Month: August 2002

Owed To George Bush

I can’t really speak for David Wagoner, but, if I’d been invited to speak at George Bush’s speech on logging practices in Southern Oregon, I would have read this poem by Wagoner:

Report from a Forest Logged by
the Weyerhaeuser Company

Three square miles clear-cut.
Now only the facts matter:
The heaps of gray-splintered rubble,
The churned-up duff, the roots, the bulldozed slash,
The silence,

And beyond the ninth hummock
(All of them pitched sideways like wrecked houses)
A creek still running somewhere, bridged and dammed
By cracked branches.
No birdsong. Not one note.

And this is April, a sunlit morning.
Nothing but facts. Wedges like half-moons
Fallen where saws cut over and under them
Bear ninety or more rings.
A trillium gapes at so much light

Among the living: a bent huckleberry,
A patch of salal, a wasp,
And now, making a mistake about me,
Two brown-and-black butterflies landing
For a moment on my boot.

Among the dead: thousands of fir seedlings
A foot high, planted ten feet apart,
Parched brown for lack of the usual free rain,
Two buckshot beer cans, and overhead,
A vulture big as an eagle.

Selective logging, they say, we’ll take three miles,
It’s good for the bears and deer, they say,
More brush and berries sooner or later,
We’re thinking about the future-if you’re in it
With us, they say. It’s a comfort to say

Like Dividend or Forest Management or Keep Out.

They’ve managed this to a fare-thee-well.

I guess I like this poem so much because it doesn’t require much interpretation, though a series of photographs might compliment it .

No Higher Than a Shrub

If President Bush has his way our grandchildren may very well never see a tree taller than a shrub.

Bush’s “no-nonsense” attempts to save the forests of the West from fire seem to come down to cutting down the trees before they get tall enough to cause serious wildfires. No denying that kind of logic. There’s certainly no denying this would put an end to forest fire.

Neither can anyone deny that there are serious problems in western forests. With the worst part of the traditional fire season still upon us, the West has seen some of the worst fires in history. There is little agreement on the best way to solve these problems even among experts in the field.

The Bush administration wants to blame these fires on precisely the people most interested in saving the trees, environmentalists. However, it strains creditability to argue that these people are to “blame” for the fires. Most of these environmental groups have been urging thinning and other steps to ameliorate the fire danger for years. For instance, here are three short-term suggestions by the Sierra Club to lessen these dangers.

The Bush plan would emphasize logging as the preferable means of controlling wildfires. According to Time magazine,

The "Healthy Forests" [you gotta love the guy who makes up these titles for Bush, he must have a degree in creative writing] initiative calls on Congress to pass laws that would "expedite procedures for forest thinning and restoration projects" and "ensure the sustainable forest management and appropriate timber production."

According to the Oregonian Bush’s message to a hand-picked audience of loggers and firefighters was that “His forest plan equals jobs”

One can only suppose that those jobs are “logging jobs.” The kind of thinning that’s based on logging practices has to include the cutting of the largest trees because they are the trees that bring the most money from logging companies. The smaller trees cost money to cut and get rid of, so there is no incentive to cut them down.

Nature’s suppression of wildfires has been diametrically opposed to this strategy. In nature, the smaller trees have been burned down by forest fires and larger trees, through the thicker bark’s natural resistance to fire, have actually benefited from the nutrient’s left by the fire and by the increased exposure to sunlight.

The Pacific Northwest’s forests thrived for millions of years when left to these techniques. The forest industry almost to today has relied on these trees, not the ones man has planted, for their livelihood.

It seems ironic that Republican conservatives who so often claim the moral high ground on religious grounds would put their faith in Mammon rather than natural forces when attempting to solve the problems in our nation’s forests.

Just in the Nick of Time Magazine

I was saved from becoming teminally depressed by President Bush’s sage advice that the best way to save trees from fire is to chop them down so that they can’t burn by the discovery that Time magazine actually has a feature on the environment HERE! I haven’t finished reading the whole issue, but I’m encouraged that the issue is getting top coverage instead of just appearing in pamphlets in the mail asking for contributions.

After you’ve read the articles and are ready to do something rather than just sitting around depressed about the whole situation, go HERE, see which issues you agree with, and easily send letters or faxes to your congressmen. Remember, they’re called representatives because they’re supposed to represent you, not just big business.

Most of all, remember if you’re smart enough to be reading this page you’re too smart not to vote. Change your world for the better and VOTE in the next election.

:: Blame it on Jeff ::

I wonder if you can catch a virus over the net? No, not that kind of virus. The kind that makes you start buying books uncontrollably.

After reading about Jeff Ward’s recent literary acquisitions I felt positively deprived and had to expand my book collection, the one that already has far too many unread works.

I blame Jeff because I was inspired to go to Powell’s online in order to find a used copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and a copy of Archibald MacLeish’s Collected Poems. While I was there I found a couple of books on special, and then I found that I could get free shipping if I spend over 50 dollars. I was only a few dollars short, and who can’t always use another book. So, I added Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi and Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges to my order.

Then, inspired by the Banned Book Project, via wood s lot, I went to my local Barnes and Noble outlet and purchased To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch-22 in order to write essays defending them at the Banned Book page. While I was buying Catch-2+2 I saw Closing Time, advertised as the sequel to Catch-22, so obviously I had to buy it, too.

Then, clearly fixing the blame back on Jeff where it belongs, I saw Harold Bloom’s literary criticism entitled Yeats, and since Jeff pointed out to me that I didn’t know enough about Yeats’ connection to the romantics, and since there’s a chapter entitled, "Blake and Yeats", I naturally had to add that to my stack, too.

Hopefully Fall will arrive with a deluge so I can have some chance of actually reading these books before Jeff’s next big splurge for books. Otherwise, I, too, will end up sleep deprived.

The Long Tailed Pull of Grief

Although I think I prefer the earlier parts of Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987, there were still several poems I found appealing in the last two sections. One of my favorites uses a kite as a metaphor for the human soul. Perhaps I find that appealing because I just returned from a beach trip where I’ve often flown kites; still, Heaney uses the metaphor to suggest a number of interesting possibilities:

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I’d tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe,
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.

At first the poem seems merely about a kite, about a kid’s toy. The interesting contrast between the “tightened drumhead” and “blown chaff” seems merely to accurately describe a kite. Later, though, when we realize the kite is used as a symbol for the human soul we wonder how these details fit in with the extended metaphor. Is our soul “a tightened drumhead” or “useless chaff?”

Though the kite metaphor hardly seems original, the emphasis on the tail of the kite does seem so. In a sense this “long-tailed pull of grief” may well keep the kite from flying up to heaven, keep it anchored to the earth, as it were, but, when you also consider that a kite flies wildly out of control without a tail, the role of grief in our life takes on a very different role. Our grief, like our joy, provides stability in our lives and allows our soul to soar while still tying us to the earth.

Believe it or not, we are all “born fit for it,” are all able to “take the strain.” Doing so makes us human and unites us with those who stand here next to us.

“The Stone Verdict” is quite different from “A Kite for Michael and Christopher,” but I find the poem strangely appealing, perhaps because I still don’t quite know what to make of it. At first glance it’s the simplicity of the poem that attracts me. After reading it a couple times, though, it’s the unusual use of “Hermes” that most seems to appeal to me:

The Stone Verdict

When he stands in the judgment place
With his stick in his hand and the broad hat
Still on his head, maimed by self-doubt
And an old disdain of sweet talk and excuses,
It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.
He will expect more than words in the ultimate court
He relied on through a lifetime’s speechlessness.

Let it be like the judgement of Hermes,
God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts
Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him
Until he stood waist-deep in the cairn
Of his apotheosis: maybe a gate-pillar
Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence
Somebody will break at last to say, ‘Here
His spirit lingers,’ and will have said too much.

Maybe I was first drawn to this poem because I wear a broad hat and carry a walking stick when I hike, which is often, and have never been too fond of “sweet talk and excuses,” particularly from students. I doubt, though, that I will ever be accused of relying on “a lifetime’s speechlessness,” especially after writing this weblog for nearly a year.

I do, however, identify with the “strong, silent” type who wants nothing to do with “feelings,” finding it quite difficult to discuss my personal feelings directly. I come by this naturally as my dad was definitely a “man’s man” and personified the strong, silent type. My movie hero as a child was John Wayne, and he was known for action, not dialogue.

The image of Hermes used here, though, is the most interesting part of the poem for me. I’ve always thought of Hermes as the messenger of the Gods. I never realized he was associated with piles of stones. Apparently he was an early God that was marked by piles of stones, or cairns, and was later adopted by the Greeks. Nor did I realize that he led the dead to Hades.

However, I could discover nothing about Hermes burying the dead in stones, so that seems to be Heaney’s fusion of the various aspects of the mythology. Personally, though, I could think of no greater tribute than to have my passing marked by a cairn that silently says “this is the way,” preferably one that marks the way around Mt. Hood or Mt. Adams.

Seamus Heaney Selected Poems 1966-1987 is never going to become one of my favorite volumes of poetry, but like most good poets he allowed me to see the world in new ways. For me, the poems’ greatest insights stem from Heaney’s victimization as a minority in Northern Island. Like Naoimi Nye, Heaney offers us a viewpoint we can probably never experience ourselves. However, we can learn a valuable lesson from him that will help us to better see the world through the eyes of the oppressed, a lesson Americans probably need more than ever in these trying times.

Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Speech (courtesy of If )