WHERE THE WATERS TAKE YOU

When I returned from a trip out of state, tired and my mind devoid of any kind of poetic thought and found a new book of poetry from Pinyon Publishing in my mailbox, I felt an infusion of energy. Where the Waters Take You by Neil Harrison is that kind of infusion. He speaks to my condition with a voice of lucid tones, writing about the natural world and what his clear eyes see in that world.

However, he is at his best when he writes about childhood, drawing readers in from the beginning of Where the Waters Take You in “The Lost Child,” a simple but complex poem about “an entity of perpetual change,” the child who is eventually lost to the world, “still forming and forever adapting/[to]this eternally unfinished home.” In these lines, the reader gets his first glimpse of an underlying wisdom permeating three sections of absorbing verse.

After reading these powerful and unflinchingly honest poems, I surmised that Harrison is a solitaire and a “poet of place” settled in Nebraska. He acknowledges this sense of place in an amusing poem entitled “Already There.” We enter into this idea of regional verse through the lines “I think we all knew he was going somewhere,/the way he’d take off on his tricycle,/though it’s clear now he was already there./On that big red-and-white trike he’d tear/down the sidewalk as fast as he could pedal/and we knew one day he was going somewhere…on his roundabout way to New Orleans, where/he lived for a time, then faced death so well/we all still believed he was going somewhere./Though it’s clear now he was already there.” The poem reminds me of a friend from Alabama who was always riding her tricycle westward to California to “find herself” and ended up in the South writing nostalgically about The Road Home to Alabama. I also thought of Thomas Wolfe who began writing about his native North Carolina while he lived in Europe.

Harrison’s impassioned elegy about death, “Spring Burial in the Sandhills,” reveals how deeply he plunges, then emerges, bringing us a poignant message that deserves numerous readings: “A carnival helix of the great wild birds/spirals upward far to the west,/winged escort singing you/up from the season of planting and birth,/out of the cyclic skein of time, where/what we here consign to the earth/has already flowered.” 

Another favorite of mine is entitled “Addiction,” in which Harrison uses a bird as metaphor — it could stand as a statement for the current obsession with opioids: “Nothing quite so human as this/quest to get higher than ordinary/on whatever wings come to hand —/food, drink, sex, drugs, some/elusive degree of wealth or fame./Gambling on those hollow feathers/fastened with that ancient glue, the dream,/another hero almost touching the sun/begins to awaken, already engaged/in the all too common fall.” Again, we hear the poet’s voice simple, yet complex, profound, yet funny, speaking of human willfulness and the tragic consequences of addiction.

We watch with Harrison as the outdoorsman performs his evening watch in his native Nebraska in the end poem, “The Evening Watch,” where “down through the ages bison died…as the day winds down, in the fading light/the view of that broken ridge brings to mind/a painting of a man at prayer, long ago,/ three friends fast asleep nearby…and from the river bluffs to the horizon and on/the stacked bones watch with me.”  The poet is alone in a wild place at dusk, and he paints a picture as vivid as scenes depicted in Wilderness Essays by the naturalist John Muir, his “sudden plash into pure wildness — baptism in Nature’s warm heart…” Harrison’s poem speaks of his mystic communion with nature, enticing readers to view the loveliness and the mysteries of the natural world.

Neil Harrison has written several books about the natural world: In A River of Wind; Into the River Canyon at Dusk, and Back in the Animal Kingdom. He is a former instructor of English and Creative Writing at Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska, and at Northeast Community college in Norfolk Nebraska where he also coordinated the Visiting Writers Series. He now resides in Norfolk, and according to Pinyon Publishing, “makes diamond-willow walking sticks, wine from various wild fruits, and excursions to the local fields and streams with his third Deutsche Drahthaar, the Happy Dog.”

More kudos to Pinyon for publishing another banner poet. Available at Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

MEMORIES OF A CITY PAST...

This morning I thought of Marcel Proust and how the smell of madeleines and tea evoked memories of things past in the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past when I picked up a bar of sandalwood soap made by Appalachian Naturals that I had bought in Asheville, North Carolina — memories of visits to that wonderful mountain city flooded my mind. The soap was just one reminder of the many traditional techniques used in Appalachian families to craft homemade goods, and it opened a treasure box of memories about western North Carolina, one of my favorite places to play and to buy homemade soaps and jellies, original mountain art, and, of course, books.

As a book lover, I appreciate a bookstore that I consider the finest in the Appalachian area — Malaprop's Bookstore and Cafe in downtown Asheville. This hangout for poets and writers is touted as the best place to buy poetry in western North Carolina and has garnered many awards in the book selling field: 2000 Bookseller of the Year, Member of the Mountain Express Hall of Fame and other kudos that have brought visitors from throughout the country to its doors. The store features a cafe, a book club, weekly readings by area and national poets and writers, the best of southern literature, and welcomes all who have serious literary interests. We always spend at least an hour in Malaprop's when we visit Asheville during the spring and summer months while sojourning at Sewanee.

Not far away in Dupont State Recreational Forest, many scenes from The Hunger Games were shot in the dense forests and of rivers that course through this area, including beautiful falls like Bridal Veil Falls, High Falls, and Hooker Falls. Moviemakers also shot scenes in nearby Asheville, and visitors can now take advantage of a Hunger Games four-day itinerary, looping from Charlotte to Asheville, viewing film locations and sites mentioned in the novel by Suzanne Collins.

I always like to veer over to Hendersonville and Flatrock to the Flatrock Playhouse to see Broadway quality entertainment and to satisfy my envee for viewing authors' homes by visiting Connemara, the home of Carl Sandburg, American poet and historian. Sandburg spent the last 22 years of his writing life in the 10,000-book library of the home, while Mrs. Sandburg spent her days raising prize-winning goats. National Historic Site workers still keep a few goats in a barn on the property, sponsor daily tours, and sometimes stage summer productions in the amphitheater of Connemara.

I've visited the Thomas Wolfe memorial in Asheville at least four times and usually rent a room in the Renaissance Hotel overlooking the old yellow boarding home that housed Wolfe's mother's guests, sometimes getting up in the night to look down at it and envision the famous writer living there. I've written many poems about writers' residences, and Wolfe's residence always inspires a few verses. Here's one that appears in In A Convent Garden, my latest book of poetry from which I'll be reading on November 16 at A&E Gallery in New Iberia, Louisiana:

DIXIELAND AGAIN

Looking down at the yellow house,

I hope that some of Wolfe's poetry

will rise to my occasion,

drift through the dozen windows

fronting the walk,

but it is dark inside,

the only light that ever shone out

to the conflicted world

were the eyes in his massive head

bright as the yellow paint

on the house of his childhood,

the frame of his imagination.

Nine rocking chairs stand empty,

no audience on the gallery,

and his sleeping porch faces the street,
reminders of tormented nights

when he moved from room to room,

forced by his mother's commerce:

an old boarding house

I have toured four times.

Each time I want his ghost

to give me a stone, a leaf, a door,

symbols in the torrent of words

wafting up three chimneys

and down the long walk,

echoes of his stories

landing in empty places,

emptier than the one from which he sprang.

At midnight I again look down

at the orange glow of the porch light,

wondering why someone

placed the beacon there,

telling him he could come home again...

too late.

WRITER’S PILGRIMAGE

Each time we travel to Asheville, North Carolina, where the artistic life abounds, I feel as though I'm  on a writer’s pilgrimage because I inevitably end up visiting the homes of deceased writers. This week, I again stayed at a hotel next door to “The Old Kentucky Home,” the Asheville home in which American author Thomas Wolfe grew up. I toured it for the fourth time! During this tour, I learned more about the 1998 fire that destroyed much of the large yellow frame home that provided the characters and background for Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, and I purchased a video that showcased the six-year restoration, which cost $2.4 million dollars. Right now, the home needs a new coat of paint, and I put a small donation in a box reserved for the $35,000 needed to provide several coats of yellow paint.

Thomas Wolfe’s mother, Julia Wolfe, cashed in on the real estate boom of the early 1900’s in the “Land of the Sky,” as Asheville was then called and bought the sprawling yellow house, described as “Queen Anne architecture," in 1906. She left W.O. Wolfe, her husband, in his home on nearby Woodfin Street and took her youngest son, Tom, with her to the Old Kentucky Home on Spruce St. Thomas Wolfe disliked living in the home because Julia made it into a boarding house, eventually expanding it to include 18 sleeping rooms, and Wolfe had to move from room to room almost nightly to accommodate strangers who lodged at The Old Kentucky Home. Wolfe later described himself as a “vagabond since I was seven – with two roofs and no home.” He escaped the boarding house and Asheville to attend the University of North Carolina and under the tutelage of Edwin Greenlaw, an English professor at the university (actually my distant cousin), he began writing apace, later developing a passion for playwriting.

After attending Harvard, Wolfe taught a few years at New York University, then traveled to London where he wrote most of his bulky novel, Look Homeward Angel. After enraging the townspeople of Asheville with his thinly-disguised autobiographical novel that contained more than 200 local characters, he stayed away from Asheville for eight years until the furor died out, quipping that “You can’t go home again but there are other places and you can go there.”

On the same day as the visit to Wolfe’s boyhood home, we traveled south, arriving in Flat Rock, North Carolina to tour “Connemara,” the farm to which Carl Sandburg moved when he was 67. Carl Sandburg, poet, biographer, author of American folk tales, and collector of folk songs, completed more than one-third of his works while living at Connemara atop Glassy Mountain. He had moved there to find the seclusion necessary for writing, as well as to have ample pastureland for Mrs. Sandburg’s goat herd. At this writer’s retreat, Sandburg spent most of the night writing and slept late, but he ate dinner with his large family and recited from his writings at the dinner table, his youngest children restlessly enduring sonorous recitations for sometimes an hour.

Connemara was a large home filled with Sandburg’s library of 14,000 books and old periodicals (he subscribed to over fifty periodicals). The Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site has the distinction of being the first park to honor a poet. Connemara sits at the top of a 0.3 mile trail and climbs 100 feet – the height of a ten-story building – and I was winded when we finally reached the summit. Goats still inhabit the area and are relatives of Lilian Sandburg’s original herd. They are Toggenburgs, Saanens, and Nubians, and children who visit with their parents are allowed to make friends with them. At one time, Lilian Sandburg’s goats numbered over 200, and helpers milked 50-80 does twice a day. Mrs. Sandburg gained fame for her dairy goats and for her work improving the herd’s bloodlines and production of milk. Her goat milk and cheese were sold throughout North Carolina.

I was impressed with the video of an interview between Edward Murrow and Carl Sandburg and came away pondering Sandburg’s answer to the question: “What is the worst word in the English language?” Sandburg promptly replied: “Exclusive.” Sandburg’s answer reflects his life as a lecturer who deplored the exploitation of workers and child labor. He also received honors from the NAACP for coverage of the 1919 Chicago race riots and worked to achieve social justice, and garnered the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1940 and in Poetry in 1951.

The last night in Asheville ended on a real “hoop-la,” an event in a downtown Asheville park where hula hoopers, ages three to sixty, danced to T.O.U.C.H. Samadi, an electronic trance dance experience that is popular with those in a program called “Asheville Hoops.” Hoop dancing is touted as a way to exercise and relax emotionally, and the movement to electronic music supposedly transports the hula hoopers to a fourth level of consciousness. The young man in the foreground of Vickie Sullivan's video seemed to be a good example of one who had reached this level.