Poetry Book Giveaway

April is national poetry month, and I will be sending out free books to anyone who leaves a comment to this post by April 30 (your comment might also rank the books in order of desire / lust). I will randomly choose the winner (or winners, maybe one book per winner?) on May 1 if I'm not too busy grading finals. The below are some of my favorite books, one for obvious reasons.

The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck

Lush, lyrical persona poems on flowers, plants, times of day, prayers.

What the Body Told by Rafael Campo

Gay physician, father, Cuban-American, reinvents formal poetry for the 21st century in gritty and moving imagery.

Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa

The best poetry collection on the Vietnam War experience ever, and by a good poet to boot.

Indelible Marks by Benjamin Vogt

My first chapbook. It's ok. There are two poems I'd like to cut. The second chap, forthcoming this October, will be better.

Thanks to Kelli Russell Agodon for instigating this idea for poet bloggers (I am a poet / nonfiction / garden / environmental / whiney blogger).

Cover for the Poetry Chapbook

They usually aren't nearly as sexy as full length books, but my 2nd chapbook, Without Such Absence, will be in color--which is like having black tulips in the garden. We all know how black tulips are. Don't we. Oh yeah.

So below is an approximation of the cover. Prepub sales aren't until August, and the book itself won't appear until late October, but you may want to start saving up now for the $14 cover price. I feel like a writer for a little while. (Now someone please publish the full length poetry collection and the memoir!)

That image would be of the chicken coop from my dad's very early boyhood homestead in Oklahoma. No chickens in there now, just rolls and rolls of barbed wire (which could be reproducing--it's likely, actually).

Spring. Winter. Sprinter. Wring. Swipringter.

Crocus, snow, junco, snow, tulips, snow, spiraea, snow, 66, 28, 49, 20, 55.... Ahh March.

Rant--Memoir #2 Research Trip to Hell, Er, Kansas

In the last year I've made exponential leaps in understanding the writing life. Well, not exponential--more like concrete affirmations, as in, bang your head against concrete affirmations. Writing is like whipping yourself, it's masochistic, it's like jumping into quicksand. Why do I do this to myself? What, exactly, is the point? The payoff? Why must I be so meticulous? Why is writerly process more like my being processed by a meat grinder?

Last Sunday I left for Wichita, KS to research my family's immigration to Kansas in 1874-1879, planning to use the Mennonite Library and Archive in Newton and visit some ancestral churches (Hoffnungsau, Alexanderwohl, Bergthal).

Halfway there, in Concordia, my back left tire blew at 70mph. Luckily, it happened right in front of the volunteer fire chief's house, and he exhuberantly put on my spare for me. Something punctured the tire. It was terrifying, and I drove on edge the rest of the week.

The only tire place that is open is a mini Walmart-esque place for farmers--they don't have the right tire size. I concede and head to the Holiday Inn to get a room, knowing I lose a day of research. The nice receptionist hooks me up with an after hours tire service. Said service guy tells me upon inspecting my lug and bolts that the fire chief did not thread the bolts correctly into the hub--actually stripped the threads--and he worked hard to get 4 of the 5 to screw in, suggesting I shouldn't even drive on 4, and that it'd take a day or two to get a 5th.

I drove to Wichita anyway. 4 hour trip is now 8. Stopped twice to make sure the bolts were tight. Monday morning I spent 2 hours at the car dealership getting 5 new lug bolts, and finding out I was lucky that the lug threads were fine, cuz that would've been $1,000 for a new lug. So far, I'm only up to $450 in tire expenses.

Wednesday morning my engine light comes on. Back to the Wichita dealership after just driving to Newton (35 minutes one way). An air hose, that helps mix the fuel or something, has cracked and could've lead to the engine, well, seizing. Soon. Luckily this fix was free, but I'd wasted an entire afternoon messing with my car, again.

As for the research itself I made NO HEADWAY at all. Dead end after dead end after dead end. All the sources I wanted to see were not helpful. Even my great great great grandmother was not buried in the cemetary she was reported to be buried in, and I was not going to spend a week searching county records and cemetaries, nor was I going to hire a forensics team to dig up the church plots. My family is lost, in great measure, so when I see someone burning down an old church or razing an old barn or farmhouse, I get mightily pissed. In America, we sure do love to erase ourselves. I think some call it progress. I call it cultural alzheimers.

I ended my trip early, retreated home.

Back in 2006 in Wichita, at a toll booth, an RV sideswiped my car cuz the driver couldn't decide which toll lane he wanted (he'd never driven an RV before, and had no insurance). Much of my car was bent, ripped off, concave. This happened a few days after my grandmother's funeral in Oklahoma, on my way back to Nebraska. I don't care for Wichita.

Point is--$^%*&@^!!. I think the best a person can do with this sort of book project is just cull together what one can from more famous people who shared the boat ride over, shared the homesteading experience, and pretend it's your family--a bunch of relative nobodies who had little money and rented farms until 1884-ish, yet transformed the plains into a completely new landscape in 10 years. Maybe I can compare my road trip to fixing a schooner wheel as a tornado or prairie fire or bison heard approaches.

It's time to move on, and maybe come back to family months later. It's time to research Mennonite missionaries in Oklahoma, the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, government policy towards them in Oklahoma territory, and the changing ecology of the most diverse state in the union. At least I'll make some headway. Right?

Gnaw, I Didn't Eat Yer Shrubs This Winter

Way more snow = way more rabbit damage, as seen below. We'll discover how adroit I am at trimming and shaping shrubs soon enough.

'Tiger Eyes' Sumac looks to be in trouble. Will new branches just ignore this and still grow out, even if the nodes or whatever are gone?

The willow will look more like a pillar than a nice round shrub once I try to even it out, at least until mid summer.

A 3 foot tall red chokeberry is now 18 inches. I'm starting over since they grow so painfully slow anyway.

A burning bush relegated to behind the a/c unit lost half its je ne sais quoi.

And how quickly one forgets the 3-4 foot snow drifts, until one looks at the gnawed off crabapple branch about, oh, 4-5 feet off the ground.

Finally, you would not believe--you can not imagine--just how much rabbit crap is everywhere. I do not look forward to kneeling in the garden this spring. Over by the willow you can't see mulch. Seriously. I forgot to take a picture, but just imagine if someone dumped gallons of M&Ms in your living room. No, the rabbit did not poop in blue or red or yellow, but I wish he had. I could pretend it were flowers. Or Wonka Land. Or a pick up game of marbles. Or [insert your witty remark here, and if you don't wit, it won't please anyone a whit].

Garfield Minus Garfield sums up today's post:

Extinction--Oklahoma, Flora, Fauna, & Culture

Last night I went to hear a friend / colleague / previous PhD committee member (has it almost been a year since I graduated?) read from his new book, Pieces of the Plains. John Janovy is a biologist, so his perspective on life is much different than mine--microscopic (studies parasites and such) and lots of method. Lots of being in the trenches. He was also born (as was I) and educated in Oklahoma, which is the subject of my next book. But more on that later. 

Janovy was asked about the current extinctions we are beginning to witness of species, and if he saw a curtailing of that being possible. No, he said flat out, no, no way--not with how humans kill each other, not with how we kill for oil and in the name of god. Then he told the college students there that when they reach his age, in about 50 years, they'd be living in a far different world of hunger, lack of water, homelessness, global government chaos--all as oil runs out. I got that from watching a recent episode of World Without Oil on National Geographic (title?). It was frightening and only the tip of the berg.

Back to extinctions. I am still young, I still have some hope, but it's dwindling fast. Janovy said he is in the top 1% of humans who ever lived that have witnessed such natural diversity on earth, and that such diversity will very shortly come to an end, so enjoy it while you can. Species will weaken as the gene pool shrinks.

We've had other significant, 90th percentile global extinctions, but this 6th one as many folks call it--even if overcome--would take millions of years to repair, to evolve back to what we see now on the planet. It took millions of years before, it will again, if it happens.

I wonder if I should spend every waking chance I have to sit on my deck listening to the cardinals, blue jays, finches, sparrows, mourning doves and others before they vanish. 1% of bird species go functionally extinct each year. I wonder if I should sell my house and buy those 100 acres now and live in a tent so I can enjoy and interact more fully with nature while it is still here. I wonder if our natural descriptions today will seem as foreign to someone in a few decades as the pioneer descriptions I read of buffalo and elk wandering through wheat fields.

I wonder if this all has to be so dark. Humans are like my students and procrastinate until the last minute, until they have no choice but to do the work. I wonder if that's genetic, or if it's the same old song and dance of capitalism, of self-preservation, of blah blah blah.

I wonder if my next book will matter, if I should even write it. Last night Janovy quoted Oklahoma historian Angie Debo, whose 1930-ish work slapped the country's collective face as to Indian policy in Oklahoma territory and its early statehood years. Keep in mind, in 1930, many folks who instigated those policies were still very much alive. I quote her:

"Oklahoma is more than just another state. It is a lens in which the long rays of time are focused into the brightest of light. In its magnifying clarity, dim facets of the American character stand more clearly revealed. For in Oklahoma all the experiences that went into the making of the nation have been speeded up. Here all the American traits have been intensified. The one who can interpret Oklahoma can grasp the meaning of America in the modern world."

As I look at the history of my Mennonite family coming over from Germany and Russia in the 1870s, I am caught in an impossible vice: their faith, hope, and work ethic was unique, was incredible, was and is so praise worthy I can't put it into words. And yet, either as government pawns and / or willing paticipants through missionary work in Oklahoma territory, they helped to so efficiently destroy the ecology of native flora and fauna and dozens of Native American cultures within a few decades--if not within one decade.

This very fine line scares the heck out of me, and I have to have faith that as I continue to research books and family stories, it will play itself out in the right way--without guilt, blame, or condemnation, but with honest and direct light, and somehow with the same hope and faith my ancestors had facing a world of incredible uncertainty. Phase 2 begins next week.

P.S. -- It's snowing hard outside. That doesn't help things.

The Geese, The 50, The Iris, The Waiting

This morning I opened the sliding door to scare away two squirrels at the bird feeders. I was angry. I'd put out a nutty squirrel log to disctract them, but they aren't distracted yet. Didn't matter. Nothing else in the world matters when, after 40" of snow (average is 20") and three months of a very cold winter, a person opens a door at 10am and, and.... Spring. My god it's spring. Standing in shorts and a t-shirt in bright sun and a light wind, it's spring. I wanted to shout it. I wanted to call back to the massive hords of geese honking back and forth to one another like a game of marco polo. I want in. I am in.

50 degrees never felt so real. It was a full immersion, a blessing, a baptism that slides right through your skin, muscle, veins, and blood. By the thuja, iris reticulata pokes up out of the ground like fresh bamboo shoots. In the garden the snow is melting fast now, water pools in the bottoms unable to penetrate the frozen clay soil. The grasses, the sedges, the asters--these are all now emerging from the snow flattened like bed hair. The only winter interest the garden has this year was a continuous one foot of wet, heavy snow ripping off large branches of itea and viburnum that will take years to regrow.

Maybe it's spring. Maybe it's not. I've been tricked before, I've let myself fall in love with moments and thoughts too often not to be a little realistic, a little jaded. Morning. It sounds too much like mourning. And yet I've also discovered that the opposite of a thing is often that thing--that what is, isn't, and so more truthfully is. Mourning is morning, the beginning of a recovery.

Spring. A coil tightly wound, compressed flat to the earth, all that stored and hidden energy, all that promise and hope, all that electric, faster-than-light, in-the-blink-of-an-eye potential and change just waiting. A trap. A rabbit hole. A rock at the top of a hill.

Hundreds of geese this morning ride the wind northwest. Iris reticulata spikes the air. Fifty degrees echoes back to December first and the fall garden. My bare legs on the back steps are like roots, tree leaves, taking in the morning again as if seasons never existed and I am the first one to know this world.

Crocus Leaves in the Grass! And a Gluck Poem

You gotta look hard, especially when you aren't used to looking for anything the last 4 months, but they are everywhere. Snow crocus. Just behind the melting snow line. Snow-less crocus.

Nostos

There was an apple tree in the yard --
this would have been
forty years ago -- behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts --
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

-- Louise Gluck

(It's a busy week ahead, tons of student conferences, sorting student entries for our annual dept. literary awards, prep work for my KS research trip, and visiting writers auditioning to captain Prairie Schooner--UNL's national literary journal--into new waters as editor-in-chief. Change is everywhere. Alas, it doesn't come in $100 bills.)

The Birds, The Sun

Outside it is 22. This morning it was 0, and will be again tonight. But something has shifted. Standing in my socks and sweater on the steps out back (pants too), it didn't feel cold. I could see my breath, but I could not feel the dry cold in my throat. I've not felt real sun in days, maybe a week (what a busy week), and though I am not really a sun person, feeling it meant something today. I was cold, yet I was warm, and it wasn't just the sunlight.

Dozens upon dozens of robins and chickadees, sparrows and blue jays, dart from ceder to elm to gutter's edge, their feet on the metal echoing down into the house. I hear a woodpecker from somewhere in the stand of trees. Chickadees chase and call each other, meticulously tracing each other's path like a snake's body. There are more geese at dusk, larger flocks pacing west toward the open cornfields and farm ponds.

It's not spring, we are 20 degree below average, and this is fine. The 6" of snow in the garden is lovely, keeping my fall transplants safe. Along the house's south wall, where the snow is gone, the preserved green of tansy and penstemon and agastache nearly fool me into believing it is April. It's not spring, and this is fine.

Inside I'm laying on the couch, sunlight warming my feet only, not reaching in to the living room as far as it did just one month ago. I'm reading a book. I'm thinking about both of my memoirs--one ready, one in the research stages. I'm wondering what I'll find in Kansas. I'm daydreaming about planting yellow twig dogwood and carex and liatris. Will I find any trace of my family? Of myself? Two robins scrape the tree line and settle on the roof--I hear them chasing each other across the asphalt shingles. It is a spring rain. The rejection letters in the mail are almost always positive now. We are in transition. The lines are blurred. It is winter. And so it must be spring.

A Rant On Our Perceptions of Environmental Degradation

First, I think it's important to say that I am not a bleeding liberal and never will be. Nor am I really all that much of a republican. I pick and choose on each issue. Not that it matters. What matters is that we always tend to prescribe any conversation about important social issues to political idealogies and groups, when that does nothing but separate us first from each other, and then from the issue, making us stagnate. Which seems to be the perpetual state of Washington.

I often get myself into stupid and ultimately silly discussions (arguments) about our perception and actions toward the environment. No issue concerns me more than how humans live in the landscape. If this issue doesn't become politicized, it will often slide down to the next level, and become a religious issue--which I think can be a good thing, because so many people believe in some kind of diety, and because so many people feel something larger than themselves when they spend time in a natural setting (wild or created) and call this feeling god.

I get accused of being too emotional about environmental degradation. Yes, ok, fine. It's going to get worse as I get older. But isn't the core problem that we DON'T get emotional? People tell me all the time to not be emotional or irrational about the issue of global warming or pollution or mountain top mining, but shouldn't we be emotional about it? If someone came and blew up your family and home, would you be emotional? If your friends were floating dead on the ocean current because they've eaten nothing but plastic for months, would you be concerned?

The way I see it, we don't care. I'm not saying humans are self centered or egomaniacal, though we can be. I'm saying if it doesn't directly affect us now, it doesn't matter. This is obvious, I suppose. But we lack the metaphor that creates deeper meaning in our lives, that connects us more deeply to ourselves and our loved ones, and as a result, the world we really do depend on. That missing metaphor is, let's say, an endangered milkweed species in only one county of Illinois. How separate is its disappearance from our world than the right for women to have equal pay or for a person to be able to walk down a city street at night and not fear being mugged, raped, or murdered?

Here's author Lisa Knopp from her book The Nature of Home:

A metaphor is more than just a way to decorate a literal statement. Aristotle spoke of a metaphor’s ability to induce insight. That insight comes through a recognition of the similarities and the differences between the two things being compared…. If you doubt the power of a single metaphor, spend the rest of this day considering how different our treatment of each other, our philosophies, the health of our planet would be, if for the past millennia we had personified nature as a father instead of a mother.

Here's another quote I think extends the conversation, from poet Robert Bly:

All through Taoist thought, there is the idea that our disasters come from letting nothing live for itself, from the longing we have to pull everything, even friends, in to ourselves and let nothing alone. If we examine a pine carefully, we see how independent it is of us. When we first sense that a pine tree really doesn’t need us, that it has a physical life and a moral life and a spiritual life that is complete without us, we feel alienated and depressed. The second time we feel it, we feel joyful.

There is no doubt in my mind that we fear ourselves, and for good reason. We are afraid of what we will do when we are angered, stressed out, on the edge. There is the fear of loving something or someone totally and wholly and losing one's self. Maybe that is the greatest fear--losing one's self. It is hard for us to let go of the outline, the rules, social decorum, or to let go of indoctrinated reason.

Many religious thinkers from various religions say we must be made vulnerable in order to know god. The same idea of vulnerability goes for falling in love and being able to, let's say, create a workable healthcare system. There is always much at risk: my sense of myself that is barely pieced together as it is after only a few decades of being alive. And before I know it I'll be dead and gone anyway. I am afraid. We are terribly afraid.

It is not my direct fault that our national symbol, the bald eagle, is again being threatened. As they pick apart the leftover carcasses of a hunter's kill, eagles devour poisonous lead shot. I did not shoot that deer. I did not feed that eagle. I can't do anything about it. And the eagle doesn't affect me. These ideas are very true. But you can decide not to hit your child, not drive your car as much, hold a door for someone, or plant a tree. You can, as Benedictine monks do, find the smallest actions are the greatest praises toward a possible god, or at least realize that in the smallest actions, when we let go, we've overcome our fears and solitude even though we are, by design, alone and wary in our environments--just like every other creature.

Maybe the missing emotional metaphor in our lives is more anthropomorphism. It could be as simple as staring out the window on a windy afternoon, snow slipping from the branches of an elm, and seeing my grandmother taking off her plastic hair net before she came inside to make me potato soup.

* A lot of the above ideas come from my memoir, Morning Glory, as do the quotes.

The Night Migrations--Louise Gluck

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.

Garden Non Destruction, Thanks P*n*s of the Prairie

I was expecting people to whack me upside the head, not agree with my reasoning. I hate blue jays because they wake me up in the morning? It's too much work? Have you seen the glory that is my garden? Look here. Here I mean. That is heaven--especially when the monarchs come.

No no no. I want to double the size. But not here. I am very unhappy with the front, though--hostas and astilbes that I once thought were my best options for shade and part shade. After 2.5 years, I've schooled myself real good in this area--plus I want something more uniform. That means all / mostly carex. Sedge I mean. Should do well in a permanently moist, compost-enriched, half slim shadey sorta spot that stays frozen late into spring. I'm still looking for the best carex. Maybe I will just plant carex in between the hostas and astilbes. And a dogwod or two.

Point is folks, I'm sorry for the deception, and shocked at the gardeners who came here and said go for it. Yikes. I'm the guy who tosses wildflower seed over the fence on to the neighbor's acreage, and out the car window going 50 on nearby semi-rural roads. The inside of my car is sprouting coneflowers and milkweed between the cushions.

I'm a seed flinger, just like the inspirational statue atop the nearby Nebraska state capitol, the Penis of the Prairie as we locals call it.

Look at the big foot that seedy gent has. You know what that means.

Garden Destruction

I'm ripping up my 1500 square foot garden. It hasn't worked right since the start or been what I hoped, and there are just far too many animals that are eating things. And the crows and blue jays wake me up in the mornings. Just too much to take care of finally for how busy I am with work and writing.

So sod is coming back in. I'm sure most will hate what I'm doing, but it should help the house sell faster whenever we do move, and it'll blend back in with the rest of the neighborhood finally.

Au'revoir jardin.

If anyone wants to dig up anything, you have until March 15.

Not Knowing Why--Poem by Ann Struthers

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings, lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger.
What danger on this island in the middle
of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel
the lift of wind under their iridescent wings,
because they were born to fly,
because they have nothing else to do,
because wind and water are their elements,
their Bach, their Homer, Shakespeare,
and Spielberg. They wheel over the lake,
the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes.

In autumn something urges
them toward Texas marshes. They follow
their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles
creeping along geometric roads, going toward small boxes,
toward lives as narrow or as wide as the pond,
as glistening or as gray as the sky.
They do not know why. They fly, they fly.

Twisty Ghost Sucks Out Girl's Brain, and Other Figures in Ice

I'm starting a new art series based on my winter rain chain. I've titled each piece to evoke what I see in the image--what you see may be different, and as a result, incorrect / less valid / quite pedestrian. Not my fault. If the image titles sound like newspaper column titles--or popular songs from the 1960s--it's because I'm also starting a new series of newspaper columns (or popular songs from the 60s), which I hope will turn into a 5,000 page novel composed of said columns (or songs), interlinked by scratch and sniff word find puzzles. I'm hoping Norton will take it. Are you buying any of this? As always, click on photos to expand.

Twisty Ghost Sucks Out Girl's Brain

E.T. Phone Swan

Recline the Headless Dragon Cat

Polar Bear Lizard Plays With Stalactites

Worm Da Baby Bird

Go Go Gadget Bottle Opener Hand

On a Red-Tailed Hawk, Winter Gardens, and Photos

When I first started gardening I was all "plants plants plants." Completely insane with plants. I overdosed many times a day. I have the medical records to prove it.

Obviously, gardeners eventually garden just as much for the plants and themselves as for wildlife. Having insects and animals in the garden extends it into a new physical dimension, a "Z" axis if you will (remember your high school algebra?). Sculptural plants that were kinetic only in the wind are now kinetic as they play a part in the lives of other organisms. Of course, we don't see the vast majority of these organisms, but the ones we do see give this gardener quite a high--especially in winter--and a deeper, more lush and meaningful high than just plants plants plants.

This last week or so a red-tailed hawk has been buzzing the yard. Two days ago in high north winds the hawk was floating above the garden, hovering like a helicopter, hopefully at work on clearing me of my rabbit problem (nota bene: I've not seen a rabbit in quite some time--but maybe the snow melt has something to do with this as other food sources open up). But the hawk was gone before I could move to get the camera.

Later that day I was sitting on the couch grading student blank verse poems. I saw the hawk crest the tree line 200 feet away. I knew it'd simply pass over the house as it always does. It flew quick and low and out of sight. After 10 seconds I made myself grab my camera, debating the possibility of getting a shot if it came around again. It flew by probably no more than 30' off the ground, but I knew it was long gone.

Standing at the sliding glass door there it was, perched like a giant football atop a neighbor's eastern red cedar. I couldn't believe it was balanced there. It reminded me of a Christmas tree angel hung off to the side because, if placed on the very top, the tree would bend over.

I missed the shot. As soon as I snapped off my SLR cover the hawk was leaping into flight. Below is what I got.

In the dead of winter I get the fullest, bare-bone understanding of where I am, and how I and my garden and little 1/4 acre homestead are connected to the larger world. A hawk passes over my yard in a second. In one minute how much more has it experienced than me? Whose perspective is deeper and richer? Whose life would suffer more for the lack of the other? The answer to that last question should be obvious.

(And does anyone want to start the conversation about how we must take photos of objects and events we value? How that is an act of ownership and appropriation? How once we have that image safe and secure in our clutches another experience with that object or event seems less meaningful?)

A Viking Prayer

Our Favre who art in Minnesota, hallowed be thy name. Thy bowl will come, it will be won, in Miami as it is in the Dome. Give us this Sunday our weekly win. And give us our touchdown passes, as we forbid those who try to pass against us. And lead us not into frustration, but deliver us to the Super Bowl. For thine is the MVP, the best of the NFC, and the glory of the Purple People Eaters now and forever. Amen.

Skol Vikings!

Vikes 34
Saints 27

Avian Roundup (+ Rabbit Poop, Squirrel Corn, and Icog)

Or, studies in wildlife. I'd never seen a common / northern flicker before. Look at these great closeup shots I got, courtesy of my new birdbath heater near the patio door.

This is the most beautiful bird I've seen in my backyard. And did you know they're considered ground woodpeckers? First time I saw this guy swoop through the yard I thought we had a hawk.

Flicker shunning.

Flicker balance beam.

Flicker GQ.

Floating cardinal. Most of the cardinals here are magicians who were scheduled to appear on Conan O'Brien in March, but....

Junco v. strawberry. Who will make the first move?

The squirrel soon ran up the elm and into the cedars with its catch of the day. After pillaging the bird feeders.

Rabbit scat!!! Yay!!! I pretend they are berries. Na na na, la la la la. They are berries. There are no rabbits. There are no rabbits. There are no rabbits.

The chicken wire around the shrubs, to keep the wabbits at bay, caught the snow most interestingly.

That's a 3 foot drift on the right by the arbor. We've had almost 3 feet of snow already this year, 15 inches above average.

With the snow melt during the day, and hard freezes at night, ice fog / freezing fog develops. This is another reason not to cut back plants in the fall. The last two mornings every object has been covered in a frothy white that is stunning in the sunlight.

And finally--GO MINNESOTA VIKINGS!

Naked in the Snow Garden

It would not have felt uncomfortable today. At 40 degrees, my 12-36" drifts are settling fast, and I had my coat unzipped and my gloves off. This time of year, no gloves feels like freestyling.

By the way, do you know what blank verse is? Tomorrow, the second day of poetry class, is traditionally the hardest day for my students--followed closely by the third, fourth, and fifth day. And likely the sixth and seventh. Good to get it over with early in the term. On the first day only 1-2 knew what blank verse was, and these were former students of mine. Can't write poetry without knowing the forms, let alone what a tercet is (another question only one student volunteered a guess at). Favorite part of the term for me because I am 100% sure they're learning something tangible they can use to become better writers.

Am I Stupid?

I'm gonna ramble about my garden design. It might not be elegant, but since I have to be smart next week as a teacher again, I'm feeling a bit, oh, je ne sais quoi. Grrrr.

1) Next time I start planting a garden, shrubs are the first priority. This is made obvious by the fact that for 4 months in the spring and summer my garden looks more like a field of dandelions. I'm talking height here. Even texture. It's most disconcerting. Blah blah blah. No structure or interest. (I do have around 20 shrubs out there, mind you.)

2) As a play off of one, I want to add a yellow twig dogwood in a position now occupied by the most slowly-growing 'Isanti' red twig dogwood I've ever seen. It's sibling 20' away gets less sun and is easily three times as big--both were planted on the same day. Deal is, any yellow twig dogwood, even some of these smaller varieties, are just too big. At least, too big in the summer. Come winter, the garden--being overly perennial--looks like a desert of brown vomit. So, in the winter, it'll work. But perennials are neater in the late summer and fall--my fall garden is heaven. The 'Isanti' began to get crowded out this year by wild bergamot, iron weed, eupatorium....

A person just can't go plugging shrubs back into a nearly established perennial garden. It's like putting a baby back into its mother.

3) Trees. More trees. Charming, different, butterfly and bird attracting small trees that grow. See, I got this 'Coralburst' crabapple I rescued for half off from Home Depot. Deal is, it grows slower than the 'Isanti' dogwood. It's even refusing to root well. So I made the mistake of planting a ninebark by it. Already I am envisioning what 2010 will look like in this corner of the garden--crabapple in a ninebark. Maybe it will be a new design fad. Did I mention a 'Snowbank' boltonia is on the other side, and that I hate to cut it back because I like those puppies tall? Crabapple sandwich.

Tall perennials are like a strong narcotic. Low perennials are like sugar in a stick.

4) A higher fence. Much higher. Say, 30'. Neighbor's dog toys shall not bombard my garden like meteors. Better, yet, a moat. A 5 acre moat.

Machine guns that sense movement, zero in, and blast tennis balls out of the air seem appropriate. I've seen these on Ebay.

5) The garden is too small. Not really. But it is. To have shrubs I need fewer perennials. This won't happen. I had so many more insects this year as my perennials matured. Butterflies galore, honeybees en masse. I am becoming entangled in the web of my perennials.

I need more shrubbery to detox me. Ni!

6) Machine guns that also target rabbits. However, I am getting some winter trimming done on my willow 'Nana' don't you know. However, the trimming is becoming most over the top--as in, where did that half of the willow go that was there yesterday?

Ratta tatta tatta rabbit shrapnel.

7) A divine number. What I feel most stupid about is basically a design quandary. Most designers say that in a smaller space like mine (is 1500 feet small?), you should go for repetition, use swaths of the same plants, or at least similar textures and colors. Whatever. I don't think my garden--or most prairies I've seen--look like cottage gardens, so what do I have to fear? But, I do have repetition in plants around the garden, just not together. Is it cohesive enough, or too chaotic to the eye? I'll find out for certain this year, barring a hail storm.

A private backyard garden cannot be a prairie. I'm learning this painfully slow. Native plants or not, I have a manicured garden like those English uptight snobs who have poisoned this country's sense of its natural and ecological self. You can check me on this if you want, because I'll agree with you tomorrow. Hate mail from England in 3, 2....

But I worry too much. I think about my garden late at night when I can't sleep, thus making me stay awake longer doing calculations and line drawings and doodles of shrubs in my head. Let it go. If you love something, just let it grow.

My Poetry (Chap)Book--Buy It

On New Year's Eve I found out my 2nd chapbook will be published by Finishing Line Press. Hopefully, Without Such Absence will come out this summer. I just don't know yet. It's a solid press, good list, nicely designed little books, and they are on Amazon and do some other promo unlike most other chap publishers.

So, I will eventually need to sell some books, especially pre orders, which determine the press run. The more pre orders, the larger the press run (and the more books I get free to sell myself at readings and such). If you'd like to be notified via postcard when the presale will begin--this spring sometime--email me your address. There will be some gardeny poems included in the book, which will be around 30p, and a few poems from it can be found here.

AS FOR THE PREVIOUS HOLIDAY, it was the first time the inlaws spent Christmas with my parents, and it went very well (whole family together--very cool). On the drive back to Nebraska, my wife and I counted SEVENTY (70!) cars, semis, Uhauls, and pickups along the edges of I-35--some right side up, most on their sides or upside down, and many groups of say 3-6 cars. 12/25 saw a blizzard of 1-2 feet I'm glad I wasn't driving through.

And school starts next week--I've been away from teaching since May. This may be the most apprehension I've had since my first days in 2000, but it's more to do with losing my free time than anything (in 2000 I was a 200 / 10 on the apprehension scale, 2010 is 3 / 10). Good classes though. I'm hoping. Trying some new things. Bribes. I jest not.