“Cultivating (Preserving)” in Bolts of Silk
October 19, 2010
While I was away this weekend up at the Rodale Institute’s organic farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, my poem “Cultivating (Preserving)” appeared in the Scottish online journal, Bolts of Silk. It’s another poem from my “Dwelling” sequence, which Alison Hawthorne Deming has called, “a phenomenology of how we live on the Earth.”
Bolts of Silk, which has the subtitle “beautiful poetry with something to say,” is curated by the delightful Crafty Green Poet, Juliet Wilson of Edinburgh, Scotland, whom I met through our both being published in another Scottish journal, Anon.
The irony of this poem being published while I was unplugged up at an organic farm was not lost on me. Perhaps (I’m not going to ask) it wasn’t lost on Juliet, who follows me on Twitter and could very well have seen my last tweet on Friday evening as I was heading to the farm.
In any event, here is my poem,
Cultivating (Preserving)
Dwelling as preserving
is cultivating.
Dwelling means knowing
what inhabits a place
and understanding that
which belongs to a place.
We cultivate what grows,
while building things
that don’t grow.
We seek the organic
in our own creations,
which are inorganic.
Imposing our will
on the landscape,
we can remove either
that which promotes capacity
or that which prevents capacity.
We are tenders of the garden,
we tend what needs tending
(heart or “langscape”)
What we save remains—
–Scott Edward Anderson
Edwin Morgan’s “Strawberries”
August 31, 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
The great Scottish poet Edwin Morgan passed away nearly two weeks ago and the tributes and accolades have continued throughout the Edinburgh Book Festival that’s just ended.
I’ve been fortunate to follow much of it via Twitter, having connected with such wonderful poets and poetry lovers as @ByLeavesWeLive, @OneNightStanzas, and @craftygreenpoet among others, who have made me feel like I was there alongside them, paying my respects.
Morgan was a remarkably gifted poet, and gifted not only in the sort of conventional sense of the word. I mean he had an incomparable ear for the rich variety and breadth of poetry that one rarely sees in this day of specialization and of literary “camps.”
Morgan saw the magical in the ordinary and wasn’t about to limit himself by the constraints of either subject matter or style. He could be funny, such as “The First Men on Mercury,” but he was equally adept when he turned his hand at tender, more traditional love poems.
One of my favorites — probably my favorite Morgan poem — is “Strawberries,” which you can read in its entirety at the Edwin Morgan Archives at the Scottish Poetry Library.
For now, I’ll just quote the ending, which is stunning even without mention of the strawberries or the scene between two lovers:
let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hillslet the storm wash the plates
–Edwin Morgan
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- “RIP Edwin Morgan” and related posts (craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com)
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