Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Roughing It (1). Mark Twain.

New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1872 (1984).


Why read it? Twain records a journey from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. Filled with tall tales, vivid descriptions, narratives of adventure and character sketches.


Sample Ideas and Quotes:

“Pretty soon he [Twain’s brother] would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the far west, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero.” p. 541.


“Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description—an imposing cradle on wheels.” p. 545.


“…dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation….” p. 546.


“…camp-fire…around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly entertaining.” p. 551.


“Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the unabridged dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody.” p. 554.


“But don’t you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always happens?” p. 572.


Pony Express: “…kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look.” p. 575.


To be continued.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Poet's Choice. Conclusion.

Editors: Paul Engle and Joseph Langland. New York: Time Incorporated. 1962.


Why read it? First the poem. Then the poet’s comment on why it is the favorite poem. The explanation is often as cryptic as the poem. The poets offer comments on the nature of poetry, how the poems originated and the many different reasons that they have chosen that particular poem as the favorite. They also write a great deal in a few words about the process of writing poetry. That alone is reason for the interested reader to become involved.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

Alastair Reid: “…but I do know that whenever I happen to read it over, I re-enter the moment most vividly, as more than a memory.” p. 241.


Richard Eberhart: “I felt I know and possessed, that is, experienced all possible relationships between the small squirrel, myself as a slightly larger animal, and the immense idea of God. I was conscious of fate and time.” p. 59.


William H. Matchett: “ ‘Water Ouzel’ is an affirmation, a discovery of joy at the core of things, in spite of appearances and limitations. After the poem had been around for a while, I began to fear that it might be soft: it was not the whole story. Therefore, I undertook ‘The Petrel,’ a complementary discovery of evil at the core of things. I don’t understand either the goodness or the evil, but they are both there.” p. 216.


Elizabeth Jennings: “This poem is about power or, more precisely, about the power which lies behind energy held in check…the enormous power of controlled strength….” p. 236.


Phyllis Webb: “What are we whole or beautiful or good for/but to be absolutely broken?” p. 265.


Thom Gunn: “The title [‘My Sad Captains’], part of a line in Antony and Cleopatra….” p. 279.


Comment: This book puts the reader inside the minds of poets. The experience of writing poetry is rich and poets write poems for many different reasons. This book, Poet’s Choice, comes close to being one of my favorites. I would never want to lose it. RayS.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Poet's Choice (5)

Editors: Paul Engle and Joseph Langland. New York: Time Incorporated. 1962.


Why read it? First the poem. Then the poet’s comment on why it is the favorite poem. The explanation is often as cryptic as the poem. The poets offer comments on the nature of poetry, how the poems originated and the many different reasons that they have chosen that particular poem as the favorite. They also write a great deal in a few words about the process of writing poetry. That alone is reason for the interested reader to become involved.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

John Holmes: “However much I vary tone, line length, and shape of a poem, I want to get one I can read aloud in my own most natural speaking voice, but emotionally heightened.” p. 61.


John Betjeman: “…as the verses, like all my verse are meant to be recited out loud.” p. 81.


Paul Engle: “…the urgent emotion demanded that language be put under control.” p. 94.


Kingsley Amis: “…something I had been trying to get said for a long time….” p. 197.


John Wain: “If it has spoken to someone else, it has proved itself.” p. 232.


William Meredith: “The second reason I like the poem is that it was what Robert Frost has somewhere called a gatherer. It pulled together a lot of apparently unrelated experience….” p. 175.


Philip Larkin: “Incidentally, an oceanographer wrote to me pointing out that I was confusing two kinds wave, plunging waves and spilling waves, which seriously damaged the poem from a technical view-point. I am sorry about this, but do not see how to amend it now.” p. 204.


Howard Moss: “ ‘Going to Sleep in the Country’ was for me a kind of reward, as if the struggle and labor of other poems had paid off in this almost effortless one, as if a great deal of conscious training had finally been put to use without my having to do much more than transcribe what the past had stored up.” p. 206.


John Wain: “…my poems stand in a quite different relationship to me, their author, from that of my other writings. If I write a novel or a story or a critical essay, I soon make up my mind as to its merits; I can read it, more or less, as if it had been written by someone else. But I cannot do this with my poems because they are instinctual: they arise, from some deep place in my being where forces are at work which I cannot command.” p. 231.


James Merrill: “The poem still surprises me…by its clarification of what I was feeling.” p. 239.


To be continued.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Poet's Choice (4)

Editors: Paul Engle and Joseph Langland. New York: Time Incorporated. 1962.


Why read it? First the poem. Then the poet’s comment on why it is the favorite poem. The explanation is often as cryptic as the poem. The poets offer comments on the nature of poetry, how the poems originated and the many different reasons that they have chosen that particular poem as the favorite. They also write a great deal in a few words about the process of writing poetry. That alone is reason for the interested reader to become involved.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

Vernon Watkins: “The very last words of the poem came to me many years before the poem was made….” p. 90.


Paul Engle: “The stanzas make their own attempt to triumph over artificiality of rime, meter and formal rhythm by making strong and spontaneous emotion not only survive these hazards, but in a sense depend on them.” p. 93.


Josephine Miles: “ ‘Reason’ is a favorite one of my poems because I like the idea of speech—not images, not ideas, not music, but people talking—as the material from which poetry is made…. I like the spare and active interplay of talk.” p. 106.


William Meredith: “I wouldn’t scan a poem while I was doing its important work—the first couple of drafts….” p. 175.


Kingsley Amis: “…it had been kicking around in draft form for months before I felt I had it right. I wrote it so many times I despaired of it.” p. 198.


Howard Moss: “ ‘Going to Sleep in the Country’ arrived without struggle, apparently without forethought, as if it had been waiting in the wings.” p. 206.


Howard Moss: “I was surprised, on reading the poem over, to notice that each stanza was one line shorter than the one before. I had not consciously planned it that way, but it added to the effect of going to sleep, the waking world growing not only more distant as the poem went on, but the sleeper’s relationship to it becoming briefer each time.” p. 206.


John Wain: “After a poem has arrived, and been born, I look at it much as one looks at a natural object: I didn’t write it—it happened to me.” p. 232.


Elizabeth Jennings: “It is perhaps ironic, as well as of some literary interest, that when I did at last find the medium, the music, the image, for my idea, I was not directly searching for it.” p. 236.


John Hollander: “ ‘Aristotle to Phyllis’ is a poem that I’m sure no one could really like as I do. It’s too full of private jokes for myself alone.” p. 283.


To be continued.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Poet's Choice (3)

Editors: Paul Engle and Joseph Langland. New York: Time Incorporated. 1962.


Why read it? First the poem. Then the poet’s comment on why it is the favorite poem. The explanation is often as cryptic as the poem. The poets offer comments on the nature of poetry, how the poems originated and the many different reasons that they have chosen that particular poem as the favorite. They also write a great deal in a few words about the process of writing poetry. That alone is reason for the interested reader to become involved.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

Archibald MacLeish: “Some poems know more about their own business than the man who wrote them and go on thinking about it longer than he ever did.” “I sometimes think the relation between writer and written is reversed here: this poem is writing me.” p. 20.


Alan Tate: “…and I wish I had made it clear, in the poem, what ‘eat dish and bowl’ means and not depended upon the reader’s knowledge of Vergil.”p. 39.


Robert Francis: “Such a word, for instance, as hallelujah. That word suggested another Hebrew one, Ebenezer. With those two words as a starter, I was on my way. Out of these two words grew everything I found to say.” p. 46.


Robert Francis: “Yet in starting to write a sestina I was really going against my deepest poetic convictions. For a sestina is an extreme example of a poem written from the outside in, and my way is to write from the inside out. To encourage a poem as it grows, to grow its own skeleton and skin. Like a living cat. And not to start with the skin, as the taxidermist does, and stuff it out. I am strong for form, but not for forms. Perhaps I should now admit that a poem written the wrong way may sometimes be more successful than a poem written the right way.” p. 46.


Langston Hughes: “I did not consciously compose this poem. It came to me, and I simply wrote it down, and wondered where it came from, and liked it. Possibly I like it because it was not contrived, inception having been outside myself.” p. 47.


Richard Eberhart: “I have a special affection for it, then, because an event in nature immediately produced a poem and because this method of composition is unusual with me, alien to my usual modes of being, thought and feeling, an upwelling into consciousness of relationships having nothing to do directly with experience, but coming out of reservoirs of memory from mysterious promptings, promptings of delicate and strong balances fashioning the created harmonies of poems.” p. 59.


Stanley Kunitz: “As a dramatic lyric, the poem is meant to be read aloud….” p. 66.


EL Mayo: “I remember the writing of this poem because it proved particularly difficult to do. I knew what I wanted, but revision followed revision without any prospect of finality—and then suddenly everything snapped into shape.” p. 69.


EL Mayo: “…most poems are the outcome, at one level or another, of a sort of rapport between the personal feelings of the poet and the spirit of the age in which he lives.” p. 69.


Robert Penn Warren: “…the cathartic value for the poet…has nothing to do with the value of the poem.” p. 78.


To be continued.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Poet's Choice (2)

Editors: Paul Engle and Joseph Langland. New York: Time Incorporated. 1962.


Why read it? First the poem. Then the poet’s comment on why it is the favorite poem. The explanation is often as cryptic as the poem. The poets offer comments on the nature of poetry, how the poems originated and the many different reasons that they have chosen that particular poems as the favorite. They also write a great deal in a few words about the process of writing poetry. That alone is reason enough for the interested reader to become involved.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“Few people work harder, or for smaller rewards, than poets, especially American poets. In a country where only half the adults read even one book of any kind a year, the poet is virtually ignored.” p. xvii.


“A good poem is usually an act of discovery…clothed in memorable form and language.” p. xvii.


Alan Tate: “Even the most serious poems are partly a game, not unlike a child’s game, the rules of which are arbitrarily made in advance.” p. 39.


John Ciardi: “I like both poems that sing and poems that say.” p. 151.


Louis Simpson: “Poetry is the art of the ephemeral.” p. 220.


Michael Hamburger: “I was brought up on the notion of the impersonality of art, and had taken the ‘objective correlative’ too much to heart. This meant that I wrote too formally, distilled experience till it seemed not mine but anyone’s—or no one’s, and became what people call a ‘literary’ poet.” p. 225.


Louis Simpson: “…a poet can be great and yet be mistaken in his ideas.” Uses Whitman as an example. His ideas about American democracy were mistaken, but he is great in writing what he observes. p. 220.


Roy Fuller: The poet oscillates between the extremes of giving up poetry for action or giving up action to write poetry. p. 116.


“I cannot say, and no one has ever been able to say, ‘Today I will write poetry.’ ” p. xvii.


John Hall Wheelock: “I have often tried to define what gives this poem so strong a hold upon me. Is it because it seemed almost to write itself and I’m still not sure of its meaning? In my case, I sense that it says a good deal in a few words….” p. 9.


To be continued.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Poet's Choice (1)

Editors: Paul Engle and Joseph Langland. New York: Time Incorporated. 1962.


Why read it? First the poem. Then the poet’s comment on why it is the favorite poem. The explanation is often as cryptic as the poem. The poets offer comments on the nature of poetry, how the poems originated and the many different reasons that they have chosen that particular poems as the favorite. They also write a great deal in a few words about the process of writing poetry. That alone is reason enough for the interested reader to become involved.


Several themes seem to recur: the importance of the poem’s being read aloud. Sometimes the poem seems to write itself, as if it is being dictated and the poet merely records it. Or the poems take on a life of their own. Poems can be viewed as games with words and rules. The poets and their poems become separate entities. The poet seeks to make the poem objective, an object. Certain poems represent specific problems in composition and the poet tries to solve them. Almost all poets are Aware of the difference between the conception and its embodiment. The poem can be an act of discovery. A poem can be a search for self-realization. Poems often deal with moments in the poet’s daily life. The material of poems must deal with what people of the future will recognize.


Allusions are often private, making the poem seem to be obscure. Some poets could not choose a favorite poem because they saw their poetry as a lifetime achievement, and individual poems only a piece of the total. Sometimes poets began with a single word that led to another word and then to another. Sometimes, poets began with the form, like a sestina, and then filled it in with their thoughts. Some poets separated the poem from the poet. Some didn’t. Only occasionally, do poets write immediately following an experience. Most need time for reflection between the experience and the poem. Poets sometimes feel that they can say in poems what they cannot say in any other form. The discipline of poetry helps create the emotion in the meaning. Some poets enjoy a poem because of the amount of work they have put into it.


For some poets revision is never completed. Some poets are surprised at what they have accomplished without realizing they were doing it. Generally, poets are not surprised that readers find things in their poems that they never intended to put there. Poets found that writing a poem helped to clarify an experience. Some poets found that poems they have written are too personal and they cannot judge them as they can other types of writing.


This book puts the reader inside the minds of poets. The experience of writing poetry is rich and poets write poems for many different reasons. This book, Poet’s Choice, comes close to being one of my favorites. I would never want to lose it. RayS.


To be continued.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Notes from Turtle Creek. Concluded. Ted Browning.

The Kennett Paper. Chadds Ford, PA: Brandywine Conservancy. 1991.


Why read it? I’m sure you have never heard of Ted Browning. He wrote essays on nature, specifically in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He urges that open space be distinguished for conservation of natural processes or modified for parks, playgrounds, green space. He died young. The editor of the paper in which Ted published his essays, said plaintively: “I wish he were here to put it in perspective for us. I wish he could…explain to us why the katydids are louder than usual, the shad bush blossoms more brazen, the fall colors more muted, the dogwoods duller.” p. xiii.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“The ruby-throated hummingbird weighs 1/8th of an ounce, but flies 500 miles across the Gulf of Mexico, a flight of 25 hours, wings beating 50 miles per second.” p. 113.


“We have to ask—do the numbers convey the wonder of it all, the sheer impossibility of what the birds accomplish in migration?” p. 113.


“Watching them [the Amish workers] swarm over the barn like a hive of bees, I quickly understood that I was not seeing nine individuals at work but one organism, one collective will.” p. 115.


“When I had come back nothing much was different at Turtle Creek, but I had changed.” p. 120.


“…blockbuster, hawk-lifting cold fronts, warm buttery October days, midnight cannonball thunderstorms.” p. 126.


“Spring rain…frolics the landscape; fall rain is gray…settles the land for winter.” p. 127.


“The native Americans perceived of the great spirit as a kind of cosmic connective tissue stretching through all creation, binding all parts into a fabric of spiritual harmony.” p. 129.


Chief Stealth, a native American philosopher of the Duwanish Tribe in Washington State said this: “…every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every…humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people” p. 130.


Wendell Berry: “We go to the wilderness to be restored….” p. 135.


Comment: Notes from Turtle Creek by Ted Browning is a book that I read every year to renew my enjoyment of the world around us. Buy it! RayS.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Notes from Turtle Creek (8). Ted Browning

The Kennett Paper. Chads Ford, PA: Brandywine Conservancy. 1991.


Why read it? I’m sure you have never heard of Ted Browning. He wrote essays on nature, specifically in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He urges that open space be distinguished for conservation of natural processes or modified for parks, playgrounds, green space. He died young. The editor of the paper in which Ted published his essays, said plaintively: “I wish he were here to put it in perspective for us. I wish he could…explain to us why the katydids are louder than usual, the shad bush blossoms more brazen, the fall colors more muted, the dogwoods duller.” p. xiii.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“If you find a milkweed and it has ragged holes in the leaf, look underneath for a caterpillar striped in white, black and yellow…loading up on foul-tasting milkweed alkaloids which render him disgusting to blue jays, mocking birds and fall migrating warblers looking for a meal. That caterpillar turns into the monarch butterfly which must migrate all the way to Mexico. It retains those milkweed alkaloids, and so, disgusting as ever, it survives the journey. p. 101.


“Owls are extraordinary creatures of the night, able to hear the footfall of a beetle at 100 yards and the squeak of a field mouse at one-half mile.” p. 104.


“Owls…drift silently as smoke across the night air.” p. 104.


“One day I picked up a dead quail that I had shot; when the bird had lined up in my sights, I felt the familiar rush of power and excitement, a kind of blood lust that linked me to the small creature suspended there at the end of my shot gun. Now the bird hung limp in my hand, its fires quenched, the iridescent earth colors of browns and tans stained red because of what I had done. I was disgusted with myself, with my violence, my lust, with the power I held so casually to destroy something so beautiful…something not required to sustain my own survival.” p. 108.


“The full moon of October radiates like the beacon from a great light house.” p. 112.


Blackpoll warbler: To make it to its winter home in South America, the tiny bird must survive a non-stop flight of 2300 miles over the Atlantic and Caribbean that lasts over 80 hours. To find favorable winds, warblers and other small songbirds will fly at an altitude of over 20,000 feet, a bitter place of little oxygen and temperatures well below freezing.” p. 113.


To be concluded.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Notes from Turtle Creek (7). Ted Browning.

The Kennett Paper. Chads Ford, PA: Brandywine Conservancy. 1991.


Why read it? I’m sure you have never heard of Ted Browning. He wrote essays on nature, specifically in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He urges that open space be distinguished for conservation of natural processes or modified for parks, playgrounds, green space. He died young. The editor of the paper in which Ted published his essays, said plaintively: “I wish he were here to put it in perspective for us. I wish he could…explain to us why the katydids are louder than usual, the shad bush blossoms more brazen, the fall colors more muted, the dogwoods duller.” p. xiii.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“The rock ballast used to stabilize early sailing vessels was loaded with seeds, which sprang up along our road and rail banks when that rock was spread for highway and railway base.” p. 92.


“It may be absolute fact that the ancestor of the plant you are looking at [Queen Anne’s Lace] arrived here as a seed wadded up in the hoof of a squealing European pig brought over for bacon and ham hocks by our European forefathers.” p. 93.


Chief Stealth: “If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit.” p. 94.


Autumn: “…doesn’t the sun seem a bit thin in the afternoon compared even to last week?” p. 100.


“Barn swallows and tree swallows line up on the telephone wires, getting ready to leave for Central and South America.” p. 100.


“By now cicadas have retreated down under the earth somewhere, but the evening chorus of crickets, katydids and grasshoppers reaches full crescendo.” p. 101.


“As summer winds down, butterflies become just as frantic as everyone else, flipping from flower to flower, loading up on nectar fuel for mating or migrating.” p. 101.


To be continued.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Notes from Turtle Creek (6). Ted Browning

The Kennett Paper. Chads Ford, PA: Brandywine Conservancy. 1991.


Why read it? I’m sure you have never heard of Ted Browning. He wrote essays on nature, specifically in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He urges that open space be distinguished for conservation of natural processes or modified for parks, playgrounds, green space. He died young. The editor of the paper in which Ted published his essays, said plaintively: “I wish he were here to put it in perspective for us. I wish he could…explain to us why the katydids are louder than usual, the shad bush blossoms more brazen, the fall colors more muted, the dogwoods duller.” p. xiii.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“I remember best the wild places of the Brandywine River—the nooks and glens and haunts tucked away in the corners of the river, the retreats where the natural word hides away. p. 78.


“For hours I’d search for arrowheads, and when I found one it was as if the Indians had never left.” p. 78.


“I have lived most of my life in the valley just at the edge of the special place promised to the Lenni-Lenape for eternity by William Penn.” p. 79.


“…the piece of woodland on Locust Lane butchered to allow golfers to tee off in a bit more light.” p. 81.


Stewardship: “Whatever it is somebody does when they hold a part of the natural world in trust for generations yet unborn.” p. 81.


“Charles Darwin called the gingko tree a living fossil…. Got going in dinosaur time, and at their peak of development saber tooth tigers growled in their shade…. Dates back 200 million years, about 65 million years before our woodland standbys such as oaks, maples, and dogwoods even thought about getting started…. Survives the equally harsh streetscapes of New York and Washington as one of the prized street trees. Name derived from a botched translation into Dutch of ancient Chinese characters meaning silver apricot.” p. 82.


“In July male deer are sprouting antlers and so the Native Americans called the full moon of July the ‘buck moon.’ ”p. 85.


“When they [male deer] ram heads with each other to establish dominance, sometimes the horns lock, condemning the combatants to a grim danse macabre over hill and dale until they drop of exhaustion and starvation.” p. 86.


“We save money by spraying herbicides instead of paying people to mow the roadsides. A wise trade-off?” p. 88.


“Last Sunday, sitting in silence for an hour at Quaker meeting, I listened to a full cicada symphony. The song is not pretty or even slightly melodic.” p. 89.


“What makes the cicada awake after 17 years?” p. 90.


“When European settlers first arrived in the 1600s, they were shocked by a dark monster of a wilderness that stretched westward so unbroken that a squirrel could hop from tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without touching ground.” p. 91.


“In designing seeds, nature uses every trick in the book to ensure that they get carried to new locations and that they survive the journey and when the early settlers stepped ashore at Jamestown and Old Swedes Rock and Plymouth Rock, they were literally covered with seeds of European plants, and so were their animals and their belongings.” p. 92.


To be continued.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Notes from Turtle Creek (5). Ted Browning.

The Kennett Paper. Chads Ford, PA: Brandywine Conservancy. 1991.


Why read it? I’m sure you have never heard of Ted Browning. He wrote essays on nature, specifically in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He urges that open space be distinguished for conservation of natural processes or modified for parks, playgrounds, green space. He died young. The editor of the paper in which Ted published his essays, said plaintively: “I wish he were here to put it in perspective for us. I wish he could…explain to us why the katydids are louder than usual, the shad bush blossoms more brazen, the fall colors more muted, the dogwoods duller.” p. xiii.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

Browning ironically “…reported that Interior Secretary Donald Hodel (1987) had recommended that the solution to the problems of harmful radiation should be solved not by scientific studies and international treaties, but by a greater use of hats, sunglasses and tanning lotions. Fish and tiny creatures in the food chain have a rather difficult time finding sunglasses that fit or tanning lotion that won’t wash off.” p. 69.


Chief Stealth: “Man did not weave the web of life./ He is merely one strand in it./ Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” p. 70.


“…an Indian hammerstone…used in grinding corn and acorns into flour for the flat, tough Indian bread called bannock.” p. 74.


“A chill of understanding flashed through me that I feel to this day. The last person to hold that stone in the same way….had been an Indian, a native American grinding corn at Meadow springs.” p.74.


"It was as if I had reached back in time to touch the hand of the person who had held the stone….” p. 74.


“They say that of all senses the nose remembers best.” p. 76.


"Veils of moisture lift out of the ground, bearing the smells of wet earth and triggering old memories.” p. 76.


“Thirty feet upstream from me a deer and fawn materialized out of the brush to drink at the river….. Against the setting sun, they became black silhouettes, outlined in a penumbra of golden light….. The moment froze…..” p. 76.


“Riding on one of the outside horses on the carousel, the ground spinning faster and faster, the tinny organ music racing, people, buildings, trees in that other world out there would break apart, flying all over the place in a kaleidoscope of colors, sounds, images.” p. 76. [Browning is referring to the carousel at Lenape Park.]


“The roller coaster would click-clack its way to the top of that first big drop and as…your heart raced, suddenly the whole Lenape valley opened up before you, the river solidly in place way down there….” p. 76.


To be continued.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Notes from Turtle Creek (4). Ted Browning.

The Kennett Paper. Chadds Ford, PA: Brandywine Conservancy. 1991.


Why read it? I’m sure you have never heard of Ted Browning. He wrote essays on nature, specifically in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He urges that open space be distinguished for conservation of natural processes or modified for parks, playgrounds, green space. He died young. The editor of the paper in which Ted published his essays, said plaintively: “I wish he were here to put it in perspective for us. I wish he could…explain to us why the katydids are louder than usual, the shad bush blossoms more brazen, the fall colors more muted, the dogwoods duller.” p. xiii.


Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“If the Japanese and native Americans are right in their belief that certain special corners in the natural world are home to guardian spirits watching over the affairs of humans and animals, then this beautiful tree [the dogwood] is prime spirit real estate.” p. 57.


“An explosion of bloom so intense, so packed that the tree seemed to have tapped into some hidden fountain of dogwood youth….” p. 57.


“…how important dogwoods are as a food source for animals and birds the fat red fruits of late summer are gorged by at least 86 species of birds including grouse, quail, pheasant, and turkey—and by animals such as squirrels, possums and raccoons.” p. 58.


“The fruits of the dogwood are thick and fleshy, loaded with fats, oils and carbohydrates like little avocados.” p. 59.


“What an amazing thing it must be, I thought, to work with plants every day and even get paid for it.” p. 60.

“…the suburban growler (the rotary mower).” p. 62.


“The smell of the barn—a stewpot aroma of cows, milk, meadows, of oats and corn mashed into cowfeed; the spicy tang of chopped corn in the silo, churning and fermenting and stewing down to sour mash and cow beer, the brown squishy smell of manure.” p. 66.


“All things are connected—one of ecology’s bedrock concepts.” p. 68.


“The native Americans phrased it more poetically: Pluck one tiny corner of the web of life/ ripples resonate through the entire membrane.” p. 68.


To be continued.