I just found out about this:  http://www.treeshaverightstoo.com/universal-declaration-of-planetary-rights.

All I can think to say is YES, YES, YES, YES, and YES.

This was first presented a year ago and is now being integrated into the forthcoming Copenhagen Treaty currently being drafted for the international climate change negotiations being held this December.  To find out more, explore the Trees Have Rights Too website.

It is encouraging to learn that this kind of environmental activism is happening on the global level.  I also learned today that Obama has chosen someone connected to the pesticide industry to be the chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the US Trade Representative.  These are the guys who wrote to his wife in the summer, urging her to stop misleading the public by encouraging them to grow organic gardens.  Yeah.

There hasn’t been a time when political activism is more necessary than now.  And guess what?  Such activism will make you happy.  So go to it.  Change the world–or some definite part of it–for the better.

I recently received an email from a graduate student asking about why I chose a particular poem.  She was okay with me putting our exchange here in the blog so that others could benefit from the comments:

Hi, my name is _________, and I’m an MFA student at _____ State University. I respect your journal and would like to do a presentation on your editorial process for my publishing class. If you have time to answer a few questions, I’d be grateful. If not, thank you for your time and for publishing an amazing literary magazine.

The specific poem I am focusing on is “Insurance” by Kim Triedman, featured on page 6 of edition 20.

1. Why did you choose this poem? It has the albatross/anabiosis theme, but what else do you look for in choosing poetry? In general, are you ever surprised by what you decide to put in your own journal?

I chose this the way I choose any poem:  there’s something about it that won’t let me let it go.  One criterion is that there can’t be anything in the poem that distracts me (an ugly word choice, for example, or an inappropriate metaphor).  Usually it’s an interesting ending that engages me.  There definitely needs to be a sense of voice, like someone is speaking from a position of authority, knows they have something to say and then they say it in a way that grabs your attention.  I accept poems that I want to read again, that–most importantly–move me in some way, engage my emotions, make me say, “Damn!” and catch my breath.

With this particular poem, I happen to know what nasturtiums are like as my wife plants them, and they are beautiful.  Not sure that has much to do with how I experience the poem–probably–in general I like poems that name things (ever read Robert Haas’s poem “Letter”  in Field Guide p. 65?  Stunning).  I liked the build-up of the ending, the list of participles (“teeming–cascading—extrapolating–luxuriating” and the image of “the little open mouths”:  something that’s coming alive while the rest of the world is at the verge of death/autumn.  And the idea of this being “insurance” against the coming winter, against the death of the summer garden, and summer in general…

This one didn’t have the powerful kicker ending some of them have, but I really liked the tone and voice throughout–that sense of authority, like I said (so many submissions come through, even ones from well-published writers, that are flat and drab).  The opening line is great and engaging:  “There is one thing I get right: every spring I plant the nasturtiums.”

I also pay attention to how the poem sounds.  You’ll notice a lot of assonance in this poem, and I find this especially appealing:

“scritch along the walk like small…”

“greenness, even the blossoms, tipped in gold, their little mouths open.”

2.  Did you receive this poem through the slush pile or was it solicited? Were you familiar with Kim Triedman before publishing her?

I don’t solicit poems directly.  It’s all one big slush pile.  I may have published her in a previous issue–that would be the only way I know her.  Here’s an interesting twist:  we are now friends on Facebook.

3. What is your reading process like? Did anyone other than you read “Insurance” or provide editorial input on the final decision?

I am the only one who reads the submissions.  I’m a one-man band.  Reading process:  every couple of months I say, “Shoot, it’s been a couple of months since I’ve done submissions, so I better catch up…” It’s hardest keeping up with email submissions.  I’m not sure I’m answering your question.  Submit follow-up questions if you like.

You should also consult the Albatross blog, where I talk about examples of my process:

http://albatrosspoetryjournal.wordpress.com/category/examples-of-editing/

I then asked her about why she picked that particular poem.  Her reply:

Thanks for responding and directing me to your blog! I just looked at it, and I especially enjoyed the entry regarding how you order poems within an issue. The way order influences structure and perspective has always fascinated me (especially the role order plays in Modernist literature). The impact of organization on a literary magazine is interesting, especially how an effective order allows the poems to stand both independently yet also in dialogue with each other.  All of the revision posts are very relevant to my class, and I’ll certainly include them in my presentation.

I was struck by “Insurance” by Kim Triedman for a fairly odd, personal reason: it reminded me of my mother. The more independent I become, the more fascinating my mom becomes as I see her as a “real” person—sometimes, almost as a stranger. The speaker in “Insurance” is probably so many things to so many people, but when she takes the time to plant the nasturtiums she is reasserting herself as a person with her own needs, fears, and hopes. As you noted, there is also some beautiful language and description in the poem. But the thing that makes me go “damn,” so to speak, is the way the poem doesn’t rely on sentiment but instead uses action and metaphor to deliver such an emotional impact. I chose Albatross in general because it takes an ecological stand and challenges humans to consider how we impact the world around us. Poetry can be such a powerful rhetorical tool, and I respect a journal that welcomes work that isn’t afraid to ask big questions.

Ultimately, editorial choice depends on the sensibility, experience, and taste of the editor, all of which results from the powerful complexity of the human brain.  This is why it’s so hard to explain!

The lead article in today’s Boston Globe’s Ideas section is titled “Sued by the Forest:  Should nature be able to take you to court?”  It tells the story of a New England community–Shapleigh, Maine–that voted in its town meeting,

114-66, to endow all of the town’s natural assets with legal rights: “Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.” It further decreed that any town resident had “standing” to seek relief for damages caused to nature – permitting, for example, a lawsuit on behalf of a stream.

This concept of government rights or representation for the environment reminded me of something poet Gary Snyder wrote somewhere.  I went to my shelf looking for Turtle Island but didn’t find it, so I’m stuck with just saying that SOMEWHERE in Snyder’s ouevre is this reference.  The ideas is not new.

I loved it when I first read it, and I love this idea now.

Why not?!  Corporations have the rights and privileges of individuals–it’s called “corporate personhood“–and they have used the Civil Rights Act, for example, to override the democratically determined decision to prevent installation of a cell tower in a small town in Massachusetts.

Yup.  Pretty startling.  So how about “environmental personhood”?

That’s a dramatic title for a post.  It’s what hooked me into reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael: An Adventure in Mind and Spirit.  The back of the book features the three-line personal ad that begins the story:  “Teacher Seeks Pupil.  Must have an earnest desire to save the world.  Apply in person.”  Given its serious subject matter, the book might be one of the top ten most important books on the planet.  The book isn’t so much a “how-to” book on saving the world but tries to point out what underlies our drive to destroy the world, which we’ve been doing steadily since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago and which has become more intense and wide-spread since the industrial revolution.

Quinn re-interprets the core stories of Genesis while weaving in anthropological and historical analysis of “primitive” vs. “civilized” societies (or what he renames “Leavers” vs. “Takers”).   For three million years all was well with hunting and gathering until the agricultural revolution.  At this point, the Takers began to break the “law of life,” which fosters life for all:  they began to exterminate competitors, destroy competitors’ food (to make room for their own via agriculture) and deny competitors access to food.  This obsessive need to control our food supply originates in a fear of not being in control of our own destiny, of trusting in higher powers.  In breaking the laws of life, we end up co-opting the role of the gods by deciding who lives and who dies (i.e. the fruit of the tree of knowledge).

In other words, for the Takers the world belongs to man, whereas for the Leavers, man belongs to the world.

Quinn ends with an insightful observation, one that can be viewed in conservative reactions to environmentalist critique of our culture of consumption:

people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty.  They need more than a vision of doom.  They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them. (243-44)

This new (or, rather, old–i.e. Leaver) vision of the destiny of humankind involves humans being the first to reach sentience and therefore the first to learn that we have a choice:  thwart the gods and die or be Father to all future species evolving to sentience after us.  In this story, “Man’s place is to be the first without being the last.  Man’s place is to figure out how it’s possible to do that–and then to make some room for all the rest who are capable of becoming what he’s become” (243).

So Quinn strikes at the mythic roots of our war with nature and tries to re-orient our species by providing the key to breaking out of our captivity to “a civilizational system that compels us to go on destroying the world in order to live” (25).  My hope is that the Albatross contributes in some small way to the change of consciousness that Quinn’s book points toward.

I discovered, just in the nick of time (though not enough time to do much about it) that today is “Poem in Your Pocket Day.”  I wrote about this back in May, saying “April 2009 was a whole year away,” and here we are!

I’ll talk for a moment about how I found out about it–it’s an interesting process that shows the power of social networking.  I have a twitter account and have been “tweeting” for just over a year now.  It’s been in the news a lot lately, so if you haven’t heard about it you’re way out of the loop.  When somebody starts to “follow” me (i.e. subscribes to my tweets), I get an email message saying so.  I always take a look at who it is who’s chosen to follow me, to see if they are interesting enough to follow.  Some of them are goofy (e.g. Santa Claus), and some are just promoting a business or a website.  Occasionally, it’s someone who has obviously used a Twitter search tool to seek out people posting on subjects of interest to him or her.  Today I got an email saying helloshmoop is now following me.  Upon checking out their twitter profile, I saw one of their recent tweets mentioning that “Poem in Your Pocket Day” is happening soon… I followed the link and voila!

Who knows how long it would have taken for me to discover shmoop… if ever… and I could easily have let this day slip by.  But now I have a chance to take some of the actions suggested by the poets.org “PIYP” page.

There’s been a lot of bad press about twitter in recent weeks, but like any tool there are good and bad uses.  Today’s Hiawatha Bray column in the Boston Globe talks about how he was won over to the use of twitter as a way to “capture the wisdom of crowds.”  So it’s all about the crowds you choose to join.  Who are you following?  Do they make relevant posts telling you of interesting websites or news items, or are they telling you what they are cooking for dinner? Some twitterers post bursts of tweets that amount to short poems.  I would have enjoyed playing with this twenty years ago, when I was an English student.  Now there’s not a lot of time for it after family and work, but when there is, I often find some useful sites, like Shmoop.

Shmoop is a collective of M.A. and Ph.D. students who have launched a website with learning and teaching resources for literature, U.S. history, poetry, and writing, and it claims to make us better “lovers of life.”  If you’re reading this, you don’t need to be told that poetry will help you love life more and better.  This is my hope and goal for Albatross as  a poetry journal–and has been since we started back in 1985:  to get us to love the environment (life!  all of life!) so that we stop destroying it (as the Ancient Mariner did in Coleridge’s poem–the source of the journal’s title).

I just posted Albatross #20 at the main site.  The print issue will be out within the next couple of weeks.

There are some amazing poems in this issue.  Some of my favorites include William Keener’s and Lyn Stefenhagens’s.  I hope you enjoy these poems as much as I have.  And the cover art is awesome as well.  While visiting my son in Gainesville, we went to a party at an art gallery, and the owner was selling this woodcut as a card.  I asked him if I could use it for #20, and voila!

I have found other works of art this way.  Another of my favorites, the cover for #10, was done by a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.  We were sitting next to each other at Dunn Brothers Coffee House, and he was sketching these cool abstract pieces.  Again, I boldly asked to use the artwork, and this is how it came to be on the cover.  This cover for #10, by the way, was featured in the 1998 (I think it was) Poet’s Market.

I just finished finalizing the PDF file for Albatross #20 and will be sending it along to the printer.  I like to print 100 copies so that there are some in print out there in the world.  I guess I’m still stuck in the age of print literacy.  But I’ve seen too many poetry websites (and too many of my published poems) disappear when the website becomes a dead link.  This way, the poets, a handful of subscribers, and a few university libraries that archive small press poetry all have a hard copy.  This way, I’ll feel like I’ve left something behind in the world, something of value, something real.

In the process of laying out the journals, I type the entire poem in and then proofread it a number of times, so I come to know the poems quite intimately.  I always have a few that are my favorites.  I posted one by Andy Roberts titled “Standoff” in my last post.   It’s not very profound; it’s a simple poem, with a simple enough message, but I chuckle every time I read the ending, and that’s been a good 10-12 times of late.  Every time I read it I have the same response, so I thought I’d write about it here.

The poem describes an encounter that the persona has with a pair of Canadian geese, who loudly defend their nest, which happens to be on the well-worn path s/he (we’ll call him or her “the poet” from here on out) has been walking regularly for 30 years.  After introducing this scene, Roberts concludes:

I will not win this argument
against pink hissing tongues.
I will not win this argument,
not in a million years.

I love this.  It’s so simple but so true.  We are at present losing the argument with nature, and it will only get worse before it gets better.

This poem could easily have appeared in Billy Collins “Poetry 180” anthologies.  In the introduction to the first one, Collins writes,

The idea behind this printed collection. . . was to assemble a generous selection of short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically “get” on first hearing–poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate.

Collins developed these anthologies to try to reconnect poetry to high school students who too often experience poetry as a painful process of reading dense and opaque writing that doesn’t seem to make much sense.  As Collins demonstrates–not only in these anthologies but in his own poetry as well–this does not have to be the case.

Poetry–like many forms of art–is an act of communication, and Andy Roberts’ poem does a good job of doing just that.

STANDOFF by Andy Roberts

I’ve been walking this trail thirty years
but today I have to change course
because a pair of Canadian geese
have built a nest on the left.
The male hisses and rushes at me.
I stand my ground but he won’t give up.
This is life and death to them,
and the pair are screaming their outrage,
defending the nest.
It becomes clear
I will not win this argument
against pink hissing tongues.
I will not win this argument,
not in a million years.

In my last post, I promised to discuss some of Roger Desy’s revisions to his poem “in the light of snow.”  In his first revision, he mostly changes just the opening lines, so I will post first the original and then the 1st revision:

ORIGINAL

– pressures of fallen soft fierce snow scatter the surface hiss of fields
over the leaf-thin light fall — strewing a violet life over a nightfall earth

– as permafrost preserves an arctic iridescence under tundra winds

a deeper intemperate radiance squalls near at hand over more fertile darkness

1ST REVISION

– pressures of fallen soft fierce snow scatter a surface wisp of hiss
over the leaf-thin light fall — strewing a violet life over the onset darkness

– as frigid iridiscence preserves distant stillness over a terrain of glaze

facets of an insensitive whitening squall near at hand across a nightfall earth

The rest of the poem is more or less exactly the same as the original, except for a couple of other minor changes:  the change of a couple of words in the tenth line:  “dens” becomes “nests” and “under the lilac womb” becomes “under a lilac womb”; also, the addition of fertile in line 12 (“embedded in a pure serene hyacinth seamless fertile crytalline identity”).  I will begin, then, by commenting on these more significant changes to the opening lines.

In the first line, Roger changes “the surface hiss of fields” to “a surface wisp of hiss”.  The change from the definite to indefinite article (“THE surface hiss” vs. “A surface wisp”) may seem inconsequential but often makes a big difference in terms of what the poet calls attention to:  a specific instance (a “the”) as opposed to a more generalized phenomenon (an “a”).  I see why he changes “hiss of fields” to “wisp of hiss”:  if you speak the words out loud, you hear the assonance, the attention to sound that every poet should be paying as s/he crafts a poem.  I sometimes pay so much attention to sound that I find some sounds inappropriate or distracting in certain phrases.   The ‘”p” sound in “wisp” here has that affect upon me.  I like the “s” sounds in “surfaCe wiSp” and “hiSS,” but the “p” as a labial plosive (something like that–can’t remember the exact terms from my study of linguistics) is problematic for me.  The meaning of the phrase is a bit compromised as well:  what is a “wisp of hiss”?  The original, “surface hiss of fields” doesn’t approach the level of musicality that the revised phrase achieves, but it does preserve sense at the same time that the F sound preserves echoes from earlier in the line:  “fallen soft fierce snow.”  (The E sound in “fields” also anticipates the E sound of “leaf-thin light fall” — and here, again, are the echoes of the F sounds).  In some ways, the revised line brings too many S sounds into play, which draws a bit too much attention to the sound:  “preSSureS of fallen Soft fierCe Snow Scatter a SurfaCe wiSp of hiSS” (S sounds are capitalized throughout).

As you can see, there is much to consider in the crafting of a line, or even a single phrase!  And I know that Roger puts this level of thought and feeling into what he does, given the kinds of revisions he makes from draft to draft.

The next major revision is a kind of flip-flopping of phrases.  In the second line, he moves “a nightfall earth” to the end of the fourth line and replaces this with “the onset darkness” (a change to the original “more fertile darkness” that it replaces).  By moving this, he loses the assonance of the I sounds in “vIolet lIfe over a nIghtfall earth” (I sounds capitalized here).  I like the phrase “a nightfall earth” a lot and am glad he kept it–it’s a fresh phrasing.  I think it works in either location.

The third and fourth lines are also quite different from one another.  The original plays on P, R, and U sounds:  “peRmafRost pReseRves an aRctic iRidescence undeR tundRa winds” (R sounds capitalized).  The revised third line abandons this for heavy assonance on the soft I sound:  “frigid iridescence preserves distant stillness” and ends with assonance on the A sounds of “terrain of glaze.”  The fourth line of the revision also loses something in the rhythm when squall changes from a verb (as it is in the original) to the object of the preposition of:  “facets of an insensitive whitening squall near at hand…”  The original, in my opinion, is much more in line with the rest of the poem (the multiple modifiers piled up like the snow that the poem describes:  “deeper intemperate radiance squalls near at hand…”).

As I finish considering these changes, I have to say that I like the original version much better than the revisions.  The one revision that I do think enhances this version of the poem comes when he adds “fertile” to the 12th line, which provides the same effect I just described:  a kind of piling high of modifiers that mimics at the syntactic, formal level of the poem its content about snow:  “a pure serene hyacinth seamless fertile crystalline identity.”

Ultimately, though, such revisions reflect a poet’s careful attention to the craft of the art form, and final decisions have to be left to the individual as to what most satisfies his or her needs in writing the poem in the first place.

I introduce this poem in a previous entry titled “On Revising Poetry.”

IN THE LIGHT OF SNOW by Roger Desy

— pressures of fallen soft fierce snow scatter the surface hiss of fields
over the leaf-thin light fall — strewing a violet life over a nightfall earth

— as permafrost preserves an arctic iridescence under tundra winds

a deeper temperate radiance squalls near at hand over more fertile darkness

— dawn upon damson sun blown sudden golden shaken from bowed limbs bent
to breaking under the weight of individual infinitesimal vermilion clarities

— amber midmorning shards of light settle on tufts of drifts
in shadows of the temperatures setting-in — into the evening of the afternoon

— the dead of winter snowbound blankets the unborn within — newborn reside

swaddled in torpor under the lilac womb warm in the nests of their dens at rest

— humility a perfect deerprint cuts into the pomace of the selfless fields
embedded in a pure serene hyacinth seamless crystalline identity

— evening on snow — pregnant with silence — nuzzling the scent of slanted buds

listens to sibilance grazing the keenness of the last azure roseate crimsoning

What I find distracting about this version of the poem are the strings of prepositional phrases at certain points.  After using Lanham’s book Revising Prose as a textbook, I couldn’t fail to notice this.  His “paramedic method” suggests first of all circling all of the prepositions.  When you do this to the poem above, you notice that in the fifth stanza there is a string of prepositional phrases:  “amber midmorning shards of light settle on tufts of drifts / in shadows of the temperatures setting-in — into the evening of the afternoon” (six in a row here), followed by a stanza with another string:  “newborn reside / swaddled in torpor under the lilac womb warm in the nests of their dens at rest” (five in a row here).

Roger commented on his use of prepositional phrases, providing some perspective on the effect he was trying to achieve:

you refer to excessive prepositional phrasing.  you can’t get away with this in prose.  in this poem prepositions are a kind of marker for time.  the poem of course has to do with time and a sustained perception — from one evening to the next.

i say this so you know there’s lot of glue on those phrases.

lines 7 [the shortest line] and 8, following subject/verb, consist of six phrases, taking the eye and other senses through shifts of light that tend to resolve on the red end of the spectrum, where the poem begins and ends.

it’s a lush poem, a style i don’t often enter.  nothing like a dead end, but there’s no room to write this kind of poem every day.  i dread imitating myself.

i went searching for this poem this last week for other purposes.  two lines in it needed to be reviewed again [lines 3 and 4].  i wound up reviewing the poem and tightening it up.  the prepositional phrasing aspect is essentially unchanged.

(It’s interesting that he says you can’t get away with excessive prepositional phrasing in prose, because when you read the examples of academic jargonese that Lanham provides in his book, you suddenly realize that you’ve been inundated with it… And Lanham provides a concrete solution for avoiding such bureaucratization of language.)

I did compare this to the one he published in Albatross #18, and it *is* different from this other one–the use of dashes, the rhythms, the phrasing.  The attempt to capture time and sustained perception not only through the poem’s content but also through its form I found particularly interesting–though I’m not sure the use of prepositions as a marker for time is the way to go about this.  Having form reflect content is a powerful strategy, and I do think that the strings of prepositional phrases tend to elongate the moment being described.  However, I can’t ignore the fatigue that this induces in me as a reader, whether or not this is brought about by knowledge of Lanham’s paramedic method.

In the following passage, Roger speaks of rejection as an opportunity for revision.  I think we can learn from his positive attitude:

funny, but when i get my work rejected, i’ve come to look at it as an invitation to get it right.  i’ve learned more about my work by reviewing/revising it after rejection than i ever expected.  funny, but rejection works for me.  and i ought to have some insight, being the most rejected human being i know!

In future entries, I will post and discuss some of Roger’s proposed revisions.