Post by moira on Jul 10, 2008 21:48:26 GMT 2
From the Back of Beyond: Women’s Poetry Outside the Academy
By Christina Pacosz
When I searched out the meaning for the phrase “the back of beyond” I immediately felt a frisson of recognition. My being a woman poet outside of the academy has been a journey through a lonely forsaken place. The phrase was first used by Sir Walter Scott in his novel The Antiquarian, published in 1816. “You…whirled them to the back of beyond to look at the old Roman camp.” But it has a contemporary ring to it for those of us struggling to write outside the academy.
Even when I tried to make my way beneath a canopy of glittering stars to the camp fire I could see in the distance, getting to that spot was all too often fraught with difficulties; or if I did somehow manage to arrive, breathless but intent on warming myself at the flame, I wasn’t able to remain in that place of warmth and welcome for very long. I write poetry as if my life depends upon it, because it does.
When asked recently why I became a poet, to my surprise, I replied, I was born a poet. It seems that was the only possible answer: born to that status like a serf to a manor. Now, at sixty-one, this reply, however startling, is also the one true thing in my life – a tough, resilient root, reaching through the decades. I am a poet. I was born a poet. I will die a poet.
Being a woman poet outside the academy is another category, one informed by this natal right to claim the title of poet. I am a working-class, Polish-American woman and I am a poet. Once, not so long ago, the former categories would have made the latter impossible.
My parents insisted that books were the way out and I believed them, and even though my mother wrote my stories down and my father told me many tales, I really didn’t think I could become a writer of books. A voracious and omnivorous reader, yes! But becoming a writer, though I wrote early and often, was never a phrase that formed on my tongue. There were no poets, no writers, striding down our block, heading toward the Crosstown bus, their metal lunch buckets tucked under one arm. Factory work, the broom and the mop, these were what people did to survive. I was the first member of my immediate family to graduate high school and attend and eventually graduate from college. And a woman!!!
While still in the academy struggling to finish my bachelor’s degree at Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan during the late 1960’s, it was clear to me that my poetry, my way of seeing the world did not really meet with anyone’s seal of approval.
I had written poems and stories since Catholic grade school and on through public high school, where I was feature editor of the school paper, The Cass Technician. Robert Gow, my journalism teacher/mentor, made sure we studied Alfred Korzybski (Polish born Jewish semantic linguist) whose basic principal that “the map is not the territory” has been crucial for my view of the world. “The word is not the world manifest, but a simulacrum. A crude copy at worst. A reasonable facsimile at best.” Understanding how words really worked in the world helped me roll with the punches I received being a woman of my time and a woman writing outside academe.
Thanks to Mr. Gow, I had been selected to attend a summer session at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan for creatively gifted high school students and was lucky enough to study with William D. Snodgrass. Some of my poems won Honorable Mentions in the National Scholastic Writing Awards.
Then why did my professor for Modern Poetry where we studied the minutia of Yeats and Elliot – and I had written my high school senior year research paper on an aspect of imagery in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – see fit to give me a “C?” What I remember clearly now is that my “take” of the poems just didn’t fit the company line, the professor’s views on what these great poets meant were to be parroted by the students. There was only one right meaning, his. I chafed at this restriction of imagination like a wild horse at a bit. I am proud of that C because it is proof that I have always been an independent thinker even if that meant getting a lesser grade than what I really deserved.
When I visited in schools in several states as a poet in various programs during the 1980’s and 90’s, I always made sure to explain that beyond a certain basic parameter – if I was writing a poem that took place in a boat, say, but you thought the setting was on a train, then either I had written a bad poem or you weren’t listening carefully enough. Other than that anything goes. Meaning, as Muriel Rukeyser insisted, must arrive in the heart and mind of an intelligent witness for a poem to truly exist. This view really freed up a lot of people, children included, who had somehow learned early on that there was only one right way to interpret a poem. So much for progress, eh?
From nursery rhymes and church hymns, particularly Polish koledy (Christmas carols), but also the Latin chants still in use during my stint in the church choir, my mother’s spontaneous lullabies, my father’s stories about growing up in Missouri and then Poland, punctuated by cardinals calling from dying elms and the rhythmic rocking of the green glider on our front porch in Piedmont Street, the West Side Detroit, Polish ghetto, through the Franciscan nuns insistence on memorizing poems (Abu Ben Adam, Kilmer’s Trees, The Highwayman, and others) while in elementary school, my poetic being was nurtured.
Part of the reason I struggled to graduate from Wayne was an early pregnancy that had me dropping out of classes and flying – another family first – to Corona, Queens, New York City, where eventually I met up with the magic of Tuli Kupferberg chanting the Manhattan phone directory in a poetry class he taught in the first Free University on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the U.S. This was 1965 and there were early protests against the war in Vietnam in the streets of the city that I joined as I had participated in other demonstrations over the years while still in Detroit. (And this early on radical politics continuing through today has also been a strong influence on my outsider status.) Tuli invited Ed Sanders to class often; they had a band called the Fugs, which is now considered an underground classic. It was a heady time, especially for a pregnant teenager.
Eventually I had to leave my hometown, say goodbye to my family, and head out west to Oregon, then Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, before I could truly claim my poetic heritage. The women’s movement, especially the women’s spirituality movement centered in Wolf Creek, Oregon and in the persons of Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, who published WomanSpirit magazine were absolutely crucial to my sense of myself as a writer. There were other influences as well.
I managed to land eventually in what was then called “the town of a hundred poets” – Port Townsend, Washington - home of Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson and Copper Canyon Press and Centrum and Empty Bowl and a whole community of what I would eventually come to understand were “outsider” artists. I started out teaching in Estacada, Oregon, but like a good beatnik, by the time I made it to the Straits of Juan de Fuca, I waited tables, worked as a night clerk in a hotel, dug clams, hauled wood to survive. Outsider. I see myself within that status still. I can hear Chumbawamba singing that solitary word now in their anarchist version of plainsong.
In the late 70’s I was hired to drive the Plains Book Bus that was intended to promote small press literature by traveling to a five-state area in the upper Midwest. I moved to Fargo, North Dakota. The books on the bus’ Amish-built shelves were selected from a thirteen state region. Time on my hands between planned stops on an itinerary that included colleges, libraries, high schools, chautauquas, arts events large and small, my half-basenji dog, Bonzo, by my side, I read through the two hundred and some titles on board. Just one or two by a woman or a person of color. That was troubling, but when I brought up some ideas that could improve the ratio, no one really wanted to fix it. Don’t rock the boat, uh, bus, Christina, but I did because I thought that more books by the Other would be a good thing. I still do. It was these kinds of quixotic efforts that may have made my reputation. Or not.
There are definite down sides to being a woman writing from the back of beyond. As the years have progressed, publication becomes more difficult. I have no one to recommend my work to anyone, except the work itself. Being in the final cut for just about any award becomes more and more unattainable. I do believe that the obstacles have grown greater with the burgeoning of the thousand and one MFA in Poetry/etc. programs that now dot the academic landscape. The competition is tremendous. Everyone, it seems, is a poet now. And they have the imprimatur of that degree to prove it. If this sounds like sour grapes, maybe it is. W.B. Yeats was supposed to have said, "There are too many of us," as he gazed around the Rhymers Club eighty years ago. Amen, I say today.
In the early 90’s I was accepted for the MFA program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where my husband and I were then living. Margaret Atwood wrote a truly wonderful letter of recommendation. (I had the great good fortune to study with her twice at Centrum.) I was hoping to get an advanced degree and improve my employment opportunities and earning capacity, not change the way I had been writing or seeing the world. I lasted for a semester workshop. Then we determined we had to leave the state due to our terrible finances. I had no regrets about closing that door to academe one final time, though I did not want to leave Alaska.
Later, in discussing what happened with poet Maggie Anderson, I remember how flabbergasted she was that I would apply to such a program unless I wanted my writing voice changed and how could I want that with publications under my belt, so to speak. Well, of course, I didn’t want to change my voice. Hone my words, improve my writing, etc, but change the poet in me, no, certainly not. A chance to work at a university, make more money than teaching in public schools, yes. So, really, what I needed was to go on and get my Master’s in Literature and leave my writing life out of it, but I didn’t know that then.
Some of the increasing isolation I have experienced can’t be laid solely at the door of the academe, but also has something to do with my own diminishing health, and my lack of writing community as I age. I have spent the last decade teaching at-risk and troubled student both sides of the Kansas-Missouri state line and this effort left me too exhausted to schmooze my way through the writing community here. When I checked about involvement in an “outsider” event that once was a locally sponsored library activity (that I was too exhausted to participate in while I was still teaching) the folks now running that show are charging several hundreds of dollars for the privilege to be on the stage.
A few years ago I did take a weekend workshop sponsored by a local notable press for graduate credit with the hopes of meeting up with some interesting folks. It wasn’t a graft that took to the tree. I remember the man who runs the press sneering at the process of journaling.
For me the journal is where all my work begins, much like compost in a garden, my words in notebooks over the decades fertilize poems, short stories, essays, novels, etc. Recently I re-read my journals from 1971 – 2004 and sent them off to the University of Michigan, Bentley Collection, which has also generously agreed to take my published writing, a truly miraculous development in my non-career.
According to poet and professor John Lane, who was quite helpful after my move from the Olympic Peninsula to the southeast, and invited me to speak in his classes at Wofford, Gary Snyder has categorized the poetic community in the following manner:
“There is plenty to think about in the contemporary literary community where there are three legitimate ‘branches from the root.’ The ‘performance poets,’ embodied lately most visibly by the slam poets, ‘academic poets,’ including all poets who work within the institutions of education, and ‘the outsider poets’ that group of poets out there who make their living outside of various forms of teaching, but are not associated with the urban street/slam scene.
Among the three poetic communities at work within the landscape of American culture-- the ‘performance’ poetic, the academic poetic, and the ‘outsider’ poetic--each poetic is diverse and well-developed, with its own genetic history, adaptation to different weather and seasonal disturbance; each is equally worthy of notice and has its own diverse potential for climax.
Climax for the performance poetics, the most extraverted of the three, is achieved moment by moment, show to show, in the now, in the outside space opened by the gestalt of performer/audience; climax for the academic, the middle ground, both extraverted and introverted, takes place in the proliferation of sanctioned books and journals, the flat world of the stored and opened page (‘not me, but the books I speak through’); and, finally, climax for the outsider takes place in introverted space, the ancient interior world of the pure artist, the most inward of the three.”*
That’s me – now especially – though once I tasted the ambrosia of all three ways of poetic being.
Wompo and this Wompherence are so very important to my self-esteem as a writer. Being part of this virtual community for almost three years now also has improved my publication success, at least with the individual poems, stories, and articles I have been submitting, mostly on-line. I prefer to do on-line submissions for a variety of reasons: ease, minimal expense, saving trees, ink, etc.
I am still hoping to find the right press/presses to print the various manuscripts of mine that are languishing in the computer equivalent of my desk drawer. Poetry: full length and several chapbooks. Nonfiction: book length. Fiction: a book-length collection of short stories, and two, maybe three novels.
I have always loved learning. But school, no! Even though I have earned my living as a teacher and trained to be a special educator and have a Lifetime Certificate in High School English and K-12 Special Education granted by the Show Me state. Even though I started one of the first Resource Rooms in Michigan. Even though I was a Poet- in-the-Schools in several states and municipalities and a North Carolina Visiting Artist at two community colleges in the Tarheel state. My angst about school and what happens there to kill the human spirit has often helped me overcome barriers in my relationship with my students, wherever I found them.
According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, I am a “naturalist” because of how I learn from the world and my best poems and writing are always rooted in what I observe in the natural world and then apply elsewhere. Sitting inside hunched over a desk, taking copious notes, is not a good place for me to be. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until recently when Bloom’s became so popular as a tool for classroom teachers. I just remember that Rachel Carson became a hero of mine in high school and that I weep daily for what is happening to my beloved earth and all the teeming wonder of the life here on our troubled planet.
From the back of beyond, I believe none of my books, no books, are worth the lives of the polar bear, the hummingbird, the gray whale, the gorilla, the coral reef, the wasp, the bee, the blossom, the fruit. Not a single word of any of it. No matter what revered author wrote it. All the libraries of all the world cannot compare to the perfume of the silk tree blossoming now in my inner city front yard. Where I try to learn the name of the 10,000 things like Gary Snyder said a poet needs to do, especially in this terrible time of extinction and oblivion.
But sacrificing the printed word cannot return the planet to balance, so I must continue to write as if life depended on it, because it does.
*John Lane, from “Gary Snyder’s Primary Values” in Asheville Poetry Review (Asheville, NC)
Christina Pacosz has been writing and publishing prose and poetry for almost half a century and has several books of poetry, the most recent, Greatest Hits, 1975-2001(Pudding House, 2002). (Which is to be found on the Wompherence site. Her work has appeared recently in Jane’s Stories III, Women Writing Across Boundaries, Pemmican, Umbrella, qarrtsiluni. She has been a special educator, a Poet- in- the-Schools for several state and city programs, and a North Carolina Visiting Artist. pacosz@earthlink.net Kansas City, Missouri, USA
By Christina Pacosz
When I searched out the meaning for the phrase “the back of beyond” I immediately felt a frisson of recognition. My being a woman poet outside of the academy has been a journey through a lonely forsaken place. The phrase was first used by Sir Walter Scott in his novel The Antiquarian, published in 1816. “You…whirled them to the back of beyond to look at the old Roman camp.” But it has a contemporary ring to it for those of us struggling to write outside the academy.
Even when I tried to make my way beneath a canopy of glittering stars to the camp fire I could see in the distance, getting to that spot was all too often fraught with difficulties; or if I did somehow manage to arrive, breathless but intent on warming myself at the flame, I wasn’t able to remain in that place of warmth and welcome for very long. I write poetry as if my life depends upon it, because it does.
When asked recently why I became a poet, to my surprise, I replied, I was born a poet. It seems that was the only possible answer: born to that status like a serf to a manor. Now, at sixty-one, this reply, however startling, is also the one true thing in my life – a tough, resilient root, reaching through the decades. I am a poet. I was born a poet. I will die a poet.
Being a woman poet outside the academy is another category, one informed by this natal right to claim the title of poet. I am a working-class, Polish-American woman and I am a poet. Once, not so long ago, the former categories would have made the latter impossible.
My parents insisted that books were the way out and I believed them, and even though my mother wrote my stories down and my father told me many tales, I really didn’t think I could become a writer of books. A voracious and omnivorous reader, yes! But becoming a writer, though I wrote early and often, was never a phrase that formed on my tongue. There were no poets, no writers, striding down our block, heading toward the Crosstown bus, their metal lunch buckets tucked under one arm. Factory work, the broom and the mop, these were what people did to survive. I was the first member of my immediate family to graduate high school and attend and eventually graduate from college. And a woman!!!
While still in the academy struggling to finish my bachelor’s degree at Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan during the late 1960’s, it was clear to me that my poetry, my way of seeing the world did not really meet with anyone’s seal of approval.
I had written poems and stories since Catholic grade school and on through public high school, where I was feature editor of the school paper, The Cass Technician. Robert Gow, my journalism teacher/mentor, made sure we studied Alfred Korzybski (Polish born Jewish semantic linguist) whose basic principal that “the map is not the territory” has been crucial for my view of the world. “The word is not the world manifest, but a simulacrum. A crude copy at worst. A reasonable facsimile at best.” Understanding how words really worked in the world helped me roll with the punches I received being a woman of my time and a woman writing outside academe.
Thanks to Mr. Gow, I had been selected to attend a summer session at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan for creatively gifted high school students and was lucky enough to study with William D. Snodgrass. Some of my poems won Honorable Mentions in the National Scholastic Writing Awards.
Then why did my professor for Modern Poetry where we studied the minutia of Yeats and Elliot – and I had written my high school senior year research paper on an aspect of imagery in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – see fit to give me a “C?” What I remember clearly now is that my “take” of the poems just didn’t fit the company line, the professor’s views on what these great poets meant were to be parroted by the students. There was only one right meaning, his. I chafed at this restriction of imagination like a wild horse at a bit. I am proud of that C because it is proof that I have always been an independent thinker even if that meant getting a lesser grade than what I really deserved.
When I visited in schools in several states as a poet in various programs during the 1980’s and 90’s, I always made sure to explain that beyond a certain basic parameter – if I was writing a poem that took place in a boat, say, but you thought the setting was on a train, then either I had written a bad poem or you weren’t listening carefully enough. Other than that anything goes. Meaning, as Muriel Rukeyser insisted, must arrive in the heart and mind of an intelligent witness for a poem to truly exist. This view really freed up a lot of people, children included, who had somehow learned early on that there was only one right way to interpret a poem. So much for progress, eh?
From nursery rhymes and church hymns, particularly Polish koledy (Christmas carols), but also the Latin chants still in use during my stint in the church choir, my mother’s spontaneous lullabies, my father’s stories about growing up in Missouri and then Poland, punctuated by cardinals calling from dying elms and the rhythmic rocking of the green glider on our front porch in Piedmont Street, the West Side Detroit, Polish ghetto, through the Franciscan nuns insistence on memorizing poems (Abu Ben Adam, Kilmer’s Trees, The Highwayman, and others) while in elementary school, my poetic being was nurtured.
Part of the reason I struggled to graduate from Wayne was an early pregnancy that had me dropping out of classes and flying – another family first – to Corona, Queens, New York City, where eventually I met up with the magic of Tuli Kupferberg chanting the Manhattan phone directory in a poetry class he taught in the first Free University on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the U.S. This was 1965 and there were early protests against the war in Vietnam in the streets of the city that I joined as I had participated in other demonstrations over the years while still in Detroit. (And this early on radical politics continuing through today has also been a strong influence on my outsider status.) Tuli invited Ed Sanders to class often; they had a band called the Fugs, which is now considered an underground classic. It was a heady time, especially for a pregnant teenager.
Eventually I had to leave my hometown, say goodbye to my family, and head out west to Oregon, then Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, before I could truly claim my poetic heritage. The women’s movement, especially the women’s spirituality movement centered in Wolf Creek, Oregon and in the persons of Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, who published WomanSpirit magazine were absolutely crucial to my sense of myself as a writer. There were other influences as well.
I managed to land eventually in what was then called “the town of a hundred poets” – Port Townsend, Washington - home of Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson and Copper Canyon Press and Centrum and Empty Bowl and a whole community of what I would eventually come to understand were “outsider” artists. I started out teaching in Estacada, Oregon, but like a good beatnik, by the time I made it to the Straits of Juan de Fuca, I waited tables, worked as a night clerk in a hotel, dug clams, hauled wood to survive. Outsider. I see myself within that status still. I can hear Chumbawamba singing that solitary word now in their anarchist version of plainsong.
In the late 70’s I was hired to drive the Plains Book Bus that was intended to promote small press literature by traveling to a five-state area in the upper Midwest. I moved to Fargo, North Dakota. The books on the bus’ Amish-built shelves were selected from a thirteen state region. Time on my hands between planned stops on an itinerary that included colleges, libraries, high schools, chautauquas, arts events large and small, my half-basenji dog, Bonzo, by my side, I read through the two hundred and some titles on board. Just one or two by a woman or a person of color. That was troubling, but when I brought up some ideas that could improve the ratio, no one really wanted to fix it. Don’t rock the boat, uh, bus, Christina, but I did because I thought that more books by the Other would be a good thing. I still do. It was these kinds of quixotic efforts that may have made my reputation. Or not.
There are definite down sides to being a woman writing from the back of beyond. As the years have progressed, publication becomes more difficult. I have no one to recommend my work to anyone, except the work itself. Being in the final cut for just about any award becomes more and more unattainable. I do believe that the obstacles have grown greater with the burgeoning of the thousand and one MFA in Poetry/etc. programs that now dot the academic landscape. The competition is tremendous. Everyone, it seems, is a poet now. And they have the imprimatur of that degree to prove it. If this sounds like sour grapes, maybe it is. W.B. Yeats was supposed to have said, "There are too many of us," as he gazed around the Rhymers Club eighty years ago. Amen, I say today.
In the early 90’s I was accepted for the MFA program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where my husband and I were then living. Margaret Atwood wrote a truly wonderful letter of recommendation. (I had the great good fortune to study with her twice at Centrum.) I was hoping to get an advanced degree and improve my employment opportunities and earning capacity, not change the way I had been writing or seeing the world. I lasted for a semester workshop. Then we determined we had to leave the state due to our terrible finances. I had no regrets about closing that door to academe one final time, though I did not want to leave Alaska.
Later, in discussing what happened with poet Maggie Anderson, I remember how flabbergasted she was that I would apply to such a program unless I wanted my writing voice changed and how could I want that with publications under my belt, so to speak. Well, of course, I didn’t want to change my voice. Hone my words, improve my writing, etc, but change the poet in me, no, certainly not. A chance to work at a university, make more money than teaching in public schools, yes. So, really, what I needed was to go on and get my Master’s in Literature and leave my writing life out of it, but I didn’t know that then.
Some of the increasing isolation I have experienced can’t be laid solely at the door of the academe, but also has something to do with my own diminishing health, and my lack of writing community as I age. I have spent the last decade teaching at-risk and troubled student both sides of the Kansas-Missouri state line and this effort left me too exhausted to schmooze my way through the writing community here. When I checked about involvement in an “outsider” event that once was a locally sponsored library activity (that I was too exhausted to participate in while I was still teaching) the folks now running that show are charging several hundreds of dollars for the privilege to be on the stage.
A few years ago I did take a weekend workshop sponsored by a local notable press for graduate credit with the hopes of meeting up with some interesting folks. It wasn’t a graft that took to the tree. I remember the man who runs the press sneering at the process of journaling.
For me the journal is where all my work begins, much like compost in a garden, my words in notebooks over the decades fertilize poems, short stories, essays, novels, etc. Recently I re-read my journals from 1971 – 2004 and sent them off to the University of Michigan, Bentley Collection, which has also generously agreed to take my published writing, a truly miraculous development in my non-career.
According to poet and professor John Lane, who was quite helpful after my move from the Olympic Peninsula to the southeast, and invited me to speak in his classes at Wofford, Gary Snyder has categorized the poetic community in the following manner:
“There is plenty to think about in the contemporary literary community where there are three legitimate ‘branches from the root.’ The ‘performance poets,’ embodied lately most visibly by the slam poets, ‘academic poets,’ including all poets who work within the institutions of education, and ‘the outsider poets’ that group of poets out there who make their living outside of various forms of teaching, but are not associated with the urban street/slam scene.
Among the three poetic communities at work within the landscape of American culture-- the ‘performance’ poetic, the academic poetic, and the ‘outsider’ poetic--each poetic is diverse and well-developed, with its own genetic history, adaptation to different weather and seasonal disturbance; each is equally worthy of notice and has its own diverse potential for climax.
Climax for the performance poetics, the most extraverted of the three, is achieved moment by moment, show to show, in the now, in the outside space opened by the gestalt of performer/audience; climax for the academic, the middle ground, both extraverted and introverted, takes place in the proliferation of sanctioned books and journals, the flat world of the stored and opened page (‘not me, but the books I speak through’); and, finally, climax for the outsider takes place in introverted space, the ancient interior world of the pure artist, the most inward of the three.”*
That’s me – now especially – though once I tasted the ambrosia of all three ways of poetic being.
Wompo and this Wompherence are so very important to my self-esteem as a writer. Being part of this virtual community for almost three years now also has improved my publication success, at least with the individual poems, stories, and articles I have been submitting, mostly on-line. I prefer to do on-line submissions for a variety of reasons: ease, minimal expense, saving trees, ink, etc.
I am still hoping to find the right press/presses to print the various manuscripts of mine that are languishing in the computer equivalent of my desk drawer. Poetry: full length and several chapbooks. Nonfiction: book length. Fiction: a book-length collection of short stories, and two, maybe three novels.
I have always loved learning. But school, no! Even though I have earned my living as a teacher and trained to be a special educator and have a Lifetime Certificate in High School English and K-12 Special Education granted by the Show Me state. Even though I started one of the first Resource Rooms in Michigan. Even though I was a Poet- in-the-Schools in several states and municipalities and a North Carolina Visiting Artist at two community colleges in the Tarheel state. My angst about school and what happens there to kill the human spirit has often helped me overcome barriers in my relationship with my students, wherever I found them.
According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, I am a “naturalist” because of how I learn from the world and my best poems and writing are always rooted in what I observe in the natural world and then apply elsewhere. Sitting inside hunched over a desk, taking copious notes, is not a good place for me to be. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until recently when Bloom’s became so popular as a tool for classroom teachers. I just remember that Rachel Carson became a hero of mine in high school and that I weep daily for what is happening to my beloved earth and all the teeming wonder of the life here on our troubled planet.
From the back of beyond, I believe none of my books, no books, are worth the lives of the polar bear, the hummingbird, the gray whale, the gorilla, the coral reef, the wasp, the bee, the blossom, the fruit. Not a single word of any of it. No matter what revered author wrote it. All the libraries of all the world cannot compare to the perfume of the silk tree blossoming now in my inner city front yard. Where I try to learn the name of the 10,000 things like Gary Snyder said a poet needs to do, especially in this terrible time of extinction and oblivion.
But sacrificing the printed word cannot return the planet to balance, so I must continue to write as if life depended on it, because it does.
*John Lane, from “Gary Snyder’s Primary Values” in Asheville Poetry Review (Asheville, NC)
Christina Pacosz has been writing and publishing prose and poetry for almost half a century and has several books of poetry, the most recent, Greatest Hits, 1975-2001(Pudding House, 2002). (Which is to be found on the Wompherence site. Her work has appeared recently in Jane’s Stories III, Women Writing Across Boundaries, Pemmican, Umbrella, qarrtsiluni. She has been a special educator, a Poet- in- the-Schools for several state and city programs, and a North Carolina Visiting Artist. pacosz@earthlink.net Kansas City, Missouri, USA