I haven’t been happy about the lack of visuals in my posts and tonight I’m going to do something about it. Below is a photo from a trip to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, where I saw a wonderful exhibit called “Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum.” (Hurry, New Yorkers, it ends November 16.) I learned about the four traditional Imperial styles of growing and training chrysanthemums. The photos shows the ozukuri (“thousand bloom”) style at the end of the post. All of the blooms belong to a single, central stem.
The patience and skill and slowness—“Slowness is beauty."
Keats said “Scenery is fine—but human nature is finer.” Still, Keats and Hopkins and Pound and Ashbery intensified the way I experience the natural world in an enduring and necessary way. I keep waiting for someone to do a real re-creation of nature in poetry. Our poems of human nature are abundant, but I’m always interested and bemused and admiring when I come upon the rare contemporary poem that attempt to grapple with nature, newly—to make that intensification again.
It could be a quixotic task—god knows there’s enough human nature, not to mention virtual nature and human nature, to keep us so distracted we never need to sniff a chrysanthemum again. And god knows there are enough dusty nature poems around to put anyone off. But the Botanical Garden was packed on Sunday—the primal tug has not gone away. There’s been a lot of buzz about “nature-deficit disorder,” the idea that children aren’t getting enough hands-on experience with the natural world and that certain areas of their brains aren’t developing because of it. Nature is a fraught, ripe subject, a frustrated love—poets, won’t you please get to work?
Trying to find some new nature poems I liked, I wandered over to gutcult—I think I was remembering editor Aaron McCollough’s book Welkin, which created a neo-primitive/stylized idiom for its poems of nature. The new issue of gutcult uses a nifty iPaper format that is easy to use and pretty to look at, but won’t allow me to cut and paste. So check out Jennifer Banks’s poems, which seemed to me to engage intensely with a decaying world (especially "Unearthed").
