Winter Reflection

I'll say one thing about this winter: The cold -- yes, even in Florida -- has given me much time to reflect. What with three frosts (to date!) and a hailstorm earlier this week, it hasn't been kayaking weather. And the cold has taken a toll on this plein air poet who's so fond of sitting in the great outdoors to pen her verse. Still, hiking and thinking go together nicely and, with added layers to keep the brain warm, I've enjoyed letting both poetic and prosaic ideas float into my head and away with no intentions other than to listen to the ideas and let them evaporate on another gust of north wind.

One thought that did take root is that beauty survives regardless of the weather forecast. Sounds rather mundane doesn't it?! But true. So, on a chill morning along the Ochlockonee River on the Forgotten Coast of Florida's eastern panhandle, I watched the sun rise in puissant splendor, warming the North American continent toward spring, if not firing up the day much above 50 degrees.

A poet friend of mine, Tom Holmes, always urges readers at the end of his e-mails to "Find beauty." To which I will add: Let beauty find you.

Here's to the coming of spring but with joy in the grip of winter.

Island New Year's Greetings

New Year's Is for the (Tropical) Birds

Frigatebirds wheel fractals
in infinite turquoise skies.

***



Roger and I spent New Year's Day on Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National Park, a constellation of small tropical isles 70 miles west of Key West and actually closer to Cuba than the Keys!

After a tour of Fort Jefferson (once a prison for Confederacy soldiers during the Civil War) and some snorkeling (notherin to write home about, alas, but the water was soothingly warm), I stretched out on my back on a beach blanket under the warm subtropical blue skies and watched some 50 magnificent frigatebirds wheel effortlessly across the blue. It was a half-hour of pure bliss.

We also had a close encounter with a burrowing owl who was not burrowing but rather perched in a niche in the brick walls of the ammunition repository at the fort. Who, who, who knows what he was doing 70 miles at sea on a small Gulf island!

Tomorrow we'll be back in the Everglades for a week of hiking and kayaking in my favorite place on Earth! And, as 2009 National Park Artist-in-Residence, I'll have a return engagement with a poetry reading on the 9th at the Coe Visitors Center.

From there we'll be settling down in the Western Everglades' Ten Thousand Island area for a month on Chokoloskee Island. More to come from the Gulf Coast!

Happy New Year to All!

Wood, Sand, Water

Visual Aid


Complexity is underrated,
the trees teach us.


***

My snowbird sojourn is well under way. I write this morning from Jekyll Island, GA. However, the adjacent image, "Uprooted," was taken a few days ago at Hunting Island State Park in South Carolina, my favorite state park in all the land where we always stop en route south. In recalling that memorable visit (several beach walks!), I wrote the above poem. It's a scherzo, a form developed by friend and poet William Heyen and one restricted to 13 syllables, not including the title. Each scherzo must also include a rhyme as does "Visual Aid."

Hunting Island will recede further into the distance as we make our way later this morning to Georgia's lovely Crooked River State Park for three days beneath the rare long-leaf pines in the habitat of gopher tortoises. I will breathe the tidal rhythms of the St. Marys River and ponder further the miracle of diversity in Nature.

In Snowbird Season

Today is our last day at home; we head for points south tomorrow morning at daybreak, a 294-mile run to Carlisle, PA.

But I take a few minutes' rest from the whirlwinds of packing van and trailer, savoring our home on a wintry, gray morning. Beloved husband Roger is off to nearby Albion to tend to repairs on the minivan. Seems after 132,000 miles -- most of it pulling Alis Elizabeth Trailer -- Bore the Van needs new struts and related suspension work. Unplanned, unexpected, this duty calls him off on one more last-minute mission. Men's work.

It gives me some time to bask in the glow of a candle, listening to Simon & Garfunkle's Concert in Central Park in the comfort of the library one last morning. I get to do poet's work. Drafting a sonnet, revising a poem I wrote last week.

And quietly reveling in this morning's good news: Literary House Review has nominated my poem, "According to Instinct" for a Pushcart Prize! A second nomination! Yehaw! Thank you, LHR!

Soon I will turn my thoughts to my winter to-do list. The mundane calls.

Be well, friends and visitors.

May you receive the many gifts of the Universe this holiday season. And fellow poets? Write on!

Godwit: Poems of Canada Chosen for the University of Rochester's Andrew Eiseman Writers Award

On Thursday evening, November 5, I had the honor of receiving the Andrew Eiseman Writers Award at a ceremony at the University of Rochester's Rush-Rhees Library. I was thrilled to the point of tears, an upwelling of emotion that had nothing to do with the $1000 prize.

Poets really do suffer long and hard in the lonely world of words. We really do, I believe, write because we have to. A powerful internal impetus drives us to the blank page. And we write, write, write (and edit, edit, edit) because we feel we must. The spirit moves us; the muse moves us. Occasionally poems see the light of day and appear in journals. And, if we are lucky, the poems make their way into books, which a few people may actually end up reading.

So, to be honored in public with this distinguished award was breathtaking and tear-making.

Once again, I wish to thank many people: Andrea Weinstein of the University of Rochester for all her work in coordinating and planning the award process and Thursday's ceremony; the award judges for believing in my traitorous book; FootHills Publishing, a small press of 20+ successful years that has furthered the careers of poets and kept poetry alive in the world -- I owe so much to publisher Michael Czarnecki; and Bill Heyen, my mentor and friend…who stood at this podium a few years ago -- I was so very, very honored to follow in his footsteps. But most important of all, I offer here my undying gratitude and devotion and love to my husband, Roger Weir, who traipsed with me across Canada to every province and territory in that great country. We are proud to be south Canadians. And I am so very proud to be his wife.


For more details about the award, go to:


http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3491


To order your copy, write me at klmerrifield@yahoo.com.

Let Your River Journey Begin

A “quest for the center of poetry itself…” – FootHills Publishing Releases Karla Linn Merrifield’s Newest Poetry Collection



Etowah River Psalms is a chapbook that seeks the primal

Wheeler Hill, NY – “I focus and actually exult” is how poet Karla Linn Merrifield of Kent, NY, succinctly conveys the poetic process of exploring life’s timeless themes – eros, death, time, patience, longing –- in her new chapbook, Etowah River Psalms.


Merrifield’s is a deeply spiritual and sensual collection in which nature is worshiped and the human-as-animal is integrated into the web of life. Thus, in “The Beholder,” two lovers are united under “shimmering light… under the ancient stars above us. And in “Entering the Garden of the Universe,” what is human in the poem’s speaker is part of the fabric of nature in its entirety: “I now choose to live carnally. / Like the ocean, I have no other god / than gravity.”


“In psalm after riverine psalm here, whether her subject is tongue or Indian summer or the eye or box turtle and moon or mountain or love, Karla Linn Merrifield continues her quest for the center of poetry itself, the primal, and we are glad, by way of her voice, to hear and behold, to draw closer, says poet William Heyen, author of Shoah Train: Poems, and finalist for the National Book Award, about Etowah River Psalms.


The collection was inspired by Georgia poet Beau Cutts’s master poem, “The Etowah,” from which she drew lines that became the kernels for all of the poems in this chapbook. Thus, Cutts originally wrote of “cleansing the inner gray” and Merrifield, borrowing the line, created with it the poem “Darkroom Work,” the first stanza of which is:

Cleansing our inner gray,
we plunge first into black and white,
a glossy emotional tableau
of Ansel’s grandest views:
mountains, mesas, canyons, coulees.
He parses the territory
of our great hearts in full moonlight.

Thus, from one poem about a river flowed the many poems of Etowah River Psalms.

Etowah River Psalms (40 pages), with a cover photograph by the author,is available for $10from FootHills Publishing at http://foothillspublishing.com/2009/id63.htm or directly from the poet at klmerrifield@yahoo.com.

###

Far, Far Away

I've only been home two weeks from our expedition to the Canadian high arctic and Greenland and already it seems as far away as it is on the map.

But when friends and famiiy ask me, "So, how was it" it's easy to recall. I say, "Bleak, desolate." And, even as I recall the welcoming smiles of so many Inuit in the three villages we visited, I also remark, "Sad."

Everywhere is evidence of global warming. I'd expected that but not the extent of the damage. Until we got far, far north in Baffin Bay, ice was hard to come by. As Jimmy, one of our two Inuit cultural guides on the expedition ship Akademik Ioffe, pointed out when we arrived in his home town of Grise Fjord on Ellesmere Island, the glaciers are decidedly retreating. The massive one behind his town used to come down to their backyards; we craned our necks to see its foot -- easily two miles up into the brown hills overlooking Grise Fjord. Seal hunting has become more difficult for Inuit and polar bear alike. The floes where they hunt are going, going, gone.

The arctic's is a sad history too. Inuit were relocated, their children sent off to "residential schools" far from their parents to be starved, beaten, raped. Whites stole their language by forbidding it. Anglican priests eradicated the First People's shamanic traditions. Thankfully, some restitution has been made; the Inuit are now celebrating the 10th anniversary of the creation of Nunavut, a vast northern territory of Canada that is theirs to govern. And parents and schools are now teaching Inuktitut. Children are learning to hunt; they're learning how to drum and dance and sing once again in their native tongue.

Although whites eventually conquered, theirs is a sad arctic history as well. Shipboard lectures and a subsequent visit to the graveyard on Beechey Island attest to the fatal follies of 19th-century arctic exploration. I've long been haunted by the saga of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845-47. Both of Sir John Franklin's ships went down; all of the 129 men died seeking the Northwest Passage to the Orient. A 150 years later it's pretty much been proven that lead poisoning was the principle culprit -- lead in the solder of the tin cans of food they consumed, ingesting the metal with the meat -- and driven mad by it. Many, many contemporary searchers after Franklin met much the same fate. Their bones are scattered across the brownscape of the arctic and buried in the sands beneath the sea.

I spent considerable time contemplating the fate of Franklin and his men in a series of poems, including the one below in which I imagined what the the fate of the pet dog that accompanied the crew on their journey to an arctic death.


Unleashed, 1847


A frigid ocean away
from heathered highlands,
one border collie
with no sheep to herd
aboard the Erebus
trotted aimlessly among
scurvy-weak sailors,
lead-demented officers.
But when Jocko,
the ship’s pet monkey,
nipped her heels
and the boatswain’s
swift kick clipped her ribs,
Neptune let over the rail
and followed the trail
of arctic wolves
into the icy mists—
the Franklin Expedition’s
sole survivor.

***



P.S. Roger took this photo of me at Lemieux Point on Devon Island; the landscape is quintessential high arctic.