It’s the opening line of the Wendell Berry poem “The Peace of Wild Things”. I’m sure there were many reasons it surfaced from my subconscious (*gestures at everything*), but regardless I was grateful it did because brought to mind the rest of the poem, which was one of the first I memorized.
Then it dawned on me: Poetry is artificial intelligence.
What is poetry if not a large language model comprised of vast amounts of text created by humans about every conceivable topic? And what is a poem if not a response to a specific prompt that can be summoned for whatever question or trouble you have?
I’m being cheeky, but the power of the arts and humanities is no joke. They’re reliable companions that can enrich our lives and help us understand and contextualize and prophesy if we just ask them to.
I had fun with this Fridge Poetry page (works best on desktop) where you can play with the provided words and even add your own. I assembled the above phrase using words that were already lying there, and I like how it turned out like one of my magazine mashup pages.
Do I totally know what it means? No. Does it sound cool and could be song lyrics? Absolutely.
“The Actor’s Vow” by Elia Kazan (via The Last Movie Stars on HBO Max):
I will take my rightful place on stage and I will be myself. I am not a cosmic orphan. I have no reason to be timid. I will respond as I feel; awkwardly, vulgarly, but respond.
I will have my throat open, I will have my heart open, I will be vulnerable. I may have anything or everything the world has to offer, but the thing I need most and want most, is to be myself.
I will admit rejection, admit pain, admit frustration, admit even pettiness, admit shame, admit outrage, admit anything and everything that happens to me.
The best and most human parts of me are those I have inhabited and hidden from the world. I will work on it. I will raise my voice. I will be heard.
On a beach waiting to witness works of fire thundering forth for the Fourth of July, sparklers burst against a cloudy sunset— the flames of liberty burning out fast.
Darkness descends and the main event announces itself with flash-bangs against the firmament: Declarations of incandescence, self-evident in their light, loudness, and pursuit of happy viewers.
United they fall, a coterie of combusted paper— explosive evidence of cheap dreams.
Yet after the rockets’ rainbow glare burst in the air, what was still there?
I’d never heard of the poet Timothy Murphy until reading about him in the Prufrock newsletter that mentioned him after his passing. He specialized in poetry about hunting, something I’ve accumulated an amateur’s worth of experience in over the years. Intrigued, I checked out his book of poetry Hunter’s Log: Field Notes, 1988-2011 from the library and stumbled upon the following poem “The Blind”, which I found to be a beautifully bittersweet evocation of duck hunting.
The Blind
Gunners a decade dead wing through my father’s mind as he limps out to the blind bundled against the wind.
By some ancestral code fathers and sons don’t break, we each carry a load of which we cannot speak.
Here we commit our dead to the unyielding land where broken windmills creak and stricken ganders cry.
Father, the dog, and I are learning how to die with our feet stuck in the muck and our eyes trained to the sky.
A half-deaf star with promise,
next always to the one who grew into a supernova
and left to shine brightly,
shrinks and stares at the cold abyss.
Then the supernova returns with its light,
to its small town in the universe.
A eucatastrophe to save a life,
For when you want to live again.
Good tidings it brings to its kin,
and salvation,
calling riches into being
for the sake of old times.
How it all comes together in the end:
The machinations of love embodied by
Mary, Christmas.
It’s a cacophonous love
that drafts through the doors,
with jubilation and release,
understanding and aid.
A jolly band on parade:
wine flowing,
voices singing,
bells ringing,
coins clinking,
and lovers bringing
peace and wholeness, like you’ve been given wings
for a first-class trip
home again.
I don’t remember where I got the idea, but recently I’ve started memorizing poems and posting recordings of me reciting them on Instagram. They’ve been mostly short thus far, 10 to 15 lines. But I aim to take on longer ones as I get more under my belt and feel more adventurous.
Part of this is a memory exercise. I haven’t been obligated to memorize something of value since college (sup, Gray’s “Elegy”), and I know it’s good for the brain to do so. But it’s also because quoting poetry or Shakespeare at opportune moments is a cliche from the movies I think we could use more of in real life. And until now the only poem I could recite was “Advice” by Langston Hughes—a whopping 19 words long.
So far I’ve done “Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About” by Mary Oliver, “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, and “Carrying On Like A Crow” by Charles Simic. I found them more or less at random by opening those authors’ poetry collections and paging through until something jumps out. I recommend doing that the next time you’re at the library.
The sunrise, it comes to me A rippled grace bound for the trees. Coming and coming, it comes, sent from the yonder colors, that are billowed in atmosphere. What is otherwise clear must contend with a cloudy obstruction that gets the best view of all: A panopticon dawn, but for me, the mere morning.
The melange, elemental in joining sky and water into one ink, spilling. Blue-blue to blue-grey to a hazy picture of contentment. Sit we, contented, and hope for another.
A flock— ovular, murmurating— emerges from nothing into black embodiment. Sky-writing by wing, collectively they greet the shore southward— and, by my view, into the ghosted sun.
Really enjoyed James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life: Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, a memoir of a sheep farmer told season by season. I followed his Twitter account for a while and enjoyed the seeming simplicity the stream of sheep pics depicted. Reading this memoir, however, disabused me of any assumptions I’d made about the life of a shepherd.
Rebanks tells of growing up in a farming family, hating school and the anti-farming condescension that came with it. He covers a lot of interesting aspects of the profession that has run in Rebanks’ family for centuries: training sheepdogs, the long-range strategy required for successful breeding, the arduous sheep birthing process (“Imagine a couple of adults looking after several hundred newborn babies and toddlers in a large park”), the disturbing yet oddly endearing way orphaned lambs are paired with ewes whose own lambs had died, and the unexpected legacy of Beatrix Potter in his region.
But this isn’t a kindly pastoral. The region of the Lake District in northern England, made famous by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, is tough terrain at any time, let alone during the long, cold, glum slog of winter, which the hardy sheep can endure but only with help from the equally tough expert farmers. Though lauding its natural beauty, Rebanks openly resents the tourist-attracting romanticization of the region and the at-large decline of his profession and way of life.
Neither does he spare the gory details of life with livestock. It’s hard, sweaty, demanding, low-paying, seemingly never-ending work. Yet even when, almost in spite of himself, Rebanks attends Oxford (his account of which drips with wry bemusement), he tends to his farm work on weekends and holidays and sticks with it even when the possibilities of the “outside world” beckon.
I’d like to think Rebanks has read or at least heard of Wendell Berry, whose writing on farming, community, and modern life echoed in my head as I read The Shepherd’s Life. Odds are Rebanks would feel at home in Berry’s pseudo-fictional community of Port William, and Berry in the Lake District. Both men deploy a simple yet vigorous writing style, the occasional flourish surrounded by spacious prose — not unlike the rural landscapes they inhabit.
Formally educated or not, Rebanks makes good use of the local dialect. Words like heaf, croft, heather, tup, fells, beck, ghyll, and shearling look and sound positively British, and help to ground us in the turf right alongside the sheep. (Check out the names of the fells — my favorite: Barf.) I also liked the book’s four-seasons structure, which, like two other nature books I love (A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and The Singing Wilderness by Sigurd Olson), gives readers the energizing feeling of spending a year on the ground with a wise, seasoned guide.
“It’s bloody marvelous,” H Is For Hawk author Helen Macdonald blurbed on the book’s cover. From one nature writer to another, she was right. Check this one out.
Some Quotes
On what he learned from a terrible experience in school:
This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I’d be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can’t wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.
On physical work:
Later I would understand that modern people the world over are obsessed with the importance of ‘going somewhere’ and ‘doing something’ with your life. The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn’t count for much.
On the pull of the landscape:
The landscape is our home and we rarely stray long from it, or endure anywhere else for long before returning. This may seem like a lack of imagination or adventure, but I don’t care. I love this place; for me it is the beginning and the end of everything, and everywhere else feels like nowhere.
On how city life can shortchange us:
I sometimes think we are so independently minded because we had seen just enough of the wider world to know we liked our own old ways and independence best. My grandfather went as far afield as Paris for a trip to an agricultural fair once. He knew what cities had to offer, but also had a sense that they would leave you uprooted, anonymous, and pushed about by the world you lived in, rather than having some freedom and control. The potential wealth on offer counted for little or nothing set against the sense of belonging and purpose that existed at home.
On functional beauty:
My grandfather had an eye for things that were beautiful, like a sunset, but he would explain it in mostly functional terms, not abstract aesthetic ones. He seemed to love the landscape around him with a passion, but his relationship with it was more like a long tough marriage than a fleeting holiday love affair. His work bound him to the land, regardless of weather or the seasons. When he observed something like a spring sunset, it carried the full meaning of someone who had earned the right to comment, having suffered six months of wind, snow, and rain to get to that point. He clearly thought such things beautiful, but that beauty was full of real functional implications—namely the end of winter or better weather to come.
Photo above from James Rebanks’ Twitter account @herdyshepherd1.
A girl, little with frizzy hair, asked sweetly, Did he have to put a knife in his heart? Her mother said no, and that was all.
A woman, grown, hobbled on one crutch to the swing set and cast her crutch to the ground. She sat on one of the swings and started to and fro, free from it all, and feeling the wind, for only a bit.
A man, homeless maybe, ambled in and laid down on the small dented slide, meant for kids otherwise, and dozed. Restless dreams, or nothing?
I ran here for the sunrise.
I ran here straight down a concrete corridor, a road
slippened by snow,
past a corner store where coffee and pie
rise to life in manifest alchemy.
With my breath steaming in locomotion
I approach the boulderow, a stone sluice
of Sisyphean resolve—bulwark against the lacustrine,
but this morn
like poppy seed cupcakes: ice-glazed
but dangerous.
My feet wedged, bracing and expectant,
I behold the firmament: a mailslot in the sky
flooding upward with milky amber-beams.
An atoll of ice-chunks,
particles scattered and fractal
from the shoreline, reflect the nascent dawn—a chessboard
—king’s to me today.
A man with a coffee mug and no gloves
comes beside me with a camera to capture the departing show.
‘I’ve been all over the world,’ he says, ‘and
this is right in our backyard.’
Revelers, we. Comrades in delight.
We drink our daily cup: mine today
is atmospheric.
A mighty evergreen near us guards the shore,
still wearing its Christmas lights.
Pales.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
When Doc bumped his head and made it so tender;
He could not recall his singular sight:
Capacitors fluxing and time circuits alight.
Calvin the sailor with life jacket steady
Inquired, ‘Hey Doc, are you now ready
To freeze space-time in the tower-clock?
Banish the thought of paradox.
Not now, you see, but hither they come,
Your days on the continuum.
Composed on the occasion of November the 5th, not in honor of Guy Fawkes Day but for Doc Brown Day.
I kill with the earth, that with which I line the walls of my room. With a paint brush choked with white diatomaceous earth-powder, I dab and fluff along the crack where the walls meet the floor to discourage the passage of bedbugs into my abode. The powder floats up and down through the sunrays that beam through the window. A Latvian choir sings vespers from my speakers and scores the moment. A lively moment, indeed, killing satanic creatures with the very earth they inhabit, or rather inhabited. I wear a white mask because microscopic charred rock isn’t great for one’s health or throat, at least as great as it is at killing them silently.
Here in late October, as an Indian summer day seizes, I’m in shorts when I should be figuring out layers. This interlude makes for curious thinking; I’m thinking about the weather and how strange it is when I really should be thinking about autumn in its usual path, from green to gold and red to dead—or so it seems. Then again when is weather ever not weird here? In Chicago, in the Midwest, things are best when they are on the move, the future blocked from view with today askew and only tomorrow the chance to weather things anew. The truth is, the world isn’t dead at the end of autumn when clouds set in and the cool air cocoons us for months; it’s only hibernating. All that dies die will be back again, if not exactly as it once was. It will be close enough, and hard for us humans to tell the difference. Can you tell one year’s sunflower patch from another?
I kill preemptively with the earth, diatomaceous powder that lies in wait, white and benign, until whatever crawls through the walls slides its thin belly over it. It doesn’t strike down its victim there, but in a moment, after the pitiful, pestilential creature’s exoskeleton has been thrashed through and exposed with the microscopic shards of ground-rock. It dies not of inhalation or poisoning, but of exposure. It bleeds out, bleeding the blood of its nocturnal victims. But this gruesome death that I cheer (good riddance) is not a death, only a hibernation. That bug is dead, but the others live. Those spared a diatomaceous death can live for years dormant, biding their time in verily anywhere, the vermin. The trap that I set in this interlude of an Indian summer is an interlude for them too. Whether they climb to my room or not, or whether they’re already here and laughing at my efforts, they will bide their time like the bushes and trees, who sleep the winter dormant but not dead, and wait to show their faces again, when they must. Dust to earth to dust, and again.
The dust of fallen leaves and rock ground into the ground floats in my air now as diatomaceous earth. It speckles the sunlight and makes it known. The choral vespers hover in the air too, a lullaby to a future-timely death of pests whose time has come. Say your prayers, parasites. The dust lying in repose waits for a bedbug to cross over it, not on this faux summery day but after, after the dust has settled and the winter has arrived for another hibernation. Will the living that die live again?
At the shore on a Monday seagulls with orange beaks, fighting against the wind, whip up and down the line, a boustrophedon parade— the waves shoving their way to shore. Jimmy Eat World’s “Futures” beckons them to me, scoring the ever-forward push of all creation.
It is all connected. It is all connected now.
Whatever reigns over this moment, I am a witness.
Up in the distance a plane careens toward the horizon, itself pushing against the wind to find its place in the future. It cuts past the clouds like the waves that topple rocks flanking the coast.
Men and women who smoke cigarettes walk to the shore, their exhaust billowing and dissipating into the rushing wind; planes in the air, smoke in the air.
There will always be exhaust, until there will not be. Until then: the horizon, the remedy, the birds.
Get open and wait— And suddenly the world becomes clear. Like a sunbeam across a prairie The atmosphere cracks and shouts a violent hello. A burning yellow rainbow— light itself enlightened. We seek illumination in our days; we crowd them still with noble desires of seeing the sunset once again. Just one more time.
