Alma Mater

The shadow of a doubt returns from exile to find another in its place, a shadow of suspicion swollen almost into a shadow of unrest. Where once an Air Force pilot passed out leaflets claiming the Holocaust was an accounting error, now there’s a new shrine to old money. Security cameras bristle around the base of a drilling rig crowned with lights. A bicycle chained to a rack begs mutely for release. The doubt is reasonable now, a respected member of the community, & no one seems to mind that he hasn’t cast a shadow in years. He’s careful around mirrors. On the cover of his authorized biography, he stretches one powerful arm, a cross stripped of the usual ambiguity. The shadow of a smile hangs over him like a broken moon.

*

Prompted by this.

Magic Carpet

On a windy day in March,
we stop at a Chevy dealership
near Orbisonia, Pennsylvania,
for a closer look at an enormous American flag
on a too-short pole. It seems intent
on demonstrating some elemental
principle of travel.

As we watch, completely straight & sober
but feeling more stoned by the minute,
it becomes a country unto itself,
complete with its own square of sky.
Slow waves of wind beginning
out among the stars find endless,
inventive ways to pass through the striped field,
the alternating strips of crop and fallow
following the contours of a land
continually in flux, like a farmer’s dream
of swimming deep into the soil.

The medium becomes the only message.
And anti-nationalist that I am, I find
I would almost pledge allegiance
to this well-made thing
& the wind that gives it another, freer kind of life.
Where were we going, again?
We both agree we could sit here all day,
if it weren’t for the likelihood that sooner
or later someone would report us
to the police for suspicious activity.
We pull gingerly back
onto the old blue road.

*

I’m mining the Via Negativa archive for poetic material. This derives from a 2005 post, Stars and stripes.

Occupied

As in: pre-.
The windy street-corner sermon,
the row of poplars waving
all their gold cards at once.

As in: otherwise-.
The gray-suited men
vanish like deer into November
the moment they stand still.

As in: certain territories
where the new occupants
must build a wall
to keep out the old.

And the space beside the wall
becomes a place to try one’s luck,
a place to wail.

Walking in the dark

Walking through a dark forest without a flashlight is an exercise in trust: trusting your feet to find the trail, trusting chance not to place a new fallen tree at shin level, trusting that a storm won’t blow in — for there’s no hurrying this slow shuffle. Over the chanting crowd of katydids in the trees, I hear the thin, whispery alarm calls of flying squirrels. I stop and peer at an almost vertical row of glowing spots a few feet off the trail: foxfire.

The damp air is an olfactory smorgasbord of molds and fermentation. As my eyes adjust, I begin to discern different flavors of darkness, too: here the rich black shadows of trees, there the cafe-au-lait openings of trail or blow-down. I feel less helpless now, more in control. But no sooner do my feet and eyes grow accustomed to their new normal state than the restless mind is off again, and I have to keep calling it back: Heel! Stay!

Is it loneliness that prompts it to wander like that? If I were sharing this darkness with others right now — say, outside a federal penitentiary in Georgia, cupping a candle flame — would I be better able to maintain focus? If instead of myself I were, in fact, concentrating all my thoughts on some victim of the criminal injustice system on his last, too-short walk into permanent darkness, wouldn’t my own hopes and dreams fade into the background, as faint as foxfire?

The sound of a very small shower approaches. I take my hat off to relish the tap of its millipede feet on my close-cropped scalp, but it’s already past. An odd reaction, perhaps — a sign that, deep down, I might still crave another’s touch.

Somehow I find the brushy intersection where the Short Way Trail leads down off the ridge, and soon I am seeing a light among the trees. Look, nobody’s home! Blinking dots of light in the window where an ethernet unit sends and receives from a world-wide web.

And how is it, I wonder as I enter the house, that I managed to walk all that way without blundering into a single spider web? The equinox may not be until Friday, but autumn is already here. Or as the book of Jeremiah puts it: The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

Rest in peace, Troy Davis.

Protecting the environment from the Department of Environmental Protection


Watch on YouTube

So as luck would have it, the Juniata Valley Audubon Society‘s first lawsuit is happening under my watch as president — this despite the fact that in my personal life I avoid confrontation like the plague. Fortunately I’m not the point-man here, and today I was happy to use my presidential authority merely to insist upon shooting a video of the real heroes of this fight (as well as to record some audio, which I hope to share eventually as a Woodrat Podcast episode).

The video wasn’t very eptly shot, but what the heck. It’s JVAS’s first official video, and I figure we have to start somewhere. It features Mollie Matteson, Conservation Advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, and Stan Kotala, JVAS Conservation Chair, member of the Pennsylvania Biological Survey’s Herpetological Technical Committee, and general bad-ass.

Becoming Appalachian

first published (in slightly edited form and without illustrations)
in
Appalachian Journal Vol. 38: 2-3 (Winter/Spring 2011)

© by Chris Bolgiano

The Fall, 2010 issue of Appalachian Journal, which focused on regional identity, hit me where it hurts: in my self-proclaimed, hardly-won, and wholly un-censused identity as Appalachian. Because nowhere in seventy pages of scholarly surveys, speculations, and definitions could I find myself.

Chris Bolgiano's view from the deck
Looking at Little North Mountain from the author’s deck in autumn.

Researchers reach out to fourth generation descendants born in industrial cities far from the mountains and deem them Appalachian, and I totally get that. I’ve come to understand, and not just from Loyal Jones, that you can get an Appalachian into Heaven but she’ll still insist on going home to the mountains every other weekend.

I understand, because even though I wasn’t born here, I couldn’t live anywhere else but here on Cross Mountain, with Little North Mountain in front of me. And the trailer court down the road. Continue reading “Becoming Appalachian”

Memorial Day YouTube Mix

I’ve compiled a Memorial Day playlist on YouTube, which you can watch there on auto-play if you like. It’s one hour and four minutes long. For those who prefer to pick and choose or listen in increments, the videos are in order below. (If you’re reading this in a feed reader or email inbox, you may have to click through to the post to see the embeds.)

For non-Americans who may be unclear on the holiday, there are three things you need to know about Memorial Day: 1) it used to be called Decoration Day, and it’s traditionally a time when families decorate gravestones and mourn the dead — something we aren’t always very good at doing — then eat lots of potato salad and barbecued chicken; 2) as the country has swung to the right in recent decades, it’s become more of a patriotic holiday, a time for especially celebrating the sacrifices of dead soldiers, which are generally regarded as more significant than the sacrifices of dead school teachers or dead coal miners; and 3) it’s generally regarded as the beginning of the summer vacation season, not that most Americans really know how to chill out. We like to think we do, though.

Anyway, here’s the mix, lightly annotated. Feel free to post links to your own picks in the comments. And remember, don’t eat potato salad that’s been sitting out too long in the hot sun, or you may be joining your dear departed sooner than you’d planned.

1. Cordelia’s Dad: “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”

2. John Prine: “Paradise”

If you’re from a military family, I respect the fact that the deaths of soldiers hit especially close to home, and perhaps epitomize sorrow and loss for you. I’m from a family of nature lovers.

3. Joni Mitchell: “Big Yellow Taxi”

More quotable than than the previous song, if not quite as much of a tear-jerker for me.

4. Son House: “Death Letter”

A Delta Blues masterpiece. The quintessential song of mourning for a dead spouse.

5. Floyd Red Crow Westerman: “Custer Died For Your Sins”

O.K., here’s where it gets a little more political. My conservative friends might want to just scroll down to #14.

6. Billie Holiday: “Strange Fruit”

When people talk of “sacrifice” in the context of building America, here’s what I think of.

7. Pete Seeger: “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”

Good ol’ Pete.

8. Buffy Sainte-Marie: “Universal Soldier”

9. Phil Ochs: “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”

Not sure we need two minor-key anti-war songs in a row, but I couldn’t choose between them.

10. Patricia Smith: “34”

Yes, it’s a poetry recitation — but by a four-time winner of the Poetry National Slam. Let’s just say Patricia Smith is one poet who knows how to rock the mike. “We reached for the past like it is food and we are starving…”

11. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: “Summertime”

12. The Dresden Dolls: “Shores of California”

As probably anyone in their 30s or 40s will recognize, the video is a parody of an MTV video for “California Girls” by David Lee Roth (q.v. if you have a strong stomach).

13. Dead Kennedys: “Viva Las Vegas”

Jello Biafra is the Phil Ochs of my generation, I think. “Kill the Poor” was my first choice of a DKs video for the mix, but this Elvis cover had the better video (scenes from the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). It also seemed like a good way to set up the following video — yin and yang.

14. Don McLean: “American Pie”

Sorry, I know it’s the epitome of nostalgia and all, but I love it.

15. Johnny Cash: “Hurt”

Interstates and States of Grief

Interstates and States of Grief from Phil & Angela Rockstroh on Vimeo. Click on the little four-arrows icon on the lower right to expand to full screen.

I shared this on Moving Poems, too, but even those who aren’t especially into poetry should get something out of it: a searing, personal indictment of American militarism, consumerism, capitalism and the interstate highway system, closer in mood to an elegy than a manifesto.

I have a weakness for documentaries anyway, and I like the collaborative process involved in the making of this film. Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist, published widely across the progressive internet. Angela Tyler-Rockstroh is a broadcast designer/animator who currently works with HBO. She has worked with major networks such as the Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, and PBS, as well as with Michael Moore on his documentaries Fahrenheit 911 and Sicko.

Link roundup: Things I give a flying f*ck about

A few links I’ve shared on Facebook over the past three weeks. With all the poetry reading I did last month, I didn’t have much time for anything else.

Truthout: “Why the United States is Destroying its Educational System”
Chris Hedges, depressingly on-target as usual.

The Atlantic: “Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More”
Stephen King has some nice things to say about poets. (But preferring Judas Priest to Black Sabbath? No accounting for taste!)

Harriet: “Death of a Kingmaker: A Critical Evaluation of Silliman’s Blog”
How being a powerful blogger can interfere with writing. I found Silliman very cordial the couple times I communicated with him, a genuine guy with some strong opinions and an equally strong streak of generosity. I wasn’t a regular reader, though.

Poetry Daily: “Casino” by Osip Mandelstam — a new version by Christian Wiman
Probably the single best poem I read all April.

Glenn Greenwald @Salon: “Lessons from Manning’s transfer out of Quantico”

This episode should be a potent antidote to defeatism, as it provides a template for how issues that would be otherwise ignored can be amplified by independent voices creatively using the democratizing and organizing power of the Internet, and meaningful activism achieved.


Not just a gag gift, but a very simple concrete or visual poem. I’m trying to think how I can integrate one into a panel discussion at next year’s AWP.

Link roundup: Advice for writers, Planned Parenthood, public radio poetry, treeblogging and the King of the Porcupines

Austin Kleon: “How to Steal Like an Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)”
I usually hate advice posts, but this one is gold. For example:

There was a video going around the internet last year of Rainn Wilson, the guy who plays Dwight on The Office. He was talking about creative block, and he said this thing that drove me nuts, because I feel like it’s a license for so many people to put off making things: “If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative.”

If I waited to know “who I was” or “what I was about” before I started “being creative”, well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.

Marly Youmans: “The House of Words (no. 11): One writer’s lessons”
The most popular post in Marly’s on-going series to date. I particularly liked this part:

Every book purchase says you want to read a certain writer and that the publisher should have confidence in him or her. In the case of poetry, a modicum of readers voting this way may even mean that a house decides to retain its poetry line rather than jettisoning it.

The comment thread for that post is also well worth reading.

Busily Seeking… Continual Change: “The Perils of Planned Parenthood”
A very different — and, I would argue, crucial — perspective on “choice,” Planned Parenthood and legislative priorities.

North Country Public Radio: “One April”
Wow, this public radio station’s web manager is doing NaPoWriMo! And they’re good poems, too. Yet another reason to move to the Adirondacks.

Call for Submissions: Festival of the Trees 59 with Spirit Whispers
For Festival 59 our host Suzanne of the Spirit Whispers blog asks, how do trees inspire you?


Watch on YouYube
via Peaceful Societies: “Lepcha Magazine Provides a Cultural Feast”