​Sonnet III
As published in the Summer 2020 issue of the Weekly Avocet 
 
So does the drought give birth to quenching rain,
As heat of day recedes with cooler night.
The arctic bear from northern sky takes flight.
With darkness ended, sun must rise again.
 
The Turquoise sky aflame with salmon red
As clouds leap fish-like from the eastern rim.
Across the watery sky we see them skim.
When evening comes the turquoise blue has fled.
 
As thirsty people cry for quenching rain,
The leaves of trees like paper scorched by sun.
The heat parched winds must cross the dusty plain.
 
Dry ferns uncurl like newfound life begun.
The soul revives where once despair had lain,
And seeds shall sprout as life must have its run.

If you are interested in subscribinf to the Avocet or publishing your nature poetry in the Avocet, some crucial information follows:
If you would like to become a subscribing member of The Avocet community and help us in our mission of promoting Nature poetry – for just $24 you receive 4 printed issues of The Avocet (64 pages of pure Nature poetry) and 52 weeks of The Weekly Avocet, every weekend, directly sent into your email box.  A steal of a deal, and, we believe, the best in all the small presses.  
Subscribe today and receive a free printed Spring issue of The Avocet.  Start your subscription with the Summer issue.
Please make out your check to The Avocet and send to:
 
The Avocet
P.O. Box 19186
Fountain Hills, AZ 85269
Thank you for supporting Nature poetry and The Avocet community.
Charles, Vivian, and Valerie Portolano, Editors
 
A Poetry Challenge for all Nature-loving poets in 2020.  I love writing Saving Mother Earth Challenge poems.  I am always on the lookout for an article about our wondrous Mother Earth.  Please find an issue about our precious planet and take the Saving Mother Earth Challenge, and, then send it to us to share with the community…
 
Please write a poem for Mother Earth, let her know of your love…
 
We all call Earth our home - Have your voice be heard through your words!!!
Please do not send those poems that have already been in The Weekly Avocet.
Saving Mother Earth for the Next Generation
​
Please put Saving Mother Earth Challenge/your last name in the subject line of your email and send to angeldec24 (at) hotmail.com. Please include a word of hello to Charles Portolano, editor and publisher. 

Featured Essay                                                   
Fishing at Chickamauga Dam

An osprey made a turn, like the move a pilot would call a nosedive. The bird seemed bound for a swim in the Tennessee River, but pulled up just as it splashed in the water. The osprey took a level course, slowly moving higher, with a fish dangling from its vice-like talons.

A sign warned humans to limit consumption of catfish harvested from these waters, due to contamination by mercury and other chemicals. But the striped bass were running. Fishers along the shore cast their lures, hopeful for a prize catch of “stripers.”

Great blue herons lined the shore nearby, beaks ready to strike with the speed of a snake should a fish wander into the shallows. One already turned a fish in its beak with the agility, though perhaps not the grace, of a juggler. Other fish escaped the many snares and moved downstream.

Fishing below dams is popular for humans and birds alike because the fish are easily caught. Stunned or injured by their trip through the turbines, they are slow moving and vulnerable. Even a growing population of cormorants, formerly rare to the area, work these waters.

Although I could easily find the cardinal points of the compass, when I think of rivers, there are only two directions, upstream and downstream. Upstream lies Chickamauga Lake with its water skies, power boats, and beaches. Downstream is the Tennessee Riverpark and the remnant wetlands of Amnicola Marsh and the Curtain Pole Road Area. Those are other stories for other days. 
​

​Welcome to Rayz Reviewz. Past editions are archived on my web page. Photos in this edition are from Big Soddy Gulf. The fence lizard, which I have adopted as a symbol for this series, I photographed at Cloudland Canyon State Park.
 
With the reorganization of the Chattanooga Chapter, Tennessee Ornithological Society, I have resumed editing their newsletter. I will also be editing the newsletter of the Chattanooga Writer’s guild this year, so I will publish Rayz Reviewz on a less frequent schedule.
 
Travels Close to Home
 
Conflicts between parks and native people are prevalent throughout the world, and our American public lands are no exception. If you want to explore this topic through reading, the following links offer three views of the subject. Reading these articles is a beginning.
 
Barry Lopez has spent many years in remote parts of the world traveling with indigenous people and with scientists conducting research projects. His books cover the natural world from the Arctic to Australia’s Outback. Some of what he has learned from indigenous people is related in his essay, “The Invitation,” as published in the literary magazine Granta.
 
For a more detailed look at his world view and his way of learning, read his National Book Award winning volume, Arctic Dreams. He says that Arctic explorers from Europe would have increased their chances of survival if they had been willing to learn from indigenous people.
 
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi tribe, concerned about the disappearance of her native language. She is learning the language and states in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass that only about a dozen fluent speakers remain.
 
In Kimmerer’s essay, “Speaking of Nature” she points out that native languages shape a world view and that our manner of speaking about nature influences our perceptions and attitudes.
 
When the US government created Yosemite National Park, several tribes of Native Americans were evicted from the Yosemite Valley. Native American authors collaborated on the essay “We are still here, John Muir is Not.” 

Opportunities for Writers
 
Do you miss the days of live performance, which are all but gone right now? If just writing a poem or story is not enough, you might want to investigate the online opportunities.
 
The Chattanooga Writer’s Guild offers regular online open mic opportunities through their Facebook Page. They also provide interviews with accomplished writers. You can view the most recent interview on their YouTube Channel.
 
The Plug Poetry Project, founded and managed by Christian Collier, offers an open mic with Zoom meetings through a Facebook page. The Plug Poetry Project is also a documentary series. Each segment includes two accomplished poets in conversation about their craft.
 
On a national level, the literary magazine Rattle Poetry offers poets a weekly opportunity to respond to current events. The winning poets present their work online through Poets Respond. Subscribe to their YouTube Channel for information on their weekly Rattlecast program and Critique of the Week. Visit their website to participate in the monthly Ekphrastic challenge.
 
The five paragraph nature essays I now present at the end of each issue are modelled on Brian Doyle’s essay and instructions presented in “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” If you want to try this form, read his brief essay at Orion magazine online. 

​​Featured Essay: Home and Away
 
From my youngest days, we lived in a land of plenty, a land I remember as a paradise on earth. The house was old but was situated on a one-acre lot, with ample room for a garden and an orchard. When fall came we had beans, corn, potatoes, and squash. Our fresh okra went into chicken gumbo soup, always homemade. Our pumpkins made fine jack-o-lanterns and pies and there were always apples to preserve for the apple pies of winter. Trips to town were reserved for meat, milk, flour, and other staples but the garden and the orchard sustained our needs for fruit and vegetables.
 
The fumes of an oil refinery assaulted our nostrils when we drove into Canton, Ohio, the nearest city. Tanks filled with raw materials that would become diesel oil, gasoline, kerosene, and other products of commerce surrounded a tower. Components of the crude oil, not usable for manufacturing, were ignited at the top of this tower. My dad once referred to the flame as the Statue of Liberty. This phrase quickly caught on with my friends when repeated. I later heard that a cousin whose family lived near the refinery was sickly until a doctor advised his mother to move elsewhere for the child’s health. 
 
Within a mile of the house and garden, a small and never reclaimed strip-mine had bloomed on the landscape. We were told never to go there alone, but one day my dad took me walking on the gutted land. He hunted small game in the wooded areas nearby. This walk was a scouting trip to see if the strip mine would yield productive hunting that year.  We saw an old house, just a board framework by this time, which he strictly warned me to never enter in the case that I “accidentally” passed nearby. He said that it was unsound, and likely a habitat for snakes.
 
On the cusp of my teenage years, I began picking the blackberries from canes filling the vacant land that surrounded the strip mine. On occasion, my friends and I caught a few snakes which we carried home in a pillowcase. Our mothers sent us packing to turn them loose elsewhere. They were much more appreciative when we brought home blackberries, which ended up in cobblers and pies. If you have the misfortune to have never experienced a blackberry cobbler, search for a picture on the world wide web. The picture won’t do justice to my mother’s cobbler. My mouth waters as a write about them. 
 
Remembering those days, I am caught between the beauty of the garden and the industrial wasteland of the refinery and the mine. My environmentalism is genuinely fueled by the twin engines of delight and despair. The strip mine and the refinery helped to shape my personality, but I think of the garden when I think of home.
 
Heaven with constant harp music and streets paved with gold has never been much of an enticement for me, but I once heard an old preacher give a more convincing speech. He told of the man on the cross who asked Jesus to remember him and received an answer. “This day you shall be with me in Paradise.” The old preacher said,” Now don’t confuse that with heaven. Paradise literally means The Kings Garden.” That was all the convincing I needed. Here was a place I could love and hope for. If I ever make it to The Kings Garden, that will be all the heaven I need. 

Welcome to Rayz Reviewz. Past editions are archived on my web page. This week’s photos are from the Tennessee RiverPark, Curtain Pole Road section. The fence lizard photo which appears on every issue was taken at Cloudland Canyon State Park.
 
Travel Close to Home
 
Learn to recognize the birds in your back yard with American Bird Conservancy’s bird of the week. Most recently, the bird of the week was an Indigo Bunting.   https://abcbirds.org/bird/indigo-bunting/
 
The Tennessee Naturalist Program offers a one-year course for anyone interested in learning more about the natural world of our state. It is offered at locations across the state, with most classes meeting once each month.  https://tnnaturalist.org/

​Opportunities for Writers and Other Creative People
 
Boulevard magazine offers a nonfiction contest for emerging writers. The entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Boulevard. The first-place winner will receive publication and $1,000. https://boulevardmagazine.org/nonfiction-contest
                    
The Masters’ Review offers contests and publication opportunities for writers.
https://mastersreview.com/short-story-award-for-new-writers/
 
The Chattanooga Audubon Society has extended the deadline for their photography contest.
https://www.chattanoogaaudubon.org/
 
I missed out on the literary journal Number One this year. If you are one of their regular contributors, so did you. Apparently, a security upgrade to their server blocked all messages with attachments. They simply did not receive the submissions and could not publish a 2020 edition. Perhaps the issue will be resolved this year and we will be able to send submissions to Number One, Volunteer State Community College, Gallatin, Tennessee for the 2021 edition. 

​Feature Essay: A Unity of Minds
 
Could a mockingbird mimic the strains of “Jupiter: Bringer of Joviality,” or any other section of “The Planets,” that whimsical set of tone poems composed by Gustav Holst? Imagine the morose tune of “Mars: Bringer of War” issuing from the throat of a bird. Though such complex mimicry may be beyond the abilities of birds, animals frequently amaze and amuse us with their behavior, sometimes mistaken as antics.  
 
We gasp when hearing of how a captive killer whale, incarcerated for years, bit more than the “feeding hand” and took the life of its keeper. Intelligent beings, they learn tricks rapidly, but intelligence makes them dangerous captives. For millennia, killer whales have survived in ocean currents, but escape becomes a ‘current event.” 
 
Killer whales, intelligent captives in public displays, are not meant to perform for our amusement let alone on a regular schedule, not even when the producer claims that the show will generate empathy and respect. 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
 
Perhaps their behaviors hold charm for us because we recognize 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 are those of a human hand, revealed in the glow of an X-ray. The same is true of a whale’s flipper, which moves them through the ocean in tandem with the thrust of a tail.  
 
We will only make peace with our animal neighbors when we see them in us as we see ourselves in them.  Some of us have already learned to do so.
 
Shameless Self Promotion
 
I published an article about Casper Cox and his book, Snorkeling the Hidden Rivers of Southern Appalachia in the Chattanooga Pulse earlier this year. If this outdoor activity, growing in popularity appeals to you, his book is available online. Read the article here. http://www.chattanoogapulse.com/arts/features/from-page-to-screen-casper-cox-searches-for-hidden-rivers/

Rayz Reviewz Volume 1 Number 18
 
Welcome to Rayz Reviewz. Past editions are archived on my web page. My feature article, Whale Watch: A Cape Cod Memoir, follows the Travel Close to Home section and the Opportunities section. This week’s photos are from the Curtain Pole Road portion of the Tennessee Riverpark in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Travel Close to Home
 
For the past few weeks, the Curtain Pole Road section of the Tennessee Riverpark has been my “go to” location for nature photography. I have spent several mornings there, collecting photographs of Great Egrets, Great Blue Herons and Green Herons, and more recently, dragonflies, robber flies, and cicadas, as well as fruits and flowers.  
 
Meanwhile, the Chickamauga Dam is still productive for viewing Osprey, Double Crested Cormorants, and Great Blue Herons.  If you want to know more about the birds mentioned here, see the online field guide of the National Audubon Society.
 
The picnic area of the Tennessee Riverpark near the Hubert Fry Center has some lovely flower gardens which are productive for butterfly observation and photography.
 
The American Lotus at Amnicola Marsh are rapidly losing their flowers. The large seed heads are prominent and green with some turning to brown. Soon the duck and geese populations should be more visible.

Chattanooga Outdoors provides information about outdoor sports on their web page https://outdoorchattanooga.com/. This is the place to find out about bicycling, kayaking, white water rafting and other opportunities.

Unknown Territory
This is my response to Brian Doyle’s essay, “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” which appeared in Orion Magazine.
 
The word “greatest” leads into the treacherous ground of superlatives. With overuse, superlatives have a numbing effect, a tendency to produce a “so what?’ response. They also have overtones of arrogance, advertising, and P.T. Barnum coming to town with his circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth.”.

That said, Brian Doyle has given us a fine essay on the art of essay writing. After my initial response to the word greatest, I calmed down and found five paragraphs of genuine, perhaps gently humorous, views on what should happen in such an 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 the readers out of themselves and into an unexpected place where they secretly hoped to go.

In her poem, “The Speed of Darkness,” Muriel Rukeyser said, “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 writer should “tiptoe” back to the gently unfolding story without sermonizing or grandiose conclusions. The essay should end 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 his 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. Horace perhaps unexpectedly founded a school of poetics, which 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. Here is a brief sample:

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.

Doyle’s essay gives similar instructions which 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 must wonder if Doyle’s definition leaves room for Dillard’s frog shriveling to an empty bag of skin after the attack by a giant water bug, or Matthiessen’s freezing feet as he crosses the Himalayas. There is certainly not room for Thoreau’s Cape Cod with the bodies of Irish immigrants lining the beach after a shipwreck and awaiting the arrival of wailing relatives. Nevertheless, these authors meet the exhortation of Horace to choose a subject suited to their abilities, which are considerable.

This line of reasoning led me to “The Cowboy and his Cow,” by Edward Abbey. The piece is self-aware, in that the transcription for publication included the audience reactions to a reading of the essay. Many of those reactions were shouted by the audience. These parenthetical records include the concluding words (gunshots in parking lot). His physical location at the reading, in Wyoming cattle country, as he criticizes government subsidized grazing land, guaranteed a hostile response. Abbey’s piece is not an essay though. It is a polemic, best described as a contentious rhetoric intended to support a position and undermine the opposing position. Much of what is broadcast on “talk radio,” is polemical. Here is a brief segment of Abbey’s polemic.

Overgrazing is much too weak a term. Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call "cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds.

Imagine reading that piece to an auditorium full of cattlemen and students at an agricultural school in Wyoming! The essay gives insight to Abbey’s devotion to the land which left no room for middle ground. As such it violates Doyle’s dictum of “no sermonizing.”

By contrast, “The Dead Man at Grandview Point,” a chapter in his book Desert Solitaire, achieves the feel of a lyric essay, defined in the Eastern Iowa Review, in part, as follows: “…The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving." - Deborah Tall 

I once prepared a profile of Abbey for the environmentalist tabloid Hellbender Press, named for a large species of salamander. Here is some material I quoted from “The Dead Man at Grandview Point,” a chapter of his book Desert Solitaire. Upon returning home from assisting a search party to find a missing senior citizen, found deceased at Grandview Point, he identified with the dead man, but paradoxically, also with the circling vultures. 

I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.

I think this fits Doyle’s criteria, and I find his comments helpful, but not an exclusive set of criteria for writing nature essays. The self-aware aspect of the work is interesting. I suppose that the phrase, “in the flow,” might describe its opposite. It matches the ancient Greek term of Kairos as opposed to Chronos. Chronos 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 yet the observer may think it has been only a moment. It is the intersection of the divine with the ordinary. It is the realm of the Muse.

I find my nature observation and journaling to be more Kairos than Chronos. I fish in a river, observe the wildlife in a marsh, or investigate the wildflowers in a wood lot with no awareness of time until I have reached some sense of completion and realize that the morning is gone. This also happens when I am writing. The alarms on my cell phone help me with keeping appointments.

In her book of essays Upstream, Mary Oliver says that writing will make you late for appointments and wake you up in the middle of the night. This is another way of seeing my intent here.

I am unable to separate the comments from personal experience. For me, the concept of self-aware observation or journaling seems to contradict the sense of wonder achieved in Kairos time. For others, that sense of wonder might be retained even as they notice their own reactions to their observations and their writings. I might hope to reach that state, but it does not seem possible for now.

Find Brian Doylle's essay here. https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-greatest-nature-essay-ever/
 
Shameless Self Promotion
A few months ago I wrote an article about Robert Sparks Walker for The Chattanooga Pulse.