Late August Collage: A Lyric Essay

Begin with the yellow flowers of a Jerusalem artichoke. Make strands of its essence. They are warp and woof, a framework for your tapestry.

Weave in the golden-brown of coreopsis, the pink of coneflower. Add the red fireweed, and you have made a start. Weave in the rich brown feather of a wren dropped near her empty nest.

Eggshells make a nice touch if you can find them.

Hang your tapestry from a hickory branch. Let it ripen with the nuts.

When the time is right, add lichen: the kind known as old man's beard, the ephemeral green vessels called pixie cups, the red-topped British soldiers.

Let it bake in the August sun and steep in the lightning of sudden storms. It will hide its eyes from the pounding rain and soften in the nurturing mists.

Now your tapestry is ready to receive the gentle songs of chickadees and nuthatches. Let the pileated woodpecker drop chips from his drill as he feeds on carpenter ants. A few will stick.

Seek the help of a spider. Her silk will bind the work together. Hang your tapestry on your wall if you must. When spiderlings hatch from its thread, you will understand that it belongs in the woods. This change will happen at the time of day when the buzzing of cicadas gives way to the trills of katydids.

Hang it on your porch. Let the light from Altair and Deneb illuminate its recesses. It will waffle in the breeze of early morning as bats retire to take their daytime rest.

Ask yourself: have I woven this tapestry, or has it woven me?  

A slightly different version of "Late August Collage" appeared in Catalpa Magazine. Downloadable files of this magazine appear here: Catalpa | UTC Scholar | Student Research, Creative Works, and Publications | University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

 Photo - Coke Ovens at Grundy Lake
​by Ray Zimmerman
A few months ago, I started on a feature article about the Friends of South Cumberland State Park and their dedication to supporting the park and its managers. It was rambling and far too long at 1,700 words. The final article is a tribute to State Park Naturalist Mack Prichard, 1939–2021, and his achievement in helping the park to grow. Publication is pending. Here are a few paragraphs I had to cut to streamline the article. 
 
The State of Tennessee established South Cumberland State Park in 1978 with approximately 10,000 acres, already large by state park standards. It has since grown to 30,899 acres, and some sources say it is our largest state park, though one source credits the Cumberland Trail State Park as the largest. Those two are our only state parks with more than 30,000 acres. The Friends of South Cumberland State Park was incorporated in 1993 to assist the park and its managers.
 
In the film Mack Prichard—My Story, Prichard thanks donors for two other parcels of land. 
The Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lee Carter Class II Natural-Scientific State Natural Area is a 931-acre tract donated by the Carters, including caves and waterfalls typical of the Cumberland Plateau's karst topography. Rangers from South Cumberland State Park give occasional tours at Lost Cove Cave, also known as Buggytop [AM1] Cave. This portion of the park is a sensitive area with some rare plants and animals. Carter (Harry Lee) (tn.gov)
 
The University of the South donated the tract now known as the Natural Bridge Class I Scenic-Recreational State Natural Area. This three-acre tract includes a natural sandstone arch spanning a 50-foot-wide opening. Natural Bridge (tn.gov)
 
Denny Cove is another portion of the park, just south of Foster Falls. This natural landmark includes a waterfall, rock climbing opportunities, and rare plants. Further information is available from the Land Trust for Tennessee: Denny Cove (landtrusttn.org). The Southeastern Climbers Coalition assisted in acquiring this acre 380-acre parcel of land.
 
***
 
Multi-Genre Submissions Calendar
 
Here are some publications you may have overlooked, but they are open to all writers and produce a fine product.
 
Number One
Website: Publications | Volunteer State Community College (volstate.edu)
Genre(s): Poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction with an emphasis on sense of place
Notes: Volunteer State Community College faculty produce this journal, not to be confused with their student publication, the Pioneer Pen. They print one issue per year in the fall. They have published my poetry.
Submissions: Materials are due in February to emily.andrews@volstate.edu
 
Catalpa Magazine
Website: https://scholar.utc.edu/catalpa/ 
Genre(s): All
Notes: This magazine is affiliated with the graduate program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Copies can be downloaded from their website. Graduate students produce one issue per year in the spring. They have also published my poetry.
Submissions: Contact scholar@utc.edu  for further information
 
Nashville Review
Website: Nashville Review – A Publication of Vanderbilt University
Genre(s): All
Notes: Sample works from the current edition are available on the website. Join their mailing list for alerts about submission deadlines.
Submissions: Accepted through the Submittable platform in January, May, and September
Submit (vanderbilt.edu)
 
Open Mic Opportunity
 
Poetry in the Brew
Website: https://poetryinthebrew.wordpress.com
Notes: Poetry in the brew offers an online open mic via Zoom on the final Saturday of each month. They also have a midmonth in-person open mic at Portman Brewing East in Nashville and poetry pop-up events in surprise locations. Christine Hall hosts the two-hour online event and allows four minutes per poet.

​Unknown Territory
This piece is a response to “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever” by Brian Doyle, published by Orion Magazine and available at: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-greatest-nature-essay-ever.
Brian Doyle has given us a fine essay on the art of essay writing. After my initial response to the word “greatest” (is he kidding me?), I calmed down and found five paragraphs of genuine, perhaps gently humorous, views on what should happen in a nature essay. First, the essay must get the reader’s attention—not in the sensationalist terms of the news headline, but in a way that takes readers out of themselves and into an unexpected place where they secretly hoped to go.

In her poem “The Speed of Darkness,” Muriel Rukeyser says, “The world is made of stories, not atoms.” She then spins the reader into her world of pain. This is what Doyle proposes the next few paragraphs should do, but in the realm of nature. The beauty unfolds, but a threat to the natural world is unveiled. He then states that the writer should “tiptoe” back to the gently unfolding story without sermonizing or grandiose conclusions. I picture this perfect essay ending with the reader aware of a tapestry of beauty with dark threads of threat interwoven into a cloth of hope.

Some reviewers have said that Doyle’s essay meets its own criteria, that it is in fact “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” This makes the piece a “meta-essay,” a work written in the form it describes, much like the “Ars Poetica” of Horace (who, perhaps unexpectedly, founded a school of poetics that took the name of his poem). Though originally written in a poetic form, it is usually translated as prose, and the full text appears on the website of the Poetry Foundation.
Ye who write, make choice of a subject suitable to your abilities; and revolve in your thoughts a considerable time what your strength declines, and what it is able to support. Neither elegance of style, nor a perspicuous disposition, shall desert the man, by whom the subject matter is chosen judiciously. – Horace
 
Doyle’s essay might have led me to the conclusion that I have read very few nature essays. Make no mistake, I have read extensively from the works of naturalists, from Thoreau’s Waldon and Cape Cod to Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Peter Matthiessen’s National Book Award–winning The Snow Leopard. I had never heard of Brian Doyle before, and this may have led me to my first impression of arrogance. Greatest nature essay ever? From an author of whom I have never heard? Having read the essay, I’ve changed my mind. I like his work, and now want to read more of it.
So, I find Doyle’s comments helpful, but not an exclusive set of criteria for nature essays. The self-aware aspect of the work is interesting. I suppose the phrase “in the flow” might describe its opposite. This phrase is a poor approximation of the ancient Greek term “Kairos,” as opposed to “Chronos,” which is the ordinary time kept by a clock or chronometer. Kairos is sometimes described as “the opportune moment” but can also mean sacred time. It is the time in which hours pass unnoticed. It is the intersection of the divine with the ordinary. My time spent in nature and writing about nature is more Kairos than Chronos. 

Seeing you there, I take comfort in your presence. One standing in the water, safe from predators, as the other flexes wings in a posture of landing, beak agape. I hear the rattling call telling me all is well in the world of cranes, my land of solace. 

I learned of you from Aldo Leopold of Wisconsin, the naturalist I never met. I read his book, A Sand County Almanac, in which he lamented the sadness of marshes that held no cranes. He saw you as a disappearing species, like your cousins the whooping cranes, cut down to just a few hundred. 

You may have visited my childhood Ohio, but I never saw a crane there, not even a photograph. For me, a crane was a machine, an earthmover, or a steely blue-gray bird I would later call a heron, one Audubon calls the "heron crane." 

In later years I saw you in my adopted home of Tennessee, along its mighty river. I saw your winter dance as beaks gaped open, and I heard your call from miles away as you flew over or I approached your cold-weather refuge. I wrote poem after poem of your mystic personas. 

Year after year, the bird alerts tell me you have returned. "The cranes are back"—an annual event, but in the longer view, back from the brink. You fooled old Aldo Leopold and everyone else, abounding in tens of thousands beside the Tennessee, hundreds of thousands along the Platte. 

You always return along rivers, and we hold a festival here, though it will not take place in the years of Covid-19. Last year, I looked out at November fog and pondered anew, "the cranes are back." Festival or no, I will drive to the refuge and seek your presence there, being older now and not knowing if another November will come.

I drove to the refuge several times that winter and cranes were abundant. They came closer with the smaller number of people to view them. I will be back with their annual return this year. 

Matthiessen called cranes The Birds of Heaven, described every species named, called you "The Bird from the East," as you are known in Siberia where some members of your tribe nest, returning across the Bering Strait for winter. 

But you will always be the birds of Tennessee for me. You returned as I knew you would, back from Wisconsin marshes where you appear in pairs to sing, dance, mate, and nest. Welcome home.

***
​
Please visit my website for links to my works published in Appalachian Voice, The Chattanooga Pulse, and the Hellbender Press: Home (rayzimmermanauthor.com)

I also have pages for my color and monochrome photographs, and I archive these newsletter articles in my blog: The Rains Come (rayzimmermanauthor.com)

My newsletter began as a source of online activities during the early days of Covid-19, hence the title RayzReviewz. It became a place for my rambling writings, but I am now attempting to keep the writings short and make room for information of interest to other writers here in the review section. A few current opportunities:

The Southern Festival of Books returns to in-person programming on War Memorial Plaza in Nashville, October 9–10, with virtual programming during the week leading up to the festival. Chattanooga author KB Ballentine will read from her most recent poetry collection at the festival this year. Southern Festival of Books – Humanities Tennessee

Cagibi is currently accepting submissions. The journal is online, but they published a print edition at the end of 2020. My essay, “Postcard from Hiwassee Island,” appeared in the online journal. Cagibi – /kä'jēbē/ ▸n. a literary space. (cagibilit.com)

Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry at the University of Tulsa is now accepting submissions. I have sent them work in the past but none have been accepted. Nimrod – International Journal (utulsa.edu)

Writers/South Awards is a writing competition with prizes in several genres. I have not investigated or entered the contest, but information is available on their website. Writers/South Awards – Charlotte Lit
You may have noticed some changes in my blog and newsletter. I am now working with the exemplary editing support of Red Pen for Rent. Red Pen for Rent – Writer Support Services

 
Could a mockingbird mimic the strains of “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,” or any other section of “The Planets,” that lovely set of tone poems composed by Gustav Holst? Imagine the melancholy tune of “Mars, the Bringer of War” issuing from the throat of a bird. Though such complex mimicry may be beyond birds’ abilities, animals frequently amaze and amuse us with their behavior.
 
Why do these behaviors hold such charm for us? Is it the recognition of our own triumphs and foibles when we look at them? We see ourselves in their behavior and even their anatomy. The bones of a bird’s wing, revealed in the glow of an X-ray, are those of a human hand. The same is true of a whale’s flipper, which moves it through the ocean in tandem with the thrust of its tail.
 
Our assessment of animals is often inaccurate. We gasp when hearing how a captive killer whale, incarcerated for years, bit more than the “feeding hand” and took the life of its keeper. These intelligent beings learn tricks rapidly, but intelligence makes them dangerous captives. For millennia, killer whales have survived in ocean currents, but an escape becomes a “current event.”
 
We forget that they are killers, able to take a seal or a man in a fast attack. Charm ends here, for they have become too much like us. We, too, kill to survive. Whether dining on wild-harvested venison or range-fed beef, we sacrifice other lives on the altar of our continued existence. Even a vegan, consuming only plants, feeds on the lives of other beings.
 
Killer whales, intelligent captives in public displays, are not meant to perform for our amusement, let alone on a regular schedule, not even when that performance includes a narrative intended to generate empathy and respect. We will only make peace with our animal neighbors when we see them in us as we see ourselves in them.
***
Where else would my article on the hellbender, North America’s giant salamander, appear than in the Hellbender Press? I wrote the article after interviewing Dr. Brian Miller, professor and researcher at Middle Tennessee State University. Dr. Miller has been researching hellbenders for 40 years and offered great insights into the lives of these impressive yet reclusive creatures. Hellbender Press - Hellbenders falling off Highland Rim of Tennessee
 
Waxing & Waning, a literary journal, publishes a diverse array of contemporary southern writers. In their own words, the editors “want what’s on the fringe. Whatever is deep and true. The moon represents this idea: what is dark, what is brooding, what is wild, what is crescent and changing.” https://www.waxingandwaning.org     
 
April Gloaming Publishing of Nashville has released Sinew, a collection of poems by Poetry in the Brew participants. This open mic group recently celebrated its tenth anniversary of live open mics at the loft of Portman Brewing East, a Nashville coffee shop. Pandemic panic sent them online, and while the online event continues, live performance at the coffee shop has returned as well. My poem “Green” appears in the anthology, along with work by Chattanooga poet Christian Collier. April Gloaming Publishing – “Amplifying the voices of the unbridled holler.”
April Gloaming Publishing – "Amplifying the voices of the unbridled holler."
 
I just received a copy of Bearshit on the Trail: Essential Poems of Earth First! The 477 pages of poetry appear to be drawn from the poetry column of the Earth First! Journal. There is an ISBN but no identifiable publisher.