You'll find here a cluttered messy little collection of pages. It contains links, pictures as well as quotes and poems.
WESTERING: This is a trilogy of poems about the relationship between transcendentalists Margaret Fuller and Henry David
Thoreau. The first poem focuses on Fuller's journeying out to the Great Lakes in 1843.
In "Wreck At Fire Island Beach" [the middle poem] Thoreau has travelled down to New York City from Concord to search for remains from the shipwreck which killed Fuller and
her new family as they returned from Rome. It's a mood piece and a transitional section to the sequence,
working off what we've learned of Fuller from the first poem, and also opening up the idea of
journeying. The final poem takes place roughly ten years later when Thoreau himself in the throws of a kind
of westering, "Thoreau Travels Up The Minnesota River". Underlying this sequence
is that notion of westering, of an exploration of the western-most [unexplored] regions of the country,
and as a consequence of ourselves.
An odd tale...as most are...this poem is an "historical" fantasy. A what if...suppose Dorothy and William Wordsworth had visited Vauxhall Gardens [pictured to the left] during the time [1843] the American painter George Catlin was touring London with his illustrious exhibit of "Indians," in this case families from the Iowas tribe. The poem is titled after the poster used to draw the curious to these shows, with a promise of scenes from the savages' life along the Missouri River. By this time in their lives, William had just become Poet Laureate of Britian and Dorothy's health had begun to fade with bouts of headaches and delirium.
"Tableaux..." concerns then a clash of culture and also this close brother/sister
relationship. Well, at least that's what drove me to write such a fantasy...
Berenice Abbott, the subject of the poem, was a photographer who documented the ever changing face of New York City in the early 1930s. She saw the city itself as constantly in motion, and that her duty as a photographer was to try to make a record of this world as it existed, even while it was in the act of simultaneously creating and changing itself.
After Abbott finished this project, roughly the late 1930s/early 1940s, she moved on to another project: to capture the physical laws of science in a visual form, such as magantism, gravity, and bodies in motion.
The poem, "Beauty of Physics" tells in her own voice of her struggles to create new instruments to capture these phenomena and also win the respect/support of the scientific community.
Ok, one more.
"Concealing Coloration" is a dramatic monologue in the voice of Louis Agassiz Fuertes, a wildlife illustrator from the early part of this century.
His preoccupation was to place the bird he was painting within the context of its natural enviornment, so that the bird could almost disappear into the background (foliage, treelimb, what have you).
Of course this was at odds with his need also to highlight the feathers, the distinctive coloring, or those markings that might help other birders or naturalists identify the bird in the wild.
Ok, that's it for now. Hey, thanks for your patience you've made it this far.
You deserve a reward. Go here.
Here are some places where you can see more of my poems on the web, should you so desire:
Floating Bridge Press
"Terrian: A Journal of the Built & Natural Enviornments"
Now a few literary sites I've discovered worth visiting: right this way folks.