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To Teach the Heart – Zoo Poetry Day 3

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2012| 2 Comments »

This afternoon Ellen and Christa showed me a secret or two about how the magic is done.  Master welder, painter, and fabricator, Christa is one of seven sculptors who work in the design section at the NC Zoo.  We had just been looking at models of the new polar bear exhibit that will open in stages over the next two years.  I noticed a lichen-encrusted slab on the work table.  I picked it up.  It was a light sheet of some composite material painted in layers – I’ll still swear it was lichen.

Christa said, “When the visitors don’t even notice that the stones are hand-made, then we’ve done our job.”

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Does that mean that the Zoo’s mission is to create illusion?  No, the mission is to transcend and transport:  to transcend illusion and transport the visitor into a larger reality.  It is no accident that the sections have titles like “forest edge,” “African plains,” “rocky coast.”  In one day’s stroll you can enter all these  habitats and, for however briefly, become part of that which makes each place unique and notable.  And you get to see wild animals.

It’s called education.  The mission of the Zoo is to teach.  In five hundred acres or five hundred thousand acres the Zoo can’t conserve the world, but if we who come here to share the lives of these creatures gain even a glimmer of understanding and compassion, then we may become engaged in conserving the world for all creatures.  And for ourselves.

So why poetry at the Zoo?  The displays and installations are already various and superb.  They employ photographs, diagrams, puns (“just lion around” indeed).  You can walk right into a bush-copter hanger, a chimpanzee research station, a jungle, a desert.  Why do you need poetry?

Poetry can teach in a way that exposition and rhetoric cannot.  You are shaken by an unexpected metaphor.  You are halted in your tracks by an arresting image.  Poetry has slipped through the bars of your logical, calculating mind and has begun to teach directly to your heart.  Maybe, just maybe, you are transported into a larger reality.

You don’t even notice you’re being taught.  Poetry has done its job.

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Advice for Long Life

Keep simple, as simple as you can.
Like the heron who stands one leg on the sand.
Like the maple who stands one leg on the land.
Like the robin who, thirsty, gargles the worm.

The spider is simple if the web is not.
The tern is simple in a watery spot.
To be flexible, fluid, adored as a druid,
cryptic, mystic, blessed, lurid,
love simple as you can.

Plural by purpose, design, and make,
the effort to give is the urge to take.
Keep a hambone of joy at your right side.
Live broad, long, deep, wide,
but ride simple as you can.

Imitate wind and creep of dark –
as much as you can, the natural stark,
sun-driven crops and gradual shoat,
a frog spilling basso from a plum-blue throat
at river’s edge.  Be simple if you can.

 Anna Wooten-Hawkins

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Anna Wooten-Hawkins grew up in Kinston, North Carolina and received her MFA in creative writing from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She was a poet and professor of English at Gardner-Webb University, and later at Campbell University, St. Mary’s College, North Carolina State University, Peace College, and Meredith College. Her accomplishments include being the faculty editor of The Lyricist at Campbell University and coordinating the annual Muse Literary Festival at St. Mary’s College. Before her untimely death in 2000, Anna won many honors for her poetry. Her collection “Satan Speaks of Eve in 7 Voices After the Fall” won the 1986 North Carolina Writers’ Network Chapbook competition in 1986. In 1985 she received the City of Raleigh Arts Commission Award for her excellence in writing and service to the arts. Some of her works have appeared in The Green River Anthology, The Lowlands Review, The Lyricist, The Greensboro Review, and Pembroke Magazine.

(from http://www.uncg.edu/aas/ccwa/AnnaWHawkins.html)

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Today my friends and fellow poets Guy and Carolyn York stopped by to see me at the Zoo.  If you’re intrigued by the Hippo Beach sculptures, that’s where we’re holding our adult workshop on Saturday, 7/14, at 10 a.m.  As Robert Frost would say, “You come too!”

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One more postscript:  on July 6 the Zoo was blessed with a new arrival.  Juma (means born on Friday) weighs 150 pounds and is 72 inches long.

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Clouded Leopards – Zoo Poetry Day 2

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2012| 2 Comments »

Saturday I was talking to a friend who lives in the woods.  I mean really in the woods.  From his kitchen window he can watch the pristine little creek twenty yards down the hill. Every so often a blue heron wades past.  Where an old tree has blown down a gray fox crosses the creek.  Pretty wild.  And yet as we were talking he noted his regret that he never sees whippoorwills any more.  Hasn’t heard one in ten or fifteen years.

Yesterday morning I left Elkin at 6:30 to get to the Zoo plenty early.  They’ve just finished a year-long project widening a stretch of 421 through Winston-Salem, and you know how a fresh roadway cut looks: planed-off angle of clay sown with chemicals and sprouting grass monoculture.  Just before the new exit ramp, at 7:15 in the morning as the city revved up, a female wild turkey strolled blithely along finding the odd beetle or something worth bending over for.

Pretty wild.

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Today I was privileged to meet with Dr. David Jones, Director of the NC Zoological Park.  Before assuming the post here in Asheboro he was director of the London Zoo.  He has worked with animals in more countries than I know the names of.  His photographs of Africa appear in many of the interpretive displays around the Park.  And the curators and staff he has assembled are equally impressive.

This evening Dr. Jones presided over the dedication of a new outdoor sculpture (installed along the trail up to Sonora Desert).  Piedmont Totem is a pottery tower created by students and instructors at Montgomery Community College, a series of nineteen cylinders stacked into a column.  Each piece intertwines native piedmont creatures and plants, beginning at the bottom with tadpole, fish, roots and culminating at the top with eagle and owl.  As Dr. Jones pointed out, when viewed as a whole the work embodies the interconnected web of life.  And as he emphasized, the primary mission of the Zoological Park is to have visitors discover those interconnections, and to feel themselves connected as a part of the web as well.

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I blame people’s cats for the loss of whippoorwills, ground-nesters who depend entirely on camouflage for survival.  Then again, maybe the raccoons are eating the whippoorwills’ eggs because the raccoons’ predators have been extirpated as varmints (may we hope that the coyotes that have moved into the countryside will eat the raccoons?!).  Or maybe it’s all the skunks’ fault, since  the only thing that will eat a skunk is a great horned owl, and I haven’t been hearing nearly as many owls lately, either.

Or maybe this whole interwoven web is so complex that every thread we disturb leads to three more unravelings.  Who’s to say we can do without any of them?

But I still wish you’d keep your cats indoors, damn it.

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The Clouded Leopards of Cambodia and Viet Nam

They are gone, almost, into the music of their name.
The few that are left
wait high and hesitant as mist
in the tallest trees where dawn breaks first.

Their color of mourning kindles
to patterns of stark white, random
and sudden as hope or daydream.
Moving, they could be mirrors of the sky,
that play of masks
behind which the ancient burning continues
to dwindle and flee.

Thousands of years in their bones
leap blameless as lightning toward us.
To come close to what they know
would feel like thunder and its silent afterword.
We would turn slowly on our shadows, look up
again to tame the shapes of the world:
monkey, temple, rat, rice bowl, god,
images echoed in the smoke of village cookfires,
in the drift of memory on the faces of elders.
We would stand in the clean footprints of animals,
holding like an offering our hope
for the lives of a handful of people,
a rain that is only rain.

Betty Adcock

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Asked in an interview what she hoped for in her poetry, Betty Adcock replied “to tell the truth and find that it is music.” Living all her writing life in North Carolina, she as won many literary awards including the Brockman-Campbell Award of the NC Poetry Society, the Roanoke-Chowan Award, the Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award, the Raleigh Fine Arts Award, a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a North Carolina Individual Artist’s Fellowship.  Her most recent volume is Slantwise (LSU Press, 2008).

http://bettyadcock.com/links.html

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Remembering Where We’re Headed – Cathy Smith Bowers

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on May 4, 2012| 1 Comment »

“Not all those who wander are lost . . .”  J.R.R.Tolkien

What would it be like to take a walk and not know where you’re going to end up?  To just sling a pack across your shoulder and strike out southwest, no, let’s make that northeast, OK, just up and out?  I don’t mean when you’re not exactly sure what route to take, or it’s a trail new to you and you don’t know how rough or easy – I mean you have no earthly idea where you’re even headed.  Or how long you’ll be walking before you arrive. Or if you’ll arrive.

For someone like me, whose days are mostly lined out in fifteen-minute blocks, to simply walk in the moment is such an alien concept it’s almost terrifying.  I’ve taken some pretty long walks over the years, fifty and a hundred miles some of them, but I always knew within a few hours when I expected to arrive at my final goal, and within a few square meters of where that goal was.  Unfolding big maps and memorizing the landmarks, dissecting guidebooks (literaly, to rearrange the torn-out pages), scratching notes on little cards I’d carry with me along the way – they’re all metaphors for this planned-out predetermined regimented life of mine.  Once in a while I might stray from the trail and wander the woods, but I always know to be home by dark.  Yet by even the most wildly generous estimate my life is now two-thirds over.  Do I remember where I’m headed?

Friday morning Linda and I are going to pick up my eighty-something parents in Winston-Salem and drive to the Greensboro Coliseum to attend Josh’s graduation from UNCG.  Can I even list the obstacles that have made his path of the past ten years so uncertain?  The ones he never imagined he could succesfully negotiate but did, the ones that crushed him more than once, the ones he just had to hoist on his back and carry, sweating, all along the way?  Many times he and we too have doubted there even was a path, much less a way to travel it.  But in the past few months there have been subtle signs, like seeing the first trout lily and knowing spring has arrived, that this is real. It IS going to happen.  One of the sweetest images is that of my mother discovering, as she unpacked boxes from their recent move back home to North Carolina, the blazer she wore as a UNCG (then “Women’s College”) graduate sixty-three years ago, a “‘49” pin still attached from one of her reunions.

Way to go, Josh!  Your GrandMommy will be wearing that blazer, and I will be wearing admiration in my heart for your achievement.  You toughed it out and I’m proud of you.  It’s the steep path that brings us to high places.

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Which of us ever really knows exactly where we’re headed?  What the heck am I talking about?  Career, marriage, kids, grandson, church, yardwork, a vacation from time to time – enough there to fill any number of present hours and more than enough to fill any contemplations of the future.  Is it only old guys and ascetics who take time out for a minute and ask, Where am I headed?  For those like me who are too fidgety for a meditation practice, too cocky for a psychologist, too type A to spend time doing nothing instead of something, there’s a window to throw open and stick your head out when those questions tap on the pane.  Poetry, of course, the opening window.  When I read a poem that pierces my id I don’t get all the answers: I discover the questions.

Thank you, Cathy Smith Bowers, for this poem and all it doesn’t say.  I was reading Cathy’s book Like Shining from Shook Foil as part of a project to collect poems to be displayed at the NC Zoo.  Among others, I want to include one by each of our NC Poet Laureates, back to James Larkin Pearson.  I started at More Weight on page 119 and read the book backwards (I know, I know, they make a pill for that sort of thing).  Hers is a poetry of arresting images, lightning, and jagged truth-saying.  When I reached poem #1, perhaps from being filled with everything that had come before, all the questions clamored loud and I knew this is the one for the Zoo, and for me.

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Paleolithic

We love these old caves – Lascaux,
Altamira – and walk carefully
the way we always enter the past,
our hands bearing
the artificial light of this world.

We imagine those first hunters
crouched, conjuring luck,
carving into rock-swell
their simple art – whole herds of bison,
the haunches, the powerful heads, floating
orderless along the walls.
And some are climbing sky
as if they were stars, planets
obiting something they cannot see.
Centuries will pass before they
right themselves, their hooves
coming down onto the deep
wet floor of leaf-fall.
Remembering earth.
Remembering where it was
they were headed.

© 2010 Cathy Smith Bowers.  from Like Shining from Shook Foil, Press 53.  First appeared in Southern Poetry Review.

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Cathy Smith Bowers was named North Carolina Poet Laureate by Governer Bev Perdue in 2010.  Press 53 (Winston-Salem, NC) published her new and collected poems, Like Shining from Shook Foil, that same year.

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