Creative Theft

The other night Andrew and I were talking on the phone, he'd had a good day, his energy was up and he asked me about what was going on with my poetry. (Not much because I am spending rather a big chunk of time taking care of him but...)

I told him I was entertaining an idea about The Dry Tortugas because I had heard an interview with a bird guy (Scott Weidensaul) taking about his book Return to Wild America and a trip he took to The Dry Tortugas (off the coast of Florida). It had for a long time one freshwater fountain in Fort Jefferson where weak storm battered migratory birds had learned to stop to drink, the only fresh water for many many miles. The fountain was destroyed by a hurricane in the late nineties but for a span of numerous generations of birds it was a haven.

Not being able to sleep that night, he stayed up late doing research and wrote this little piece. I particularly love the last line.

Dry Tortugas

A likely place to search for buried treasure...
or last respite for swindlers and their banks...
the 'floating world' of money, drugs and leisure
(first tortoise-slow, then yet so crazedly)
now slides, next claws, then burrows in her flanks.
The fortress, unremembered, echoes words
like 'sanctuary', 'prison', 'pardon', 'free'.
And 'Mercy!'...on the tongues of many birds.

The Nebraska Connection

So Jim Harrison has been doing promotion for his new book of poems In Search of Small Gods and I was listening to him and wondering if he has had a stroke. His speech seems slightly off kilter somehow.

(I am interested intensely in the course of strokes right at this moment because my partner in poetic crime here on Meander, Andrew, has had a moderate stroke himself recently.)

So off I went looking for some mention of that and instead I came up with this delightful and interesting review by Jim Harrison of Karl Shapiro’s book.

When I was reading the review I kept thinking the work of Shapiro’s that Harrison quotes sounds so much like the work of my cousin Bobby.

Having spaced out for a moment that the two wrote a still read Prosody handbook. Duh.

It is interesting to me that their work does sound so much alike. I don’t think Andrew’s and my work sounds alike at all, even though we do often use similar source material from Buddhist texts.

Harrison writes a great deal about birds and with my current bird obsession how can one not admire his? Of course he has been known to shoot them, unlike me.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Nebraska, but who knows… I may go birding there someday and run into Karl Shapiro’s unhappy ghost.