River of Play

North to NewPages.com

After a sustained three months of madness and abused endurance, we are finally (mostly) settled in  Fairbanks, AK. I am reminded of our extraordinary setting every morning as I head away from the Ray Mountains, push up the steep incline of the bike path to join up with the Johansen Freeway as it passes over the train depot, and look to see if I can spot the Alaska Range. On a clear day, I can see Denali. And that’s a good omen for us all.

I’m not sure where to begin. The excitement and rush around the job posting, interview, and offer negotiation? The six day drive up through Canada to the Alaska Highway and on to Fairbanks? The blow out about three hours into the trip? Or getting settled in with our boxes and boxes of stuff (no outright breakage but plenty of ding-n-dent)? As I said, hard to know. 

Right now, the girl’s asleep, Dana’s knitting, and I’m thinking about near-arctic living.

Near arctic? Yes. So an all-wheel-drive car with complete winterizing kit (sure, a block heater, but also a battery heater, and advice to get a thermal-rated extension cord). Long thinking jags about over-mittens and snowshoes, about uninsulated storage and about snow up to my shoulder.

And near to the end of the world. All the big department stores (and many others) around here do bush flight deliveries. Tourists zoom by packed in cruiser-weight buses from one scenic drive to the other. I’d guess they’re doing a loop from, say, Homer along the Wrangell-St. Elias mountains, across the eastern edge or the Alaska range, up to Fairbanks, and then back down through the Alaska range, past Denali, and down to Anchorage. I assume they’re hoping to see caribou (done it), moose (seen many), bison (somehow larger and shaggier up here), bears (yes to both black and grizzly), and other charismatic fauna.

I’ll be honest: I don’t blame them. 

There’s more to say, of course, but I’ll end this brief post with a note about something that surprised me: smell. The air smells different. Almost like incense. More balsam than pine, more dry than the leaf mold smell of eastern forests. Definitely worth the drive.

Ah, and I missed something when I drove up here: I had an interview on NewPages.com. Go read it!

 

Turn of the Seasons

The last two months have been moving too fast for me to keep any sort of posting up to date. During the first week of April, the University of Alaska Press posted a job listing for a new acquisitions editor. I was encouraged by friends, colleagues, and mentors to apply--the job certainly sounded good to me--so pulled my resume and application letter together and entered the market. 

A week after the job closed, I got a call to schedule an interview. The next week.

After a harried weekend studying the U of Alaska Press, I interviewed. I thought it went pretty well, and  week later I got an email asking to schedule a call to talk about the job.

By the end of the week, we had reached a deal. I think that was the sixth of May. We decided that June 13 would be a good start date, so we've been running around like possessed people trying to extract ourselves from Lincoln and find a way to insert ourselves into Fairbanks, AK. We've been 
busy lining up housing, and I've been training my replacement at the magazine.

A week from today, I roll out of Lincoln and head north through the Dakotas before tacking northwest across Canada and on into Alaska.

We're looking forward to learning about this new, and very different, landscape. And... Well, just about everything. We'd be more excited if we weren't so frantic.

And right now, I should head home and keep packing.

And Back Again

The trip to U of Northern Iowa was uncomfortable, but only as far as the driving was concerned. Rain mixed with snow. Thunderstorms. Wind hammering the car with 30 mph bursts of entirely unnecessary energy. My time with Jeremy Schraffenberger and his students (and, later, the family) was a treat.

They had been reading ecopoets and ecocritical articles the entire semester and engaging the idea of ecopoetry. They had also read my ecopoetry manifesto. The conversation we had was wide-ranging and exciting, but at some level it felt very odd to me. Who was this Engelhardt we were all talking about? Did he really write these things? Can we extend his argument? And, if so, why were they all looking at me?

Great students. It seems clear that UNI is doing a fine job attracting engaged, dedicated students. And if any of them of bouncing over to this post: hello!

I'll add a picture of the building in which we all huddled into a corner to talk about the outside world (though we had a bright green young pine tree outside one window that we used as an object lesson the entire evening).

Jeremy and I went for a very tasty dinner in the short length of Main Street that houses a cluster of neat shops, good coffee, and a clutch of good restaurants. We talked poetry, poetics, university politics, children, and on and on well into the night. If you're ever in the Cedar Falls area, look the man up.

The next morning, I rolled out of town, battled the elements, and prepped for Saturday's game day at the house. (Which games? Thanks for asking! Furstefeld, The Hobbit, and Municipium.) Later today, there's a poetry reading at the main Lincoln library. Busy weekend. And I'm still feeling good.

 

On the Road Again

I head out day after tomorrow to talk ecopoetics with my friend Jeremy Schraffenberger and his grad students ( doesn't Engelhardt & Schraffenberger sound like a German confectioner?). The weather will be classicly spring-like: chance of rain, mid-50s. As long as the rain is sporadic, it's not bad for driving. Lots of chances for roadside animal spotting. I expect to see at least one eagle.

My new poetry project is aggressively ecopoetic, so the visit should offer a great opportunity to bounce ideas around. I'm continuing to struggle with the continuum between avant-gardistes, post-avantistes, and the quiet smugness of mainstream poets--whatever the hell we mean when we put "main-stream" and "poets" together. I'm deeply interested in the making of the poem--hence the -poetics--but I find myself bristling when I'm told what I should be doing to be interesting. I especially don't like being dismissed as, essentially, 'uncool.' I mention that because I generally feel, when I visit other blogs and commentators, that my interests are not valued. I don't think I can go further than to simply articulate my impression. All the rest is strawmen and bitterness.

So I think the more useful direction to go is to reverse Hawk & Handsaw's subtitle. I've been thinking a lot about what sustains creativity. The bedrock answer is, as it is for all sustainability projects, energy. Energy, for my writing, comes from the land I'm in, the animals and other life I share the land with, and culture. All of these things add language, the material I work with, they direct my attention beyond the bony shell of my own, limited skull, and they excite the chemical-electrical wilderness of my brain. Plus, a bit of focus.

I enjoy--and appreciate--the shiny frontiers of the avants. At its best, the energy there is expansive, deep, and inclusive. There's certainly less self-righteousness about carbon neutrality. Every so often, I wish I would spend more time in (formerly) smoky bars and coffee shops, talking late into the night about the best, newest thing. But then I head out across the land and find out that I regret nothing.

 

Back Again, Again

Back down the hill from Denver...and slowly getting back to this blog. 

The Hawk & Handsaw/Terrain.org reading was great. I kept running into people from the reading all weekend, and that made me feel like I was part of something different. A tribe, a clan, a small group of like-minded people. People I could resonate with. And resonance is just so relaxing, no?

Touching Down

Which has nothing to do with the recently begun football season, though that brings a lot of red-clad folk from across the state to our small city. And it's always interesting to see the rural folk respond to life in the city, though Lincoln isn't nearly as touristy a town as the ones D and I grew up in. 

I'll use that to segue to our Marietta, OH trip. Many relatives from both sides in one spot cooing over baby clothes. W received a few useful devices and some puzzling tchotchkes as well as a hundreds of diapers. I got a chance to talk to pretty much everyone for at least a sentence or two, so that was good. 

I came home to an email from the KNOCK magazine Ecolit competition people. It seems that I'm one of the winners of that contest. So that was a happy thing. Poem out in their November issue.

And I came across some fine, fine sites on the web to keep yourself thinking about ecologies that don't involve the intricate connections between financial institutions. 

Whorled Leaves

EcoArtTech

Ecology Without Nature

And after our travels across the sky, D and I have vowed to spend more time shopping for train tickets. How about you? Discuss. I'll be back later to check on your work.

On and On

We're heading out on our trek to Ohio. Lots of family we haven't seen in years, lots of hills and trees, lots of temperatures much higher than we've had here recently. 

I'm heading out in just a minute for the Autumn Poetry Mailing. And when I get back: the final steps on the Schooner budget. Aaaaaaarrrghh...

But I'll be happy to see all y'all again. In the meantime, I'll be reading Winter 2008. Proofs. And then Spring 09 starts in two weeks. 

Travel Update, Now with Pictures!

We're going to start with the campsite. Caribou. Soon, snow will start falling.

After mother and calf, D and I headed out to the canyon itself.

Somehow, D became the photographer of record. Especially of snow in the canyon.

We did manage to convince a nice passing stranger to make an image.

First, a stop at Four Corners. I mean, why not?

And then we're off to Mesa Verde.

A nice view of the first Anasazi structure we toured.

And, of course, the Ladder of Doom. D went up it like a monkey even though terrified and three months pregnant.

To round things out, some scenes from the tiny two-lane roads we rode across Colorado.

The Call of the Caribou

D and I are back, back, back from our trek. She heads out tomorrow to deliver the vehicle to its new owner. I would warn the owner that it needs front end work and that almost all of the keys are missing, but they do get a nice fimo figure, a couple of things made of fleece, a dusty beach towel, and chains for the tires.

The trip was smooth. We stopped in Kingman, AZ (Home of...not much) before heading up into Grand Canyon National Park. That is, we took I-40 out of California (it goes all the way to the NC coast) and then went up 64 to the Park. Caribou were grazing our campsite when we drove in, and this was a fairly large and built up tenting campsite with restrooms and everything. Caribou. And then it snowed as we were putting up the tent. And it snowed throughout the day. The Park was...interesting. Many, many tourists from all over the world. Lots of ill-considered behavior (many deaths attributable to heat stroke/exhaustion, falls, etc.). But we did see condors, bluebirds, ravens, tufted squirrels...The Park does not focus so much at what's close at hand and the site ends up feeling more like a summer camp than a wilderness. 

And on, and up!, to Mesa Verde. Not snow for camping, but frosty nights. The experience of this Park was entirely different. The institutional focus is on archeology and research, and visitors had to commit to vigorous activity to get to most (but not all) of the sites. One particularly interesting aspect of the research is reconstructing how the humans interacted with their environment, so guides to wildlife and local plants were more available. The history or archeology was also up for discussion.

Between the parks, we drove through the Navajo Reservation, past the Hopi, and through the Ute Reservation. This route took us through the Painted Desert and Monument Valley. And through absolutely crushing poverty. This is inhospitable land at best. The drive was breathtaking for both beauty and horror.

Take a moment to breathe. 

OK. We had planned to go up to Boulder, but after yet another night in the 30s, which we were not prepared for (the weather service got surprised by just how low those lows were), we decided to just pull a long day in the car and head for home. This included coffee at Pagosa Springs and a lunch stop at 10,000 feet. And on through the day, past Denver and back down to Lincoln.

Yes, there are pictures. Yes, I will post some. But first we've got to get our feet back under us.   

Notes on a Color

I was in a meeting not to long ago when a colleague mentioned his disgust (from an ecocritical standpoint) with all this "greening" going on.

But wait, I thought, isn't this what we're hoping for?

And then I went to Manhattan, KS and watched tv in my hotel room. Oy.

"Greenwashing" I've heard it called, this veneer of care. The message seems to be-- hell, the only message is consumerism. A lifestyle of absurd consumption--let me emphasize this--will never be green (though that term is rapidly losing meaning). The first step, always, is reduce. Then, reuse. Lastly, when the usefulness has been wrung out, recycle.

Here's HGTV's Green Home Giveaway in Tradition, Hilton Head, SC. Note the size of the house. Note that though it's on an island, you can't open the house to cross breezes; instead, there's a super-efficient AC. It raises high the question: can you have a satisfying, fulfilling standard of living without having a lifestyle that will render the planet inhospitable for future generations of humans? I think we can, but I don't think HGTV's got it.