LA PETITE MAISON

Tiny houses seem to be the hottest residences in real estate today. However, they're not really the newest form of small shelters for those who want to avoid high rents or lifelong mortgages. When I see tiny houses advertised on the net, I inevitably think of Henry David Thoreau (Walden) and that 10 x 15 sq. ft. cottage he built in 1845 at Concord, Massachusetts for $28 and lived in for two years, observing nature in the woods near Walden Pond. Thoreau, like most people who gravitate toward the idea of the tiny house, had in mind two purposes for constructing his simple English-style cottage—to be self-reliant and to live simply.

Then there's Mary Oliver, the renowned Pulitzer Prize winning poet, who decided to build a tiny house because she had been teaching for a year in a Midwestern city—had been, as she described her situation: "...responsible, sedate, thoughtful, and for most of my daylight hours, indoors. I was sick for activity..." Her tiny house in the woods near Provincetown, Massachusetts cost $3.58, and although she hardly used it, except as a place to write a few poems, she claimed that the house had never been a structure she built as a shelter for thought. She built it simply to build it. She had a goal sorta' like Thoreau's idea of self-reliance or self-sufficiency. Later, the tiny house would become a storage shed, but while Oliver was building it, she was "involved, frustrated, devoted, resolved, nicked and scraped, and delighted...I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy."*

Strange how both of these literary luminaries were attracted to the idea of building tiny houses, and both of them didn't use them as long-time residences. However, Robert Francis, another poet who also lived in Massachusetts and joined the small house society, built the tiny house he had dreamed of owning for $1,000 near Amherst, Massachusetts so that he could have the solitude he needed to write and think. At "Fort Juniper," his small house surrounded by woods, fields, and streams, he subsisted on as little as $489 a year in 1952. He wrote in Travelling in Amherst: A Poets Journal 1931-1954: "Though I live far below The American Standard of Living, I am not impoverished or pitiful...I own my small home. I am well nourished [from his own garden], and adequately clothed. Few writers have more propitious conditions under which to write..."

From a poetic point of view, small houses sound idyllic. However, a 150 sq. ft. tiny house today might cost as much as $40,000; even a do-it-yourself project can cost $23,000. Many of these small dwellings are priced at $80,000. Most people who dream of owning these scaled-down residences seek acres of land on which to build and frequently have to build in remote places to obtain the plot of land they want to own. Also, poets may survive in those surroundings, but, more often, people who build tiny houses in remote places gradually begin to use them as vacation retreats. Still, there's the attraction of having wood walls and no sheetrock, the excitement of living in a place next to nature's heart, and the opportunity to get rid of all that stuff that has cluttered up your life for too many years.

However, most of us who're attracted to the experiment of living in a tiny house might think twice about the isolation, poverty, and obscurity of which Robert Francis spoke and decide against this structure as a permanent domicile. After all, Thoreau lived in his small cottage only two years, and Mary Oliver ended up moving out of her la petite maison and making room for those tools with which she had built her tiny shelter.

*From Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

THE SINGING INSIDE

One of the perks of my association with Pinyon Publishing is that I sometimes form a friendship with a fellow poet, via e-mail, and the poet and I make a spiritual connection through reading each other's work.  One of those incidents of serendipity has been through my recent correspondence with Michael Miller, a very fine poet who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Michael and I share a fondness for the New England poet Robert Francis, "a man who owned freedom and leisure," as I described him in a former poem – a poet who subsisted on a pittance for years before being recognized as an important New England poet.

I reviewed Michael Miller's newest book of poetry, Into This World, published by Pinyon Publishing, a few weeks ago, and before I traveled to Florida recently, Miller referred me to another of his works, The Singing Inside, a beautiful book of poetry set by hand in 14 pt. Perpetua, a font designed by Eric Gill.  The text was printed letterpress on a Heidelberg Original Cylinder press, and the cover was printed by hand on a 10x15 Chandler and Price platen press.  Artwork was printed from wood engravings by Frank C. Eckmair, and the book was designed and printed by Birch Brook Press.

I describe these exterior qualities because I seldom see such beautiful, hand-printed books of poetry.  The Singing Inside accurately defines the poetry inside – the singing inside of a man who pays tribute to his wife and their journey together as they mature in married love, passionately and honestly.  There are so many fine poems in the volume that I wouldn't strike out even one as unfit for the theme of married love, from its inception as a passionate love affair to the present decade of their aging.  Miller sings about the latter stage of married love: "Our house is singing as it sinks/A gradual decline with choruses/We can hear beyond the floorboards/Cracking, the old beams creaking,/The stone foundation shifting as if/It were looking for a place to escape./How we resist our body's aging!/Resentful of our brittle bones,/Our muscles slackening as if asleep,/Come, let's open all the windows/And sing to the warblers, the wrens."

I was also impressed by the cogent feelings expressed in two exquisite love poems reminiscent of the Persian poet Rumi, on facing pages, XIX and XX, the latter defining a love that has been plumbed and kept intact: "We have delved into the anatomy/Of each other's darkness,/Of each other's light,/Uncovering a grave,/Unveiling a hidden sun./We have explored without a caution,/Reconnoitering each other's heart,/Refusing to believe there is/Nothing left to discover."

Although Miller speaks of "maple leaves reddening and curling at their edges," he recognizes that mature love takes "decades of struggle/And ease to arrive at this/Three-foot wall built with/Smooth and rough stones/Where the countries of lichen grow,/And we sit upon it looking out/With the joined perfection of hands."

These poems are true and powerful – no frills, each word crafted with precision, each poem condensed into tight, concrete imagery and rendered in passionate phrasing.  I read this volume while vacationing in Weston, Florida, a city of wonderful light and felt a synchronicity of environment and the wonderful clarity and light in The Singing Inside.

PINYON PUBLISHING’S LATEST POET

Robert Francis, one of my favorite New England poets and a contemporary of Robert Frost, wrote that poetry was what “excited him most deeply,” but at the age of 70 he declared that he disliked it! In the introduction to Traveling in Amherst, Richard Gillman explains that Francis declared this antipathy for poetry because he found much of the poetry written by his contemporaries (excepting Frost) “to be boring or baffling or both.” At some point in Francis’s life, he concentrated on creating his own poetry rather than being unhappy reading the work of others, and he wrote his best poems when he entered his sixth decade.

I admire Robert Francis’s poetry, but in antithesis to his denigration of contemporary poetry, I find that I’m exhilarated by post modern and progressive poetry, and my shelves have become crowded with volumes of contemporary poets.

Publisher Gary Entsminger of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado, has launched the work of several distinguished contemporary poets during the last few years, and the work of these poets have delighted and surprised me. I always try to budget for the newest poetry books emerging from this Indie press located in a cabin in the Rockies.

Pinyon’s latest poet, Francine Marie Tolf, has written a volume of sharply-edged poems that might surprise Robert Francis, if he were alive and reading, despite his avowed dislike for contemporary poetry. Prodigal, Tolf’s second collection of poems, is written by a poet who possesses that which some literary critics would call “new eyes”—and she uses them to make observations about animals, nature, even antiquity, sometimes poking fun at herself in the manner of Charles Simic, another contemporary poet, particularly in the prose poems that plumb her personal life; e.g., “She Only Wants to Write:”

“the thin keening of crickets this fragile May morning, and how the breath of her cat sleeping on a pillow behind her is a little cloud on the back of her neck. She knows if she links these two mysteries, she’ll spin a bridge joining everything to everything, with her in the center, swaying on rope that braids itself as she casts down words, sinking full weight into each syllable without looking down.”

This kind of objective/subjective poetry is difficult to achieve. It illustrates “control” accomplished by synthesizing personal and profound in a way that changes and moves not only the reader but the poet as well. As publisher Entsminger observes, [it is] “derived not from cheaply won sentiment, but from an intensely personal conviction…”

Tolf achieves a meditative effect with her compact poem entitled “Morning,” which includes a beginning quote from Joanna Macy: “I could not cure myself of praying to a God I no longer believed in.” The brief, incisive poem is a wry commentary on the Jungian notion of God needing us to bring Him into the world:

“But I do believe. He knows that.

I talk to him as I drink coffee in the morning.

I give him angels.

When I wake in darkness, severed

from myself and from him,

‘he knows my terror.

He allows me to pray

him back into being.”

For me, the poem that presented an evocative mixture of mindfulness and wisdom was the title poem of Tolf’s book, “Prodigal.” It is a blend of imagery about ordinary landscapes of nature and human terror and extraordinary beauty that illuminates our intimate connection with all life:

“…They remind me how prodigal beauty is

Think of sunflower offering themselves

at the edges of freeways, never caring

if they’re prized.

Beauty seems the opposite to me of evil,

which weighs advantages expertly

and wastes nothing—

neither a mother’s terror, not a child’s trust,

nor the gold filings of the dead.

Beauty throws away acres

of pear blossom and burnished maple

season after season, never learning

to be prudent, yet saving my heart

again and again—

my stapled together heart

that refuses to remain open…”

Prodigal contains wonderful meditative poetry that illustrates hard-won wisdom emerging from an understanding of what it is to be a human living in the tension of a beautiful and savage world.

Francine Marie Tolf’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, and she has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board; Barbara Deming Memorial/Money for Women; the Loft Literary Center; and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She has an MA from Kansas State University and an MFA from the University of Minnesota.

Prodigal is available from www.pinyon-publishing.com or Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.