Author: Sara Puotinen

may 12/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
70 degrees

Took Delia the dog on a walk to the river. So much green everywhere. Birds, blue sky, soft breeze. Everything out of focus. Walked above the winchell trail and the ravine. Made note of the angle of the leaning tree on the wooden fence. Couldn’t see anything below through the thick leaves. Encountered 2 women with coffees deliberating whether or not to descend the old stone steps. Let’s go further and take the road down. I took the steps down to the trail that leads to the river. The river was blue and sparkling with small waves lapping the shore. A boat must have just come through — I didn’t see it. I wish I could have stayed there for longer but Delia wanted to keep moving. Returned to steps and waited for someone descending. At the bottom, they turned around and walked back up. Did they change their mind, or were they doing a stair workout?

For the rest of the walk Delia was difficult. Refusing to go in certain directions, wanting to stop and pee near every tree, slowing down right in front of me. I want to forget my irritation and remember what a beautiful morning it was, how the river looked, how the air felt. Breathing it in, a sense of calm and euphoria enveloped me.

before the run

Yesterday I came across this call for submissions:

What does it mean to be a poet engaged with the physical material of the world around us? How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? How do we write collaboratively with—rather than about—nonhuman beings and ecologies?

For the Fall 2025 issue, Arc is seeking experimental eco-poetry that engages with the possibilities of organic form. We welcome experiments with lyric, visual poetics, material poetries, and sound poetries.

I want to spend today (at least) exploring what this might mean for my writing around/beside/within the gorge. And, if I can manage it, I’d like to find another home for some of my favorite lines: it begins here, from the ground up: feet first, following. I started to write, finally find a home, but then I remembered that I’ve actually used the line in a poem that was published earlier this year: Girl Ghost Gorge

My organic form is based on breathing and foot strikes: 1 2 3 breathe in/ 1 2 breathe out. Is this experimental enough?

How do write collaboratively with the nonhuman? Does my form, based on foot strikes, impose an order on the nonhuman? Does it offer a way outside of myself and into somewhere else?

How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? I’m thinking about water and stone and wondering how they inform my poetry about the gorge.

during the run

I tried to think about my form as I walked. Mostly, it’s easier for me to think about the words/content than about form and shapes of the words. I wondered about absence and the gorge as eroding/eroded and how that affects the page. An blank space that is not empty but open. Yes, can I push at the idea more?

after the run

I think some inspiration would help in thinking through how form can be inspired by place. Time to revisit Susan Tichy and her collection North | Rock | Edge.

distills somatic observations down their bones. Tichy describes an immersive, granular experience exploring the contours, rocks, winds, and waters of Shetland, a remote northern archipelago between Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Norway. In isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks, she details the distances and resonances between geology and language, minutely mutable coastscapes, and how to write and walk in a time of planetary change.

distills / somatic / immersive / granular
contours / rocks / winds / waters
isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks

In the interview, Tracy Zeman suggests:

The islands’ bays, rugged edges, and jagged protrusions correlate with the way the poems look on the page, a varied right margin, short lines, and a proliferation of line breaks. There are few stopping points in the poems, no periods, and sparse punctuation generally, so that pacing and rhythm are made with line, as if the reader is part of one continuous yet staggered experience.

In my poems about the gorge, I’m less interested in having the words look like the place, but I like the idea of the few stopping points, lack of punctuation and a poem that is part of a continuous experience. Maybe a mostly continuous experience with a few pauses?

There are rhythms to walking on rough ground, a step-after-step persistence that swallows obstacles, like irregular lines that nonetheless carry forward through the poem. There’s also a sensory excitement in a sea-rock-light-wind-bird-flower-seal-seep-peat-rain-salt—oh look, there’s a whale!—environment that subsumes attention to any one thing into the press of the whole.

I like this idea of the sensory excitement that doesn’t subsume attention to any one thing, even as there is one thing: the gorge as gap, gash, bowl.

Tracy Zeman: you also eschew the “I.” I feel that the lack of “I” allows the reader to experience the place as the poem’s speaker does, and that the landscape stays primary and the human secondary in the action. Can you explain why you made this choice and what effect you hoped it would have on the reader’s experience of the text?

Susan Tichy: To me, the poems feel so intensely somatic and personal that the grammatical sign felt unnecessary. Here and there, I drafted other people’s words to express the sensation more directly, such as Robert Macfarlane’s thought diffusing /at body’s edge in “Eshaness | Is It Force Failure.”

Where do I/the poet fit into my poems? I wrote in Plague Notebook, no. 25: To be with the gorge, to witness/behold it, demands participation not observation. It is intimate — contact, meeting, interfacing — and transforms you. You transform it (the gorge world), too.

I feel like this poem that read today on Poetry Daily (poems.com) speaks to and against that:

Captivity/ Siddhartha Menon

it is impossible
to kill and question at the same time.
—Louise Glück, “Liberation”

Or to watch and at the same time
to capture.
A restive robin in your path
flew onto a low cable
and you had to choose between
binoculars and camera. You knew
it would not stay for both.
So near: a killing
to capture it forever here.
Only to watch is a kind of questioning.
You are paralyzed.

captivate = to hold something’s attention
captivated = rapt, enthralled, cannot look or turn away

may 11/RUN

4.3 miles
ford overlook
63 degrees

Ran earlier today, which helped. The first half was windy. Windy enough that I needed to take my cap off on the ford bridge. Sunny. A mental victory: thought about stopping on the bridge but then just kept going. Made it through the hard moment. The second half of the run, I felt stronger, everything was easier.

I don’t remember noticing the river sparkling, but I did see scales on its surface as I ran west on the bridge. No rowers, no roller skiers, only a few bikers. One small pack of shirtless runners.

Ran up the steep hill that starts under the ford bridge and ends in Wabun park. At the top, I stopped at the fence and looked down at the dam. I studied the tall grass pushing up against the fence. I thought about fences for a moment, how many I encounter while I run by the gorge, some maintained, some abandoned, many damaged by leaning trees or critters or hikers. Wooden, chainlink, iron, stone. Noticed another fence at the ford overlook: chainlink.

Listened to the wind and birds until I reached the ford overlook, then I put in my “Wheeling Life” playlist. Started with “Windmills of Your Mind,” ended with “Watching the Wheels.” Thought about FWA and how he might appreciate John Lennon’s song.

Speaking of playlists, I forgot to mention this in my entry 2 days ago. Listening to my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist and Cream’s “White Room” came on. I wanted to remember this description of eyes:

Silver horses, ran down moonbeams
In your dark eyes

Is this a gleam? Or is she crying?

suburban lawns

I’m still thinking about grass. If I were to make a list of grassy things, which I should and will, the suburban lawn would be on it. I’ve thought about it before, imagining my version of Lorine Niedecker’s growing in green (from her poem, “Paean to Place,”) as the lawn and the patches of green that grow on the edge between suburbs and the few remaining farms they haven’t yet consumed. That was my childhood. Here’s a poem I found this morning to add to the image of the lawn:

Observation/ Nicholas Friedman

In the wilds of our suburban lawn,
the natural world inclines to fable:
Gray squirrels, unperturbed by rain,
jockey for position at what our landlord
speaks of, nominally, as the bird feeder.
Below, dark-eyed juncos peck at fallen millet,
masked like hangmen from another time.
The great, unwritten order of it all
scrambles when Max, our landlord’s aging chow,
starts loping toward the scene. This is his work,
so in a sense, he’s adding order, too.

One squirrel has shifted to a fencepost
where it twitches its tail and rearranges
in quarter turns like a guard. In total, there’s
more movement than the eye can account for,
all of it framed in the window’s tic-tac-toe.
The glass weeps condensation. It’s early, but
already the dog has slumped down for a nap.
There’s plenty of time to lumber after thoughts
that rise and disperse, dark-feathered things
returning when I manage to be still.

may 10/WALK

60 minutes
winchell trail
63 degrees

A near perfect morning. Wow! Sunny with a slight breeze. Blue sky. Quiet. A slow walk with lots of stops for Delia. We walked to the winchell trail and took the worn, wooden steps down to the oak savanna, then another set of wooden steps up to an overlook. So much green everywhere — new trees popping up, tufts of grass, moss. We walked behind the mesa along the abandoned chainlink fence and I marveled at the bright green moss. At one point, I bent down and touched it — almost like carpet, but better.

10 Things

  1. the odd curve of the abandoned chainlink fence on the dirt trail behind the mesa
  2. that same fence, buried deep in the dirt and leaves, only the top was visible
  3. rowers! not seen, only heard — the coxswain calling out instructions
  4. a speed boat moving fast near the opposite shore
  5. tall grass in clumps and tufts and patches
  6. someone sitting by a tree stump, hidden in the green until they were right in front of me
  7. the clicking and scraping of a roller ski’s poles
  8. two runners, running by single-file, talking about a video game
  9. a big bird flying high in the sky
  10. on the boulevard between the river road and edmund, the grass was uneven and bare in many spots, studded with dandelions in others

The moment of the walk was when I stopped to let Delia sniff — more like she demanded to stop — and I stood on the edge of the bluff looking out at the blue water and feeling the soft, cool breeze. All around bright green leaves were fluttering. Below, the river surface was glittering. The movement was mesmerizing, meditative.

Against Lawn/ Grace Bauer

The midnight streetlight illuminating
the white of clover assures me

I am right not to manicure
my patch of grass into a dull

carpet of uniform green, but
to allow whatever will to take over.

Somewhere in that lace lies luck,
though I may never swoop down

to find it. Three, too, is
an auspicious number. And this seeing

a reminder to avoid too much taming
of what, even here, wants to be wild.

manicure – patch – carpet – uniform Great words to describe an over-managed lawn. Last night Scott and I were talking about lawns and the moral imperative to maintain your lawn to a certain standard. That is not the case as much in our neighborhood. Most people’s yards don’t have manicured grass. Partly because we live in a quirky neighborhood in the city, and partly because we’re near the river and people know that lawn chemicals get into the groundwater and then travel through the sewer to the river. I mentioned to Scott that I don’t judge people if their lawn isn’t manicured, I judge them if it is because it can only be that way if they’re treating it with chemicals — and if they’re not using chemicals, they’re still wasting water on their laws. But, I don’t want to judge anyone, so I’m trying to work on that.

Somewhere in that lace lies luck. . . What a great line!

a reminder to avoid too much taming
of what, even here, wants to be wild.

I’m always returning to this question of what it means to be wild and where the gorge fits into that. In the spring, when left alone, the small patches of grass on the bluff want to be wild. Tall blades and dandelions and little trees everywhere. Unruly, sometimes almost menacing as they creep closer to the trail, blocking out the view. Not wild, but re-wilding.

may 9/RUN

5.2 miles
franklin loop
67 degrees

Felt like summer today. Hot! A common refrain: I need to get up earlier and get out there before it gets too warm! Difficult. I can tell that the 2+ week break got me out of cardio shape. My heart rate got higher faster. I’m sure the heat had something to do with it too. After a mile, I decided to switch from 9/1 to walking every time my heart rate went above 170, then running again when it went down to 135. A did a lot of walking.

At first, I listened to the traffic and the kids at the church daycare and my feet, but after a few miles, I put in my shadows playlist — if I could find the shadows on the path, I’d find them in the music!

From the Franklin bridge the river was beautiful — so many sparkles. I noticed a few sandbars just below the surface. No rowers. They were probably here earlier in the morning — another reason to get up and run early!

I smelled the flowers — a hint of Big Red cinnamon gum. Heard the birds and construction trucks backing up. Gave attention to the grass, filled with clover and dandelions. At the end, nearing the corner of my block, I watched the shadows of leaves dancing on the grass and dirt — a big patch that was more dirt than grass. Ants? We have several of those in our backyard.

As I looked at the grass and thought about the blade and the sheath, I remembered/realized something: I can’t really see individual grass. Not enough cone cells for that. I write really because I can sometimes see an individual leaf, but just barely, and more the idea that there’s a blade, but definitely not the sheath.

I forgot to post this earlier: I stopped at the sliding bench, noticed how much green there was, and decided to take a picture in order to compare it to a pre-green picture:

sliding bench / may 2025
the back of a wooden bench, all around it a faint trace of snow and bare branches
sliding bench / dec 2024

grass roots and astroturfing

Looking through my Plague Notebook, Vol 25 notes from yesterday, I saw this: grass roots — origins of the phrase. So, I looked it up and found this on wikipedia:

A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or continent movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from volunteers at the local level to implement change at the local, regional, national, or international levels. Grassroots movements are associated with bottom-up, rather than top-down decision-making, and are sometimes considered more natural or spontaneous than more traditional power structures.
*
The earliest origins of “grass roots” as a political metaphor are obscure. In the United States, an early use of the phrase “grassroots and boots” was thought to have been coined by Senator Albert Jeremiah Beveridge of Indiana, who said of the Progressive Party in 1912, “This party has come from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of people’s hard necessities”.

In the entry, it also mentioned astroturfing, which is an organization that presents itself as grassroots, but is really lead by an outside organization/corporation.

Astroturf — I wanted to find the origins of this term:

The synthetic grass product that eventually became known as AstroTurf® was originally designed as an urban playing surface meant to replace the concrete and brick that covered the recreation areas in city schoolyards. During the Korean War, the U.S. Army had found urban recruits to be less physically fit than rural recruits. Attributing this to lack of green space in cities, the Ford Foundation funded research for Monsanto to create a synthetic grass replica in 1962. It had to be wear-resistant, cost efficient, comfortably cushioned, and traction tested. Two years later employees of the Chemstrand Company, a subsidiary of Monsanto Industries, developed a synthetic surface called ChemGrass and installed it at the Moses Brown School, a private educational facility in Providence, Rhode Island.

Astroturf: The Story Behind the Product

What is the Grass?/ Mark Doty

On the margin
in the used text
I’ve purchased without opening

—pale green dutiful vessel—

some unconvinced student has written,
in a clear, looping hand,
Isn’t it grass?

How could I answer the child?
I do not exaggerate,
I think of her question for years.

And while first I imagine her the very type
of the incurious, revealing the difference
between a mind at rest and one that cannot,

later I come to imagine that she
had faith in language,
that was the difference: she believed

that the word settled things,
the matter need not be looked into again.

And he who’d written his book over and over, nearly ruining it,
so enchanted by what had first compelled him
—for him the word settled nothing at all.

I’m with Whitman. How boring it would be if the word settled everything!

may 8/BIKE

8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
60 degrees

The first outdoor bike ride of the year. I’m always nervous, not knowing how it will go. Can I still see enough to bike? Will it be too scary? Yes, I can see! No, I wasn’t scared! I was a bit disoriented with all of the dappled light and I had to take some deep breaths a few times, but it went well. It’s a combination of: a memorized path — all of the cracks and bumps and tricky spots from years of biking; a familiarity and acceptance of not knowing or seeing everything; a few still-working cone cells and the ability to compensate with peripheral vision and other senses; and a belief that I can bike. Oh — and biking a little slower.

The lake was beautiful. I can’t wait to swim across it in a month. I signed up for open swim yesterday — signed FWA and RJP up too. Summer is almost here.

7 Grassy Things

  1. there’s a certain stretch of grass on the bike trail that separates it from the road and helps me to see where to go — I need because the gray of the trail can blend in with the gray of the road
  2. had to bike through the grass when I turned off the trail too early — I remembered biking through this grass with FWA 2 summers ago
  3. an open field between the duck and echo bridges — a beautiful green studded with bright yellow dandelions
  4. someone spread out a blanket and is sitting in that grass — how buggy is it?
  5. what a bright blue sky! a great contrast with the green trees and grass
  6. shadows of new leaves waving in the wind on the grass near lake nokomis
  7. a bright yellow trailer and half a dozen cars parked on the grassy hill between lake hiawatha and lake nokomis — they’re redoing the path and (I had to look it up) adding a pedestrian bridge: “A new pedestrian bridge over Minnehaha Creek next to Lake Hiawatha is scheduled to be installed May. The bridge will be delivered in pieces, assembled onsite and then set in place with a crane.”

Other things: someone listening to a song on their phone as they walked — a new one from Lorde?; the bog near my favorite part of the path was completely dry; a sign, loose gravel — thankfully there wasn’t any; bird shadows on the path; lots of people walking around the lake

a grounding, a frame, a context

I mentioned in my entry for 7 may that I would post a quotation from Jenny Odell about context here:

I think a really interesting mental exercise to do with anything or anyone is to think about whether they have been afforded experience, the ability to experience, which means like having a past and a future. So one of the most fascinating things that I came across in researching the book, that I talk about somewhere in the middle of the book, is a study about the lesser minds bias. It’s not something you would immediately think has to do with time, but it’s a bias that other people, especially people in out-groups—so people you don’t identify with—don’t have as rich of an emotional inner life as you do. And so in this study that I referenced, the people running the study ask the participants to think about houseless people and show that the part of their mind that has to do with theory of mind, and imagining that someone has an inner life, is not lighting up when they’re thinking about these people. And then they ask them the question, what kind of vegetable do you think they would like, this person? Just imagine that and then suddenly it is lighting up, right? And my interpretation of that in the book was, well, someone who wants something and has desire must have a past and must have hopes for the future. For something to have desire, it has to exist in time. And so it’s almost like—that participant who’s thinking about them—it’s almost like this person has entered a time with them. Like this person is now also an actor. This person has wants and needs and regrets. And I think that kind of flipping is a really helpful and interesting way to think about why we do or don’t afford that to, you know, the nonhuman world, and also many groups within the human world—like out-groups, as they were talking about in the study. And it is that relegating of part of life to the realm of the timeless—like it might be cyclical, but it’s considered timeless—that is so much at the root of the logic of extracting it. It’s lifeless. But it’s the same mechanism that’s behind dehumanizing someone, because you’re seeing a person as almost like an instance. To go back to people without housing, it’s interesting that people don’t think about how someone might go in and out of housing within their life. You know, what led to that? What might be in their future? They’re just sort of seen as they’re just there. And so I think that’s an example of what happens when you take something out of time, or it doesn’t seem to inhabit time in the same way you do.

Another Kind of Time/ Jenny Odell

As I write this, I’m listening (by pure accident) to the Rolling Stones, “Time is on my side” and now I’m thinking about returning to time. Reviewing past entries for 2025, it seems like I’m all over the place. Maybe, but I’m also orbiting around a cluster of ideas related to the gorge and my larger poem, or series of poems, about haunting the gorge. At some point, something will stick and I’ll stop to write, but for now I’ll keep moving and circling ideas.

is a really helpful and interesting way to think about why we do or don’t afford that to, you know, the nonhuman world

What is desire to the grass? And, what is the grass as a subject? One blade/leaf? A lawn? A clump in a sea of dirt? I suddenly thought about the smell of freshly cut grass, a frequent scent in May. As a kid, it was one of my favorite smells, then I read or heard somewhere that it was the grass crying or bleeding, and I stopped liking it. I decided to look it up and found a PBS segment, That Fresh Cut Grass Scent is Really a Signal of Distress. But, according to PBS, the grass isn’t crying, it’s communicating, sending out a message to other plants, or other parts of themselves, to be prepared for trouble.

The idea that the grass is crying, or screaming, still abounds. Here’s the opening line from an article for Lawnstarter, a lawn care company:

Inhale deeply. That heavenly fresh-cut grass smell you savor while mowing your back 40 is actually your lawn screaming in pain from the hell of a hurtful haircut.

Fresh cut grass is your lawn’s shriek of despair, science says

Science (not scientists, or a scientific study), says? Wow. Anyway, I’m struck by how the idea that grass is communicating (the PBS clip) offers more agency to the grass than depicting them as shrieking or screaming in despair (the article). The article offers some of the science, then moves onto a discussion of why we might like the smell of freshly mown grass and then gives examples of how that love is depicted in song.

I wrote in my Plague Notebook, vol. 25, what is the root system for grass. Looked it up and found this helpful resource: How does Grass Grow?

Grass typically has a fibrous root system, characterized by a dense network of fine, thread-like roots that spread outward and downward.

Fibrous? I posted something a poet said about being fibrous a year or so ago. Can I find it again? No. It had something to do with someone thinking of themselves as made up of fibers, of their idea of the self as fibrous? I wish I could remember!

One last thing: Over the past weeks, I’ve encountered references to Dads and their obsessions with the lawn, how lawn maintenance is gendered male. I found this interesting site when I searched “gender lawn” from Lady Science: Liberate Your Lawn from the Legacy of Masculine Science.

In Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth T. Jackson shows that the American Neighbor’s attachment to his lawn, since its takeover of the suburban consciousness after the Second World War, is the result of the affluence and financial security that the lawn represents. The lawn is a simple status symbol that signals to the little-n neighbors that The Neighbor has achieved a level of economic comfort that affords him both the money to pay his exorbitant water bill and the free time to mow thrice weekly in the summer. I think, however, if we want to break the American Neighbor of the lawn — and we should, because it’s not good for the environment that 2 percent of the land in the U.S is taken up by monocultural swathes of ornamental grass — we might consider that the lure of the lawn is deeper.

Hmm. . . this crabgrass book looks interesting.

may 7/RUN

4 miles
trestle+ turn around
59 degrees

Today I tried the walk/run method: 9 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking. As usual, I followed this method approximately. Run 9:30/Walk 1:30, 8:30/1 — I can’t remember after that. It was good. It’s still difficult, but I’m pushing through more. I greeted 2 regulars! Dave, the Daily Walker and Daddy Long Legs. I noticed how green the floodplain forest was, only the narrowest sliver of river to see. And the view from the sliding bench? Green green green. If someone was walking below, would I even be able to see them? Ran on the grass and the dirt a lot. Thought about taking the short dirt trail that cuts behind a tree nearing the trestle, but didn’t. Next time? Admired someone’s raspberry red running shoes. I used to have shoes that color. Now they’re boring dark gray/almost black.

Ran through gnats. Most of them went in my eye, one in my throat. Also ran through cottonwood, or some white flowery thing that I thought of as cottonwood fuzz. Usually the cottonwood arrives at the beginning of June, so maybe it was something else?

No rowers, no roller skiers, no turkeys or geese or bird shadows. One fat tire. One little kid. Several runners and walkers and cars.

I don’t remember what I heard for the first half of the run, but for the second half, I listened to my windy playlist (it was windy out there!).

edges / middles / context

I started the morning thinking about surfaces and the places where things meet and textures and skin and feet. And then I remembered Emily Dickinson’s love of the circumference and the wonderful site, out of Dartmouth, all about ED in 1862. It has a blog post on ED and circumference.

I was excited to read this bit:

Laura Gribbin argues that Dickinson’s conception of Circumference rejects Emersonian expansion, revises the patriarchal conceptions of the (male) poet’s encompassing consciousness, and resists being taken over by an outside power. It does so by calling attention to “the circle’s necessary boundary or perimeter without which it has neither shape nor meaning.” In Gribbin’s reading,

“Circumference marks the borderline of symbolic and linguistic order.
This border is a highly charged point of convergence where oppositions are collapsed, boundaries are explored, and meaning originates. Circumference is also the space within a circle where life is lived, pain is felt, and death is observed.”

In what amounts to a powerful critique of Romanticism, Dickinson stands not at the center but on the periphery, at the outer limits of knowledge and language, replacing, as Gribbin notes,

“the Romantic impulse toward transcendence with an alternative concept of knowledge gained within the limits of experience.”

Instead of the Emersonian emphasis on sight and specularity, Dickinson emphasizes touch and what can be felt. Because

“Circumference delineates that region where the imagination comes into play, [it] is thus the source of poetry itself.”

White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862, a Weekly Blog

While reading my “on this day” posts yesterday, I encountered a discussion of middles from 6 may 2023. It’s in the middle of my summarizing of Mary Ruefle’s essay “On Beginnings”:

It’s about beginnings and how there are more beginnings in poetry than endings. The first note I jotted down in my Plague Notebook, Vol 16 was about the semicolon, which is a punctuation mark that I particularly like. Ruefle has just introduced an idea from Ezra Pound that each of us speaks only one sentence that begins when we’re born and ends when we die. When Ruefle tells this idea to another poet he responds, “That’s a lot of semicolons!” Ruefle agrees and then writes this:

the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry) you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being–an Italian as a matter of fact–that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes unrelated.

then adds: a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, and this:

Between the first and last lines there exists–a poem–and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other.

At some point as I read, I suddenly thought of middles. The in-betweens, after the beginning, before the end. How much attention do these get, especially if we jump right in and start with them. It reminds me of a writing prompt/experiment I came up with for my running log: Write a poem about something that happened during the middle of your run–not at the beginning or the end, but the middle (see 27 nov 2019). 

the MIDDLE

mid-motion
mid-walk, mid-run
Activity: notice and record what you notice in the midst of motion. Pull out your smart phone and speak your thoughts into it.

Not how you got there or where you’re headed, but here now in-between

the middle: Lucille Clifton’s unfenced is, Alice Oswald’s purpled sea

I like the idea of being dropped in the middle — no need to endure a beginning or an ending, but what’s lost when we’re floating in the middle? Something that grounds or frames the experience: context.

aside: writing that last bit, I recalled a few lines from Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish”:

The whole world outside….
I know it’s better, whole, outside, the world—whole
trees, whole groves–but I
love it in here where it blurs, and nothing starts or
ends, but all is
waving, and colorless,
and voiceless….

This morning, I came across a learning prompt on Poetry Foundation: Context.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines context as “the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning.” The word itself comes from the Latin contexere, which means “to weave or join together,” which I interpret as “to make sense of” what we’re reading, particularly when we’re not familiar with the author’s background and/or work. Knowing a poem’s context can give us a sense of place, culture, politics, gender dynamics, etc., and situate us in a specific time and place using concrete references. . . .

A sense of place, a connection, an anchor, a way to ground ourselves and our understandings.

a few hours later: I just remembered Kamala Harris’ coconut tree comment, which RJP loved to quote during the campaign:

context

added the next day: As I read through this entry again the next morning, I suddenly remembered something I posted earlier this spring about how not knowing or acknowledging a person/community’s history is to de-humanize them, to turn them into an object and not a subject. I can’t find where I wrote about it or what I was referencing. After a lot of searching, I found it! It’s in an interview with Jenny Odell about her new book on time, Another Kind of Time. Instead of posting the lengthy quotation here, I’m putting it in my entry for 8 may.

ground contact time

The Apple watch has all sorts of data points, most of which don’t matter to me or are meaningless because I don’t know what to compare them too. One such data point is “ground contact time.” Mine is almost always between 235 and 240 ms. It’s cool to think about how little time my foot is on the ground — and how much time I’m flying! — but what does this number mean? I suppose the fact that it is consistent is good, but should I be spending more time or less on the ground? I found a helpful primer on GCT (ground contact time) that has a chart — and plenty of caveats about that chart — to use for evaluating your ground contact time:

  • < 210 ms: Great
  • 210 – 240 ms: Good
  • 241 – 270 ms: Room for improvement
  • 271 – 300 ms: Needs improvement
  • > 300 ms: Lots to work on

The bottom line: less time on the ground is better. It makes you a more efficient, less injury-prone, faster runner.

So, mine is good, but barely. Ways to improve it include: picking up the cadence, being lighter on your feet, dynamic hip exercises — plyometrics or hill repeats, more deliberate arm swing. Maybe I’ll try some of it; I’d like to fly more! I think I’ll start with hill repeats. I’ve been wanting to do those for some time.

All of this talk about surfaces and edges where things meet — seams — and middles and shortened time on ground is making me want to reread Wendell Berry’s “A Native Hill.” I finally have a physical copy of it. I think I’ll read it and mark it up this afternoon!

may 6/RUN

2 miles
2 trails
69 degrees

It was nice and I felt good, so I decided to go for a short run this morning. Hot! I wore my summer attire: tank top and shorts. Sunny. Sharp shadows, still air, not much shade. Ran right by the Minnehaha Academy playground and heard all of the kids shouting and shoving and having fun. I peeked at the river through the trees: a flat blue. No turkeys or roller skiers or gushing water. No headphones either. Instead, I listened to the kids and the cars and the loud rumbling of a truck. Also heard: someone’s workout program on their phone, you have complete 3 miles — or something similar to that.

before the run

This morning, I’m reading another chapter of RWK’s Gathering Moss: The Advantages of Being Small: Life in the Boundary Layer. I was excited/please/inspired to encounter this passage:

Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. This meeting ground between air and land is known as the boundary layer. Lying cheek to cheek with rocks and logs, mosses are intimate with the contours and textures of their substrate.

Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

surfaces / where earth and atmosphere meet / boundary layer / intimate / contours / textures

I’m interested in surfaces, both ground surfaces by the gorge and water surfaces at the lake. I’ve gathered poems and thought about them before. And there is a line from my Haunts project that I’m still trying to write around/beside/through: It begins here: from the ground up, feet first, following. Today, I want to think about surfaces and boundary layers and textures and the intimacy that is created when air and land, foot and ground, meet.

things we did on grass

When you lie on the ground on a sunny summer afternoon to look up and watch the clouds go by, you place yourself in the boundary of the earth’s surface. When you are flat on the ground, the wind speed is reduced, you can scarcely feel the breeze that would ruffle your hair if you were standing up.

Things we did on grass is a line from an XTC song. I’ve been wanting to experiment with it. RWK is inspiring me!

still

the air becomes progressively slower and slower until, immediately adjacent to the surface, the air is perfectly still, captured by the friction with the surface itself. It is this layer of still air that you experience while lying on the ground.

Such a rich word and idea, still. I’ve been orbiting around it for years. And yet, the opposite of restlessness, something I can’t do: sit still, a calmness and willingness to stop and just be.

during the run

Since I’m thinking of surfaces, especially grass, I decided to run on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road. After the run, as I was walking home, I recorded some thoughts:

[transcript] may 6th. I’m thinking about surfaces and moss and where air and ground meet and these little spaces that are sheltered, that are a little warmer and still and allow for friction without total erosion. Then I was thinking about how I like those spaces — those small spaces, those enough spaces. Then RWK’s bit at the end of the chapter, about how moss still need to germinate and seed and they can’t in these sheltered spaces so they have to expose themselves. Also thinking about the back deck as a sheltered space. It’s interesting to put this in a context of the pandemic because of how the surfaces and how this dirt trail is surely wider because people were running and walking and using it during the pandemic. All the different ways that (the pandemic) is written on this surface, this boundary layer.

surfaces: asphalt, concrete, grass, roots, packed dirt, soft dirt, mulching leaves, rubbled asphalt, limestone

Earlier in the run, I was also thinking about friction in relation to surfaces meeting. In particular, my feet and the ground, but also RWK’s example of free flowing air being disrupted and altered by rock. My thought: we need that friction to feel bodies, to feel our bodies. A flash of Wittgenstein and his rough ground (as opposed to smooth ice) flashed through my head.

I thought about the benefits of being small and a discussion I had with FWA the other day when he was suggesting that humans are resilient in the way that small trees that can bend and lean with the wind during a heavy storm are.

after the run

Ideas to give some attention:

  • Intimacy and Forrest Gander and Anne Pringles’ conversation about intimacy as an encounter that transforms you and Scott describing two trees growing out of the same spot and intertwining as intimate
  • the texture of wind when encountering objects, makes me think of light on surfaces and how the ancient greeks took that into account in their understandings of, and names for, color
  • surfaces and feet first, following — the encounter between foot and ground is the space where a poem can be written and offered
  • the boundary layer visible to our eye as the horizontal lines I mentioned last month: the line between blue and brown
  • where earth and atmosphere meet = violet
  • grass as threshold (a boundary space): the threshold between neighborhood and park, between life and death — grass as a space where the dead and living can meet
  • the dirt trail through the grass as a record of the pandemic
  • not too deep, at the surface: humus, loam

may 5/RUNWALK

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
59 degrees

Warm! Nothing hurt, it was just hard. My heart rate was higher. Who cares? No back or calf or hip pain! I’m trying to ease back in. Today I ran 4 minutes/walked 1, 8 times. I was proud of myself for sticking with it, even as my heart rate climbed. Yes, I’m ready for some mental toughness!

10 Things

  1. an abundance of sparkles on the river
  2. more green leaves crawling up the trunks of trees
  3. fee bee fee bee
  4. shadow, 1: a straight-ish line on the path from the fence
  5. shadow, 2: soft, sprawling branches
  6. shadow, 3: me — sharp, upright, satisfied
  7. the faint, slightly off tune dinging of the train bell
  8. flowing falls
  9. park workers had the one set of stairs blocked off — I heard water, were they spraying down the steps?
  10. passing another runner from behind, they were dressed warmly in long pants and a a jacket and breathing heavily

enoughness / contentment / not scarcity

Moss lifeways offer a strong contrast to the ways we’ve organized our society, which prioritizes relentless growth as the metric of well-being: always getting bigger, producing more, having more. Infinite growth is ecologically impossible and exceedingly destructive, as it demands the transformation of the lives of other beings into raw materials to feed the fiction. Mosses show us another way—the abundance that emanates from self-restraint, from enoughness. Mosses have lived too long on this planet to be seduced by the nonsense of accumulation, the delusion of permanence, the endless striving for productivity. Maybe our heartbeats slow when we sit with mosses because they remind us that contentment could be ours.

Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Summer Day/ Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

When I think of green, I think of another concept Robin Wall Kimmerer promotes: abundance — as in, a gift economy and a challenge to the (mostly) myth of scarcity. In May, green is almost too abundant — a gift that is not scarce!

walk: 45 minutes
winchell trail (ravine) / tunnel of trees / edmund
76 degrees

Took Delia out for a walk in the afternoon. The green is taking over. The view from above in the tunnel of trees was only green — no dirt trail below, no sliver of river, no exposed sewer pipe. Just green. As we walked, I thought about another passage I read from RWK in “Ancient Green” this afternoon:

They [green moss] cover the inanimate with the animate. Without judgment, they cover our mistakes, with an unconditional acceptance of their responsibility for healing.

Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Everywhere green — not moss, but leaves — were covering bare branches, sewer pipes, the gorge. A green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return of the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Did I feel that way about the green I was encountering today? Somewhat, but I also felt it taking over, transforming the floodplain forest in ways I didn’t like: too hidden.

overheard: music from car radios! Someone blasting “Bohemian Rhapsody,” someone else “Rhapsody in Blue.” Until typing these 2, I didn’t make the rhapsody connection.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.
(The Man with the Blue Guitar/ Wallace Stevens)

rhapsody: a portion of an epic poem adapted for recitation

may 4/WALK

40 minutes
winchell trail
66 degrees

What a beautiful morning! This year winter was a blur. It’s hard to believe that we’re only a month away from open swim season. Walked with Scott and Delia down the worn wooden steps to the winchell trail. Took the trail that winds below the mesa. Scott wondered what the trees near the 36th street parking lot were. According to his app, plum trees. He was dubious. We talked about FWA and RJP and the big changes in their lives — one graduating from college, the other moving into their first apartment. After seeing the rowers I wondered, would FWA like rowing? or canoeing? or kayaking? I think he might. Just asked him and his response: Nah. Oh well.

10 Things

  1. the water in the ravine was gushing — heard it first, then saw it — not drip drip dripping, but rushing out of sewer pipe
  2. the hillside that leads up to the trail in the oak savanna was covered in green — more of our view of above, blocked. Last week I was still able to see whole people running and biking above. Today, only the flash of movement through the trees — at first, I thought it was a bird, then I realized it was a biker
  3. 2 bikers on the street — one on a tall bike, the other on a fat tire
  4. so many new leaves on the branches — as I noticed them I thought, a slick new leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm — a line from Ada Limôn
  5. voices . . . a bullhorn . . . rowers! An 8 person shell + the white motorized boat with the instructor giving instructions to a new class
  6. the annual walk-a-thon was happening — as we ascended the 38th street steps, we saw that the road was blocked off and that there was a row of a dozen port-a-potties
  7. a sharp, whistled call in the savanna — what bird is that?
  8. a cloud of bugs right outside our front door — yuck!
  9. so many tulips in a front yard, causing Scott to quip, we’re living in Holland!
  10. in the stretch between the savanna and the 38th street steps, the chainlink fence was leaning over to the ground, buried in mulch and leaves

Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Succession

A few days ago, I encountered the concept of succession in ecology. A meadow becomes a thicket. A thicket becomes a forest. Today I noticed that one of RWK’s chapters in Gathering Moss was titled, “Binding Up the Wounds: Mosses in Ecological Succession,” so I decided to read it. RWK is discussing an area of the Adirondacks blighted by a now defunct mine and abandoned. One of her students is doing her thesis on some moss in the area and whether or not they might help seeds, then trees, establish a home in the otherwise inhospitable tailings (the waste material of a mine: sandy, dry soil, slashes of rock).

succession defined: Ecological succession is the process by which the mix of species and habitat in an area changes over time. Gradually, these communities replace one another until a “climax community”—like a mature forest—is reached, or until a disturbance, like a fire, occurs (source).

Out of the carpet of living moss came a crowd of seedlings, the next step in binding up the wounds of the land.

. . . a little grove of aspens that had somehow gotten started in this desolate place that everyone wanted to cover in garbage. We know now that these aspens originated from seeds caught on a patch of moss, and the whole island of shade began to grow from there. The trees brought birds and the birds brought berries which now blossom around us.

Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Out of the waste of an abandoned mine, moss. From moss, a seed, then a tree. With a tree, birds and berries and blossoms and shade.

may 3/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
47 degrees

A little cooler, but sunny. I wore shorts and my legs didn’t feel cold. The green continues to spread. I’m sure I still have a view of the river but I don’t remember looking at it, not even once. I saw some rowers heading down to the rowing club, but didn’t hear them on the water. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Was passed by several groups of young and fast runners. High school or college teams? Not sure.

Mostly I felt good. My heart rate is still high. I guess I lost some fitness on my almost 2 week break. Monday, I’ll try some more deliberate walk-run segments.

Listened to other runners, cars, water gushing out of sewer pipes heading north, my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist heading back south.

Ran on the grass for a few stretches to avoid other runners and walkers. Thought about how several sites recommended running on more gentle surfaces, like grass, when dealing with a herniated disc or sciatica.

before the run

I’m thinking more about open fields, meadows, lawns, boulevards, village greens, grasslands both wild and manufactured. Grassy spaces I recall from childhood, living in sub-divisions in North Carolina and Virginia and Iowa: soccer fields, manicured lawns, pastures just beyond my backyard.

I decided to look through the poems I’ve gathered for more meadow poems. Found Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. Wow.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, 
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, 
an eternal pasture folded in all thought 
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light 
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

An eternal pasture with a hall made by light and shadows. After the poem, I wrote about Duncan’s idea of projective verse

poetry shaped by rhythms of poet’s breath. So cool–I want to explore this more, thinking about breathing when I run vs. walk vs. sit.

“Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath: 

“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE 
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”

poetry foundation introduction to “Projective Verse”

The heart, by way of the breath, to the line — This idea will be the start of a moving while writing experiment!

after the run

up to the wind-stripped branches shadow-
signing the ground before you the way, lately, all
the branches seem to, or you like to say they do,
which is at least half of the way, isn’t it, toward
belief — whatever, in the end, belief
is…
(My Meadow, My Twilight/ Carl Phillips)

My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts, a half acre with tall grasses and weeds and the occasional wild flower because we do not mow it but leave it scrubby and unkempt. 
(The Bench/ Mary Ruefle)

And, back to the field:

Crossing a field, wading

                   through nothing
        but timothy grass,

imagine yourself passing from
and into. Passing through

doorway after
doorway after doorway.
(Threshold/ Maggie Smith)

After the rain, it’s time to walk the field

again, near where the river bends. Each year

I come to look for what this place will yield –

lost things still rising here.
(After the Rain/ Jared Carter)