of fear and hate, you’re in fact committing a heresy, by saying that God does not love us all equally and want us to love each other. Worse, some of you actually project your hate on to God (I’m looking at you, Westboro Baptists) and say that God hates homosexuals. That’s blasphemy.

Listen, Jesus says clearly in the Gospels, when confronted by the pharisees, that the greatest commandments are these: To love God with everything we have, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We honor God by letting God’s love flow through us to everyone we meet. Is making laws that discriminate against our neighbors a loving act? Most definitely not, and doing so in the name of our faith, in the name of our God, is most certainly using God’s name in vain, a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments handed down by Moses (in addition to being a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution). And doing so causes very real harm. Here’s a heartbreaking video that will give you some idea of the results of this kind of discrimination. I dare you to watch it:

If your heart isn’t already shrunken to the size of a pea and as hard as a pebble from being steeped in hate, that should’ve made you cry. Or at least made you rethink your stance against marriage equality. See, LGBT folk are human beings, with emotions like anyone else’s, with the same need to love and be loved, the same need to plan for the future, the same desire to commit to a loving relationship. The same need to protect and provide for their families. And every right to do so.

Now maybe calling you a name like hatefreaks isn’t the best way to have a dialogue. But here’s the thing. I’m not going to call you Christians. Because what you’re doing isn’t Christian, and since I recently came back to my own Christian heritage, with a full-on conversion experience that I cannot deny, I’m not going to let you claim that title anymore, not when you’re not being a fountain for Christ’s love, not when you’re driving people away from Christianity with your hate, not when you’re bearing this bitter fruit. And hatefreak is an accurate appellation, because guess what? Hate for you has become a drug. I dare you to try living without it. Like any addict, you’re going to find it hard. But here’s another thing: Christ can help you with that. Get on your knees and pray.  Ask for forgiveness for your heresy of hate. Look into your own sins, get that beam out of your own eye, and quit casting stones at your brothers and sisters. Go forth and hate no more.

From Nature’s Patient Hands: For Couplets, Elizabeth Barrette

Elizabeth Barrette is the author of the poetry collection From Nature’s Patient Hands (Diminuendo Press, 2010). She’s an astute observer of nature and delights in the details she finds there, relating both those details and her delight to her readers. Here’s the title poem from her book:

From Nature’s Patient Hands

The water in Greece is the color
of turquoise, of verdigris,
of bottle glass in August sunlight.
It sends shadows rippling and twisting
in moiré patterns on the sand below.

The cliffs rise above the sea
in slanted layers of yellow and brown,
their tops scraped smooth by the wind.
In sheltered clefts grow the green sprigs
of wild rosemary and oregano.

Long ago, these cliffs and this sea
saw the launching of the long sleek ships,
the pride of Greece. Today, they are just
a vacation place in the lazy summer months.
But they remain the same, indifferent to us.

Before we came, the melissae buzzed
from bloom to bloom with their buckets of honey,
and after we leave, they will still dance
in their palaces of pale gold wax.
Our ruins are busy with their minute industry.

The ants in the soft sand of the beaches
and the scattered gravel of the Parthenon
continue building their hidden cities.
The sea, the cliffs, the plants and insects remain –
only we and our history disappear,

brushed like dust from Nature’s patient hands.

1. What’s your favorite poetic form? I enjoyed “Tidepiece,” your Sicilian sonnet, very much.
I love interlocking/repeating forms, especially the villanelle and sestina. I do write a fair number of sonnets, though; that’s another form I really like. Much of what I write is free verse but I enjoy form poetry in general, because of all the variety.

I like forms that do specific things — so for instance, if I have a handful of key words, I’ll write a sestina, whereas if I have a pair of really good lines, I’ll write a villanelle. A thoughtful topic that breaks into parallel pieces works well in a sonnet.

2. Is there a form that resists you, that you’ve tried but not managed?

Not really. I think the most challenging forms I’ve tried so far have been Welsh ones,
which rely on features of the Welsh language that English doesn’t support as well. I wrote a
whole set of those for a competition once, spanning a couple dozen different forms.

3. Your book is long, for a poetry collection. I know you published late for a debut. From how big a pile of poems did you select these?

Thousands. Currently I write between two and three hundred poems a year. I’ve
been selling my writing for about 24 years now, and had poetry printed in nonpaying markets
before that. It just took a while to find a publisher who both liked my poetry *and* had money
to spend on publishing a book of it.

4. Anyone looking as closely at nature as you do can’t help but notice its degradation at human hands; your concerns regarding what we’re doing as a species bubbles up here and there in the poems (as in the aforementioned sonnet), but mostly you seem intent on communicating your enjoyment of nature’s beauty. How significant is your concern that we’re tampering with the life systems that support us and the rest of the planet?

Very. I’m painfully aware that humanity has wiped out a number of species, causes  more extinctions all the time, destroys whole sections of environment, generally tends to poison the air and water, is altering the very climate in destructive ways, and has a dangerously short attention span. The biosphere will almost certainly survive, but a great deal of the diversity will be lost in the process. I’m a hobby-scientist and an activist as well as a poet; I always keep an eye on this kind of news.

Sometimes I do write about the dire things going on. I’m perfectly capable of shaping words into weapons and harpooning people. But if folks realize that you do that, they tend to avoid you, which is counterproductive to communication and change alike. So most of what I write takes a different approach.

I write about the beauty of nature because I want people to love nature. I want them to understand it. Then they will want to protect it without being told; it will be their own idea and they will cling to it fiercely. If I can describe nature in terms they already know, it will seem familiar and not like something “out there.” If I can show them how all things are connected, they will get a feel for nature being part of them as well as them being part of nature. They’ll act to protect it when others threaten it, because that’s an attack on them too. One air, one water, one earth, one biosphere — everything is connected. And that’s the common thread running through everything I write, really.

5. What sort of person do you imagine as your ideal reader?

Someone who loves exploring nature, whether to study it or save it or just admire it. Someone smart and curious, who is looking for a different kind of writing because they don’t see themselves or their worldview reflected much in the mainstream. Someone who gets tired of waiting for muses to inspire writers and editors to pick out pieces to be published, and wants to try doing those things personally so as to have more influence on what kind of poems emerge.

This is part of Couplet Blog Tour, organized by Upper Rubber Boot Books. Be sure to check out the rest of the entries, for interviews with and posts by a plethora of poets.

For Couplets Blog Tour, Joanne Merriam Asks Me Some Questions

It’s National Poetry Month, and I’ve been busy writing poems, adding to the manuscript for my second book, as well as writing new Wonder Woman sonnets. I also had a chance to answer some questions for Joanne Merriam (yes, she’s a descendant of THAT Mr. Merriam, which is pretty dang cool for a writer, if you ask me). Here’s that interview, which is part of a humongous blog tour she’s organized as editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books.

Get It Done! (Another Climate Failure in Durban)

 

Despite this rousing speech by youth delegate Anjali Appadurai, the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, have once again ended without any agreement to lower carbon emissions, essentially damning the world to catastrophe.

 

Are you okay with this?

 

 

I’m not. The time for action is now. Well, really, the time for action was decades ago, but scientists say we now have a five-year window, AT MOST, in which to turn this doomsday machine around, after which climate change will be irreversible and the planet will become unrecognizable and unlivable. The primary obstacle to action is the inertia caused by the confusion, thanks to denialist propaganda funded by the fossil-fuel industry and promulgated by their corporate media outlets, regarding the reality of climate change. This has created the lack of political will we see evidenced every time the UN meets to confront carbon emissions. We need to get it done. This is not a political issue; this is an issue of survival. Conservative or liberal will mean nothing when the water rises at the coast and refuses to fall from the sky on former breadbaskets. Those who oppose action on carbon emissions stand on the wrong side of history. In the end I suppose that won’t matter. No one will be around to write it.

Comment to the NY DEC Draft SGEIS on the Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Regulatory Program (September 2009)

I’m writing as a concerned citizen of Tompkins County. Whether or not my voice carries any weight compared to the corporate profits of the “persons” who have pushed to be allowed to carry on this dangerous process (hydraulic fracturing of the Marcellus Shale) is doubtful, which is a shame and a commentary on the level of corruption evident in the approval process thus far.

This extractive process, using dangerous chemicals and water that would be better used for drinking and agriculture, puts at risk the health of everyone here by contaminating our drinking water with chemicals known to cause nerve damage and cancer. Even if none of the wells experienced a leak (hardly likely), the fluid would so tax our water treatment plants that contamination would be unavoidable. It also threatens to disrupt the relatively healthy existing local economy, which is based on organic dairy farms, vineyards, and the many small farms that feed us, as well as the tourism attracted to the bucolic surroundings and good, healthful cuisine in our many locavore restaurants. Our roads will also be over taxed by heavy trucks hauling hazardous chemicals. It is all around a very bad idea that will benefit only the few who will profit. Everyone else will suffer. It is a glaring example of the corruption of our society by corporations that put their profits above the welfare of human beings. New York State is collaborating with these corporations instead of protecting its human citizens. If our government refuses to protect its citizens, it should not be surprised if some of them use a diversity of tactics to frustrate the fossil-fuel industry’s ability to operate here. I would hate to see anyone harmed by such tactics, but I would also hate to see children suffer cancer because our government failed to protect them from gas drilling and its affects on human health.

We moved to New York from Shreveport, Louisiana, where we witnessed a disturbingly high cancer rate, with victims among our friends. We discovered afterward that the area we left had been contaminated by this same process decades before. We chose this area because we wanted our children to be able to grow their bodies in a relatively healthful environment. I implore the Department of Environmental Conservation to rethink its collaboration with the fossil fuel industry and stand instead with the citizens of Tompkins County.