Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.
This was, I believe, our fourth hike in the Monongahela National Forest’s Otter Creek Wilderness Area since we first ventured down that way in 2005. Back then, my camera was primitive, so I had to make up for it with more eloquent writing. This time, I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.
UK blogger and photographer Rachel Rawlins has been visiting the USA, including Plummer’s Hollow (whence this photo)…
Continue reading “Ecotourist Photography 101”
Naturalist, blogger and photographer Jennifer Scott Schlick visited Plummer’s Hollow earlier this week, and has just posted a short but stunning set of macro photos of some of our wildflowers. She was especially charmed by the rue anemone and fringed polygala (AKA gaywings), neither of which she’d encountered in her area of upstate New York (Jamestown and environs, just north of the northwest corner of Pennsylvania). It was also the first time she’s seen pink and yellow color variants of red trillium — one of the flowers included in our photo-poem collaboration last year. I’ve embedded her Flickr slideshow below, but if you can’t see it, here’s the link.
I had a hunch that Jennifer’s slideshow-talk “Confessions of a Reluctant Birder” would make a good presentation for our local Audubon chapter’s annual spring banquet, and I was right. Turns out she’s a highly entertaining, down-to-earth speaker. She does this sort of thing more or less for a living, along with banding birds, introducing high school kids to nature, mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to remove invasive plants from a 600-acre wetland, and yes, writing the occasional grant to support the Jamestown Audubon Center & Sanctuary, for which she serves as program director.
It was fun following Jennifer through our woods and introducing her to some of my favorite fellow inhabitants. Seeing the hollow through the eyes of a visitor is always a treat, but never more so than when the visitor has advanced training in looking at the natural world. And if you’re wondering whether Jennifer has blogged about the visit yet herself, the answer is of course.
Persistence pays:
I once saw a pheasant just
where the stone dog points.
This almost belongs in the Manual series, but for the fact that I didn’t write it. The text, and the object to which it refers, came from the pen and knitting needles of Rachel Rawlins, and you can see both at twisted rib. While there, you can click on the conversari tag and browse her half of our on-going, inter-blog conversation in words and images, originating in more quotidian exchanges via email, IM, etc.: one of those sprawling conversations that just keeps sprouting new, sometimes grotesque branches and digressions, grows ever more firmly rooted, and seems as if it might go on forever.
I shot the footage of the garter snake ball yesterday morning, while rushing back and forth between the houses to bake bread. (A mention made it into the Morning Porch, whence, curiously, Luisa also derived the image of a heart.) I felt I had to make the film fairly abstract, since I already made a videopoem with more straight-forward footage of a garter snake mating ball two years ago. On that occasion, I also uploaded an 8-minute video of the orgy. This time, I grabbed my regular camera and managed to get one half-decent still photo:
It was a thing of beauty, albeit hair-raising as always. Incidentally, I’ve probably said this before, but our robust garter snake population in Plummer’s Hollow is, I think, a direct consequence of our decision to stop mowing the lawns. If you like reptiles and amphibians and want to encourage them around your own home, the best thing you can do is transition to a less-managed landscape. Call it Daoist gardening if you like.
Garter snakes usually form mating balls immediately after emergence from hibernation in spring, but sometimes they mate in the fall, too. The great American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote about encountering one such coupling — “that wild braid” — in his iconic poem “The Snakes of September.”
I seem to photograph the coltsfoot every year — it’s the first flower to bloom on the mountain. And this is the earliest it’s ever bloomed.
It’s non-native, but not particularly invasive here. I think most people mistake the blooms for dandelions (which of course bloom much later). Pliny famously classified it as two different plants, failing to observe the small leaves beginning to emerge as the flowers die. This small fly, however, seems quite unconfused.
“Electronic literature might also be called born-direct literature.”
“I love the messiness of digital space.”
“Blogs and online magazines with comments best embody the literary anarchy of the web — a literature without gatekeepers.”
“I’m sorry, I like gatekeepers. I don’t have the time to decide what to read.”
“A kind of hypertextual tunneling.”
“It’s emblematic of our societal discomfort with poetry that so many blurbs for poetry books use the word ‘unflinching.’ Actually, I think poets should flinch. We need to get better at flinching.”
“I practice a pedagogy of emergency.”
“The Seminary Bookstore at Hyde Park is the best bookstore in the world. I was jilted by Powell’s.”
“To give a poetry reading is to feel the phantom limb of the musician’s audience.”
“I make 40 to 50 thousand dollars a year traveling around playing the fiddle and reading poetry.”
“If you funk up a cliché, it becomes genius.”
“I was a whore at the poetry bordello.”
“She ripped the cigarette out of his mouth, broke it in half, and jabbed the lit end into his cheek.”
“Not many parks, but lots of feral space.”
“Just because you know how to write doesn’t mean you know how to read.”
With poet and Chicago native Susan Elbe
Right, so I’m in Chicago.
My bedroom is directly underneath this billboard. I’ve been occupying the hell out of it.
But best of all, at the conference I met Luisa Igloria for the first time! And many other wonderful people, of course.
In May of last year, during my week in London I visited the Kew botanical gardens twice, the second time in the company of fellow blogger-photographer Rachel Rawlins. I shot more than 500 photos at Kew all told (though in retrospect I should’ve doubled that number and taken photos of the labels for each plant, too, so I’d actually be able to i.d. everything).
I shared the first part of those photos in a post here last August about the oldest of Kew’s signature glasshouses, the Palm House. Last night, I presented a slideshow on Kew to my local Audubon chapter, so in the past few days I’ve processed a bunch more photos — and now they’re uploaded to Flickr as well. You can browse the set (especially if you’re on a slower connection) or view the slideshow. (I could embed it in the post, but what’s the point? It should be viewed at full-monitor size.)
The second day I went to Kew, it was their spring festival, with stilt walkers, live world music and teeming crowds. The set begins with the Palm House, moves to the treetop walkway (with a shot of the Chinese pagoda in passing), then proceeds to the Temperate House. Then it’s back outside for a couple of live bands, a few of the more picturesque trees, and some random shots from smaller glasshouses, and we end in the newest of the “big three,” the Princess of Wales Conservatory.
Revisiting these photos, I came to a realization about what my favorite group of plants is, aesthetically speaking. The set closes with them: the cacti. Maybe I really belong in the desert.