Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts

All Nature Writing Should be Like This - A Review

11:52 AM



There are beautiful books and there are important books. Winter: Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass, is both of these because through its beauty it tells us something important about how to interact with nature and then how to write about it. Profoundly moving, honest, and beautiful, it chronicles the journey into the interior of Bass’s discovery of himself in northeastern Montana’s Yaak valley. The mystery of the book is that it blends the author’s embrace of the landscape and the land’s actual physicality into a single voice. To say that the setting of the book is a character as well as the scene, is an understatement. At times it is difficult to tell if the story is about Bass or whether it is about a land exulting in and enduring winter. I’m curious about this dynamic, about the relationship between scene and writer. What makes a scene leap off a page and quicken the pulse of a reader? Does a writer come to so perfectly describe nature that nature itself lends its unspoken power to the page, or does the magic flow through the words from the reader’s own experience of the land? In other words, does the precision of the writer’s description move readers, or does the power of the author’s recollection and affection do so? In some ways this is splitting hairs. In other ways, it makes all the difference in the world. Could Rick Bass have described a picture or a video of the Yaak Valley in the same way that he could describe it after having lived there? I don’t think so.
Continue Reading

The God of Nature Poetry

12:03 AM

In graduate school I wrote a paper comparing the way several distinct cultural collections of poems approached the concept of the 'other' or the supernatural that is found in nature. This post is not a summary of that paper, but an affirmation that a poet's sense that there is something 'else' in nature is almost always right, but that the poet runs the risk of missing the whole point if he or she focuses only on the feelings that nature elicits. I'll quote a few of the poems that I cited in my paper:
Paiute Ghost Dance Song
              Snowy earth
comes
              swirling
    ahead
         of the whirlwind
              ahead
                             of the whirlwind
              snowy earth
                                       swirling
(this is a traditional song of the Paiute tribe that has been recorded as a poem)


Headwaters
Noon in the mountain plain:
There is a scant telling of the marsh –
A log, hollow and weather-stained,
An insect at the mouth, and moss –
Yet waters rise against the roots,
Stand brimming to the stalks. What moves?
What moves on this archaic force
Was wild and welling at the source.
(by N. Scott Momaday)

I could go on and on, but the point here is pretty clear - nature often catches us up and gives a sense that there is something other than ourselves. From these examples, it is a quick jump over to William Wordsworth, who codified the otherness of nature in his epic, "The Prelude" where he recounts times of physical illness and euphoria in response to his experiences in nature. All of these poets look at nature and sense something greater than and different from themselves. Where this gets interesting for me is that a common view of this experience is to say that religion has invariably sprung from a culture's association with nature. People and cultures, critics say, attempt to explain  the vastness of nature by creating myths telling how the nature around them came to be and how to live in harmony with it. The theory is that the cradle of all religions is a desire to connect with and find explanations for an overwhelming experience (often a terrifying one) in nature.

Continue Reading
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )
Powered by Blogger.