Like Robert Frost

We have agreed to let the electric company trim some trees.
If they come when you are there

let them
Ensure they leave the wood behind.

Get them to put the small bits
behind the hazel bush

where the rest of the prunings are.
Try and get a card

from the wood cutter,
we have other trees

we�d like him to look at.
Don�t use the pump in the spring

for more than twenty minutes,
and meanwhile remember

to water everything if God
is not doing his fair share.



A note left for new guests by the owners of a holiday cottage in Brittany, 16 September 2014. Submitted by Nigel Lawrence.

January

January. The days
are short but dramatic scenes
await the hardy.



From the Great British Year poster, Open University. Submitted by Uschi Gatward.

Fleeting

The ocean is empty
again. Here and there

a small galaxy of scales
marks where a bluefin

swallowed a herring.
The victim's scales

swirl in the turbulence
of the departed

tuna now bearing off at
high speed. Then each vortex

slows and stops. The sinking
scales gleam like diamonds

from a spilled necklace
then they dim. Finally

they wink out at depth.



From Quicksilver, Kenneth Brower, March 2014, National Geographic. Submitted by James Brush.

The 4 Days in Nature Writing Prompt

How about this as a way to get out of a writer's block, a creative rut, or poetic funk: unplug and get out into the natural world..

A study published in the journal PLOS One found that spending four days in nature - away from electronic devices - is linked with 50 percent higher score on a test for creativity.

I am one of those people who spends too much time in front of a screen (computer or otherwise) but who also loves to take a hike.  The study looked at people who did electronics-free wilderness hiking trips for four to six days. (The hikes were organized by the Outward Bound expedition school.) 

They gave creativity tests to some the morning they started their trip and others on the fourth day of their trip and found the day 4 group scored higher. (I'm not sure why they didn't test all of them before and on day 4.)

Maybe it was being in nature, or maybe it was being unplugged. Maybe its both things. 

Another study was also cited that found that just seeing the color green before being given a creative prompt yielded more imaginative answers than seeing the color white before the prompt. 

Anyone willing to experiment and report back to us?

In the Matrix with May Sarton

May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 - July 16, 1995), an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.

Her father was a science historian and her mother was an artist and she seems to have acquired interest in both of those worlds in her own life's work.

For some reason, the first writing of hers that I encountered had to do with nature and I assumed she was a "nature poet."

Actually, reviews of her poetry, fiction, and autobiographical writings are more likely to be described as "inspirational, touching, honest, and thought-provoking" and concerned with themes like "love, friendship, relationships, and the search for self-knowledge, personal fulfillment, inner peace, and social and political concerns" such as feminism and sexuality.

One of the poems of hers that caught my eye was "A Country Incident" that open with the lines "Absorbed in planting bulbs, that work of hope, / I was startled by a loud human voice." I loved that idea of bulb planting as the work of hope. A lifelong gardener, I always feel hopeful putting bulbs and plants into the ground hoping for some future harvest of food or flower.

In searching for that poem online, I found a lovely piece by Katie Eberhart that says, "Naturally, the poet is gardener, nurturer of words and ideas, and the gardener who chooses from many plants�whether for duration of blooms, size, or color�is poet and artist working on page or canvas of fenced yard, or creating a meadow out of a plowed field."


And though I know now that nature was not her main focus, I recently came across her journal, Journal of a Solitude, that chronicles her garden, the seasons, and her daily life in New Hampshire.


This book begins "I am here alone for the first time in weeks to take up my 'real' life again at last. That is what is strange�that friends, even passionate love,are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore what is happening or what has happened."

Long before I heard anyone use the term "the matrix" in the way many of us think about it today, she wrote in this journal, "I hope to break through into the rough, rocky depths,to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there."

The Secret Poetic Life of Trees

I like trees because they seem more resigned to

the way they have to live than other things do.

- Willa Cather

This month's prompt was inspired by a series of programs about trees that I listened to on the BBC. They were created in response to the ash dieback disease that has hit trees in the UK. Roger McGough hosts Poetry Please and presented some tree poems, old and new by DH Lawrence, Philip Larkin, Thomas Hardy, WB Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and others.

 "The Secret Power of Trees"  looks at Britain's woodlands that were planted for timber or hunting but are now also used to help the mentally ill and elderly people as part of what is known as "social forestry." The power comes with seeing woodlands as therapeutic and healing landscapes, and not just by new age types. He points out that in Japan, doctors take seriously the practice of "forest air bathing", and claim all kinds of health benefits from simply being in the woods. It's a different trend in the poetry of trees, since in much older poetry, forests were often seen as scary places, full of evil spirits and outlaws.

Thinking about trees, some poems come to mind immediately, like "Birches" by Robert Frost which ends with that glorious wish to be a swinger of birches.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Moving amateur birch swinging into a profession, one segment from the radio program looks at a professional tree climber, James Aldred, who climbs one of Britain's tallest trees, a giant redwood affectionately called Goliath, and sleeps in its branches.

In our current season, I think of  "Winter Trees" by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

But the two poems I decided to focus on this month for our writing prompt are poems that feature women interacting directly with a tree.

Woman Waving to Trees by Dorothea Tanning

Not that anyone would
notice it at first.
I have taken to marveling
at the trees in our park.
One thing I can tell you:
they are beautiful
and they know it.
They are also tired,
hundreds of years
stuck in one spot�
beautiful paralytics.
When I am under them,
they feel my gaze,
watch me wave my foolish
hand, and envy the joy
of being a moving target.

Loungers on the benches
begin to notice.
One to another,
"Well, you see all kinds..."
Most of them sit looking
down at nothing as if there
was truly nothing else to
look at until there is
that woman waving up
to the branching boughs
of these old trees. Raise your
heads, pals, look high,
you may see more than
you ever thought possible,
up where something might
be waving back, to tell her
she has seen the marvelous.

 

Another woman who might be seen from a distance as - odd? - is looking up into a plum tree and addressing the tree, its fruit and a visiting bird.

Woman Looking Up Into A Plum Tree by Melanie McCabe

Strung with whistle bones, frail reeds fledged, a bird
can fly or fold in, tuck beneath the wing the skull's
little engine, that tiny grist, that whit of will.

This is the secret kept in the crook of the limbs:
what claims flight must first be hollowed, must
whittle to a straw grace. Desire, that heavy

marrow, will someday open, riddle with holes
for wind to clean. The wet plum will parch to its
stone pit, dwindle and lift its faint whiff of almond.

But she is rooted still, tang of riven earth on
the back of her tongue, a late seed considering
another rending, an improbable sprouting into

turning air, a farfetched bloom. If she lightens, it is
slowly. Above her, the bird unfolds, beats sky with
thoughtless wings. She does not yet envy its going.

This month's prompt is obviously to write a poem that focuses on someone interacting, perhaps addressing, a tree. Your woman (or Man Swinging From Birches or Man Sleeping in a Redwood) will also need to be specific in their tree choice. It's sad how many people can't even identify the trees on their own property or ones they pass every day.  Of course, in Jane Kenyon's tale of "Taking Down the Tree," the specificity is that the tree is a Christmas tree, which is an alternate and legitimate take on the prompt too.

Submission Deadline: March 3, 2013.