SEASON OF FRIENDS

Vickie and Anne on porch

This summer has been a season of friends, traveling afar to be with them and staying at home to receive them, and the latest visitor was a long-term friend from New Iberia, Louisiana. Yesterday, Anne Simon, author of mysteries called “The Blood Series” — Blood in the Cane Field, Blood in the Lake, and Blood of Believers — sat a spell with us on the small porch facing our woods here in Sewanee, Tennessee. Presently, Anne, a retired district judge, has turned her attention from writing mysteries to telling the story of an African-American woman named Felicité who nursed yellow fever victims in New Iberia during the 19th century, and we enjoyed a good writers’ chat concerning the extensive research she has been doing regarding Felicité.

We sat on the porch “taking the air,” as we say in south Louisiana, and I was reminded of the essay I wrote for Porch Posts (co-authored with Janet Faulk-Gonzales) a few years ago. This morning, I re-read my last essay in this book entitled “The Ultimate Porch:” 

“It [the porch] would be a place to which people brought peace and conversation, laughter, and their willingness to take time out. For me, the ultimate porch would also be a dual haven, in early morning hours offering me a safe place where I could sit in silence, stilling the storm of some past suffering in my mind, or expressing myself in writing, all my senses effortlessly taking in the scene around me, interrupted only by the squawk of a crow bringing me messages of affirmation.

Mostly, I’d want to bring to it my “belonging”… with friends, family, and community… where, as C.S. Lewis said, we all saw the same truth: love. Evening would be the best time for porch sitting, a time like that of an old memory at early dusk when there was just enough light to read by, and my Grandmother Nell and I sat together in a scaling, green-painted swing, reading from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse: “The world is so full of a number of things,/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

In early September, we plan to venture over to LaGrange, Georgia to sit on the new porch of our friend, Mary Ann Wilson, who probably loves porches as much as I do and was laying the foundation for one when we first visited her in June. It’s a screened one overlooking a patch of Georgia woods “in the country,” she says, “a place I’ve never lived.” Every time she writes, she’s on that porch, enjoying a deserved retirement from the English Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, her “roofed-in observation post where she can sit to get a clear view of what’s in the world outside and that allows for amiable company…”*

Moon in a Bucket

*Introduction to Porch Posts by Diane Marquart Moore and Janet-Faulk Gonzales. Illustration by Paul Schexnayder in Porch Posts.

FROM THE FRONT PORCH

It's the time of the pause between books I've been writing—a time when I'm reviewing the work of ants, spiders, birds, plants, and the lime green trees in the wood beyond my front porch. I can't call it the time of idleness because I have a condition that is known as "racing mind," and contemplative or centering prayer is difficult for me unless I have some sort of mantra buzzing in my brain.

I console myself that the transcendentalist Thoreau observed, read, listened to the sounds of nature, built a cabin, planted a garden, and wrote about all of this during his two years of communing with nature in the Concord woods. As far as I know, he didn't assume a lotus position and just ponder or practice nothingness.

Right now, the crows overhead are jeering at me, as they do every time I come out on the porch. I've read that they recognize faces and voices, and we keep up a lively conversation above the sound of construction work going on near my driveway. One of them waddled over to my steps the other day and cocked his yellow eye at me when I recited the first poem I learned at age four while my mother read aloud from A Child's Garden of Verse: "A birdie with a yellow bill/hopped upon my window sill..." The crow quickly exited the yard at the sound of rhyming verse since he's more accustomed to readings of my free verse, and he flew away when I continued to recite the rhyme in a sing-song voice.

Moments later, my nose picked up the scent of a skunk, a creature more equipped for nocturnal visits, and I shuddered, remembering the family that colonized the insulation underneath our cottage two years ago—and ripped it into pieces for a nesting place to raise babies. Three skunk catchers later and $1,000 poorer, we rid ourselves of the offending visitors. I hope the scent this morning doesn't indicate there's a scouting expedition nearby.

We've had rain in sporadic bursts for weeks, and the snails are out. A large one was encamped by the French doors leading into our living room, and I was rude enough to interrupt his slumber, brushing him into the yard. When I was a child, a neighbor bully was fond of sprinkling salt on snail bodies when they emerged from their shells and would watch them turn into "butter," as he called it. It was a gruesome sight, and I've never bothered to find out why this chemical reaction occurred as it was a clear violation of nature.

Tiny bright orange toadstools have appeared in the bed of fern, varicolored hosta, a sickly lemon balm plant, and a stunted rosebush by the steps, the latter two preferring more sunlight than they're getting under the shade of the white oaks. The toadstools look like the fairy footstools my mother painted in her renderings of fantastical creatures that she imagined populated the piney woods near Franklinton, Louisiana. I expected a gnome with a pointed hat to appear on the spot as she always painted a gnome standing alongside huge mushrooms, a palette in hand and a large green frog perched in the foreground, observing the magical creature at work.

Those who want to read expert observations on the natural world should get a copy of The Unseen Forest: A Year's Watch of Nature by David Haskell, or read his blog entitled "Ramble." He has received national awards for his wonderful writings about a square meter of space in the woods where he spent a year observing nature at work. 

I'm not a trained naturalist, but I do like my observation post on the front porch here at Sewanee and find that it's a great way to reclaim my writing urges on a day that could have been a time for just being a good for nothing southerner doing some serious porch sitting.

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

APRIL IS THE MONTH FOR POETS AND POETRY

Although I read and write poetry every day, every month in the year, I'm always excited to see that the Academy of American Poets commemorates April as National Poetry Month. The Academy has been sponsoring this observance since 1996 and encourages schools, libraries, publishers, and poets to celebrate poetry during April through readings, workshops, and festivals. This year, members of this supportive organization have suggested that poetry lovers carry poems in their pockets and read them during casual encounters with friends, co-workers, and other people they meet on the street on April 24. 

I own approximately 400 books of poetry and house most of them in my bedroom here at Sewanee, Tennessee, and when I'm in Louisiana, I suffer pangs of withdrawal from the lack of availability of my books. However, right now, just as the "blooming yellows" appear—daffodils and forsythia, our first signs of spring—I'm in my Tennessee poetry library again and am happy to be in the company of bards ranging from Shakespeare to Charles Simic.

I teethed on Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse, thanks to my mother, memorized Henry W. Longfellow's poems in the third grade, and had an epiphany about becoming a poet when I was eleven. The epiphany occurred as I was sitting at one of those old fold-up seat desks reading "Hiawatha," and as I read the poem, I experienced the same sensation that Emily Dickinson said she felt when she read a good poem—as if the top of her head had blown off. I also received the revelation that I could write a poem. We had just moved into a new stucco bungalow in Franklinton, Louisiana, and I wrote the poem about this new home, the sight of which gave me an overwhelming feeling of security after traveling in the West the preceding summer, "gypsying," as my wanderlust father described my childhood odyssey to California.  

I only remember that two of the lines of the poem I wrote described the home as being "away from the town's noisy din/safe from the roar of the cotton gin," unimpressive lines to mark the advent of the life of a poet, but enough expression to make me think that I could write poetry. And, by the way, this early effort is one of the few rhyming poems I've penned during my lifetime.

I didn't become serious about writing poetry until I was 29, and my first published poem appeared in The American Weave in 1967 when I was 32. I was paid from the Hart Crane Memorial Fund and felt as though I had arrived in the world of poetry. Five years later, I received an award for inspirational poetry during the Deep South Writer's Conference but, again, time passed and I read more poetry than I wrote. During the early 1970's, I became serious about writing poetry while I sojourned in the desert of southern Iran and have remained dedicated to the craft and to publishing my work for almost forty years.

A friend once told me that no one is successful at any endeavor until they put in their 10,000 hours of practice, and I think that measure is probably a good marker for success in writing poetry that engages people. A better measure is that of writing a poem a day, and I feel that the ritual of writing is a spiritual act, as well as an act requiring discipline and study.

My poems will probably never be recited by third graders or sit on the shelves of academicians in the university realms, but the writing of them is still as exciting as the day I wrote that first poem when I was eleven and said to myself: "I can do that! For me, poetry provides what Jacque Maritain declared:  "You cannot attain eternal life through poetry but it is as essential as bread to the human race as it fits us for the life of the spirit."

PUBLISHED POETRY BOOKS OF DIANE MARQUART MOORE:  In A Convent Garden and Other Poems; Mystical Forest; Everything Is Blue; Post Cards From Diddy Wah Diddy; Alchemy; Old Ridges; Rising Water; The Holy Present and Farda; Grandma's Good War; Afternoons in Oaxaca; The Book of Uncommon Poetry; Counterpoint; Your Chin Doesn't Want to Marry; Soaring; More Crows; Just Passing Through; The Beast Beelzebufo (children's poetry); and A Moment Seized. 

Poems have appeared in The Daily Iberian, Yaddasht Haftegy, American Weave, Trace, Pinyon Review, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Southwestern Review, and other journals.