As Wilderness Interface Zone approaches its third birthday, it’s growing up a little.  Formalist poet Jonathon Penny has consented to join WIZ’s literary ecotone in the role of contributing editor. Jonathon has a keen eye for the belles-lettres.  Beside being a wonderful poet possessing a unique voice, he took his MA in Renaissance literature at BYU and his PhD in 20th Century British literature from the University of Ottawa. He has taught at universities in the U.S. and Canada, and now lives with his family in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates where he is Assistant Professor of English at UAE University. He has published on Wyndham Lewis and apocalyptic literature and is currently at work on several books of poetry for precocious pipsqueaks under the penname “Professor Percival P. Pennywhistle.” Bits and pieces may be found here. In addition to verse published on WIZ, his poetry has appeared at Victorian Violet Press and in Gangway Magazine and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Several of his poems have also been published in the landmark, recently released poetry anthology, Fire in the Pasture, from Peculiar Pages Press.  Welcome, Jonathon!

Also joining WIZ as a contributing writer is Val K., a soon-to-be fifteen-year-old aspiring naturalist and fantasy writer.  She has participated in NaNoWriMo since she was twelve years old and has successfully completed three novels.  She also writes short stories, articles, and story serials.  She lives in a corner of southeastern Utah with her family, her carnivorous plants and her two cats. She has previously published in Moab Poets and Writers’ Desert Voices and also on WIZ.  Besides writing, her hobbies include drawing, biking, weaving, hiking, catching snakes, rescuing helpless creatures from her cats, and beadwork.  She is a voracious reader.  Welcome, Val K.!

I did not know I was from the desert
when I moved to this hell of heat
that engulfed, stifled, weighed down leaden.

I pouted and sweltered that first summer
while sauna winds desiccated Spring bushes
into brittle skeletons whose sapped roots
cowered with reptiles under charred, rock pavement.
Then the heat gave way to a docile winter
so warm there were roses for Christmas,
robins in January, a mere dusting of snow and
I didn’t care if I was ever cold again.

I learned to worship rain when Spring erupted
through the lace of lizard trails on sand dunes
in masses of verbena and evening primrose;
bluebells and gold poppies tumbling over railroad tracks;
roadsides mottled beaver tail magenta and lupine blue,
wafting fragrance into all the crevices of town.

I walked out one afternoon to see virga
from heaped clouds in all that vast sky
and the sun setting in red fire
against hills of dusky purple-gray.

An egret up from the river flew by,
a piece of torn gauze carried on the wind,
a ragged flag of surrender;
and I knew that I was home.

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To read Judith’s bio and more of her poetry here on WIZ, go here and here.

*contest entry*

From a hidden place in the earth
she brings her cache of jewels;
slips circlets of golden poppies round her arms,
drapes turquoise lupine about her neck,
anoints herself with scent of evening primrose,
white silver in the moonlight.

Wind, smitten by her beauty,
rushes from the west to dance with her.
He howls ancient love chants to her.

Jealous Sun hears;
he sees them whirling.
When she casts aside her robe and jewels
he forces wind away
and pours down love heat
on her tawny body.

Overcome, she lies stricken by searing rays,
cooled only by the passionate summer tears
of Sun’s longing.

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Judith has been a Master Gardner and a volunteer at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix for twenty years. She loves the desert and often writes about it in her poetry. She has degrees from BYU, Boston University and a Creative Writing certificate from Phoenix Community College. She has had poems published in Irreantum, Dialogue, Segullah, and Exponent II.  Last March she participated in a reading tour of Mormon  women  writers organized by Dr. Holly Welker and Dr. Joanna Brooks. She also enjoys playing duets with the birds in the backyard on her Native American flute.  Judith is also the poetry editor for Exponent II.  You can reach the online forum for Exponent II here.

To read another poem by Judith published on WIZ, go here.

*contest entry*

cherry trees lifting petticoats to heaven
full-blossomed defiance
caught mid-cartwheel
kicking up chaos
in can-can regalia
long-limbed show-offs
in ruffles and bloomers
late and early
daffodils and Japanese magnolia
crocus and iris and tulips cover places
old winter (that cold-handed lover)
has relinquished at last
bright spindled forsythia
lilies and redbud
double flowering peach
too much is not enough

this is earth in an Easter dress

and all because Persephone
called ahead to say
Mama – I’m comin’ home!

_______________________________________________________________

Four times nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Carla Martin-Wood is the author of the recently released Songs from the Web (encore), as well as One Flew East, Flight Risk and How we are loved, all full-length collections of her poetry (Fortunate Childe Publications). She has authored seven chapbooks: Songs from the Web (Bitter Wine Press); Garden of Regret and Redheaded Stepchild (both Pudding House Chapbook Series); Feed Sack Majesty, HerStory, and The Last Magick (all Fortunate Childe Publications); and Absinthe & Valentines (Flutter Press). Carla’s work also appears in the following anthologies:  Love Poems & Other Messages for Bruce Springsteen and Casting the Nines (both Pudding House Publications); Lilith: a collection of women’s writes and Postcards from Eve (both Fortunate Childe Publications); and From the Front Porch (Silver Boomer Books). Her work has appeared in a plethora of journals in the US, England, and Ireland since 1978. She was recently nominated by Flutter Poetry Journal for Best of the Net 2010. Carla is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory at www.pw.org. To see more of Carla’s poetry on WIZ go here and here.

“Homecoming” was previously published in Leaf Garden Press.

*contest entry*

Light’s rise sparks bright blooms:
birdsong, fields of it, vining–
spring’s first green flourish.

These mornings, I step outside my back door to hear the hush of winter thrown off by a clamor of birdsong–the crackle of starlings, jazzy riffs of purple house finches, a lonely two-syllable call from a flycatcher,  screeches and churrings of magpies, ravens’ gravelly croaks, a woodpecker drumming a juniper tree, jangling songs of meadowlarks outshouting everyone.  Quite stunning, this send-off of the season of low, cold light.  And I can’t help but detect in the intertwining of different avian dialects the bloom of flowery beauty and signature fragrances of meaning.

The language of the birds, or the green language, is the mythical, magical language of wisdom and divine insight thought to pass between birds and those humans with ears to hear the music of the cosmos with which birdsong is thought to be impregnated.  Some traditions equate la langue verte with the adamic or perfect language.  Many folks might consider any relation between birdsong and human utterances and comprehension illusory.  But if you listen closely, you will hear chirps in the language of many species ranging from rodents (prairie dogs’ alarm calls sound bird-ish, and the noisy grasshopper mouse chirrups constantly) to cats (chirps and trills) to amphibians (our Woodhouse toads pip at us) to insects to puppies to people–especially babies.  My nearly 19-year-old disabled daughter, who can understand more words than she can say, chirps, hoots, and trills in response to questions and other words of address.  After nearly two decades of studying her bird-like, tonal language, I think I can rightly claim that I’ve gained from it deep, magical insight–including into the quiddity of human expression.  Because of my experience with her and what I think I hear in the language of birds and other animals and insects, I’ve begun to wonder if, rather than acting as the basic phoneme of  a foreign language spoken by creatures with which we think ourselves to have little in common, the chirp might just lie at the root of human expression.

Whatever else it’s said to be, the mythical language of the birds is highly poetic, layered with multiple strata of meaning, playful, punful, sliding, gliding, beguiling to the ear when performed aloud, and, when conveyed in written interchange, deeply engaging of the mind’s inner ear.

For WIZ’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff and Celebration, let’s see if we can outshine the birds in their spring ceremonies.  Human language can be just as green and gorgeous, just as textured and as alluring as the language of the birds.  And when it comes to the opening of new prospects and possibilities, human language can have no rival.  Even the language of the birds lags behind the best effects of the best human language: opening-the-possibilities acts of authentic creation.  Poetry, with its multifaceted, many-leveled effects and metaphoric prowess–its strength for getting across–can create, so to speak, more world.  As John D. Niles says in Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Narrative, “It is through such symbolic mental activities [as storytelling and poetry] that people have gained the ability to create themselves as human beings and thereby transform the world of nature into shapes not known before.”

So this Spring Poetry Runoff, let’s go green in our language.  I don’t mean Green, as in supportive of social or political movements touting environmental protection.  In some cases, that language is the least green of all.  I mean let’s go green, as in producing living, doing, being language that acts to open possibilities by virtue of its creative élan.  I mean let’s give out words that don’t just describe experience, they create experience, providing raw materials that others can recombine for their own narrative needs, thus altering, here and there, world and worlds.   Referencing John Miles Foley, Niles  calls this cosmoplastic, or “world-building” energy of human language, “wordpower.”

During this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration, we’ll not only be running the poetry contest with prizes in the Most Popular Vote Award and Admin Award categories but also an open-invitation haiku chain (a developing tradition on WIZ), a non-competing category for those poets wishing to participate in the Spring Poetry Runoff just for fun, the Runoff Rerun (re-publishing of one of last year’s poems), and other activities.

Hope you join in.  It’s spring.  Let’s sing it up.

To review submission deadlines, rules, voting procedures, and prizes, go here.

________________________________________________________________________

Photo of singing western meadowlark by Alan Vernon.

As part of its modest celebratory events, WIZ will post two Retro Reviews of vintage movies and offer copies of those movies in DVD form as gifts to interested audience members and WIZ contributors who comment on the review posts.  Each movie fits the Love of Nature, Nature of Love Month and has nature as a key element of its story, either as setting or plot vehicle.

How to get a free movie: Read the Retro Review I post today and/or the one I’ll post Monday, February 28. All readers need do is post a comment at the Retro Review and that will win each unique commenter one free copy of the movie under review.   I’m hoping that each Retro Review post garners 10 comments by unique commenters, but if they go over that, I think we’ll be able to meet demand.  If the unanticipated happens and commenters go way over the expected number, I may impose a cut off limit just to keep my sanity intact.

Thanks so much, loyal readers, for following WIZ’s content and posting comments, and deepest thanks to our contributors, who have heartily and with a great show of talent stepped up to provide for WIZ’s success.  I’m looking forward to this next year, which I anticipate to be exciting and filled with good prospects.

Profoundest thanks, friends.  This round’s two Retro Reviews will feature the films The Charge at Feather River starring Guy Madison and Helen Westcott and South of Pago Pago starring Francis Farmer and John Hall.  Today’s Retro Review is The Charge at Feather River.

Cayuga Lake’s asleep again,
ice-locked at her edges.
Dressed once more
in shreds of white,
organza, wispy curls
across her skin-
beauty lying deeper
than her dreams.

Denise and I would skate
when we were girls,
flying toward each other
till we met and locking hands
would spin in dizzy circles,
laughter pealing bright
in frigid air;

innocent of life to come
and choices made,
of sorrow bearing arms
against the days
that rush ahead
with thawed intent-
the seasons spinning too.

Will you hold me
in your arms
as winter turns,
as icy stages thin
then melt away?

Singing to the Sacred,
the mocking bird
as Easter comes-
in the flowering pear
whose leaves are just now
loosening on the bough.

____________________________________________________________________

Lou Davies James grew up on the beaches of Eastern Long Island and currently lives in North East Florida with her husband Wes and far too many cats. She is the author of one full length volume of poetry, Adrift in the Holy, and two chapbooks; Drawn as Ever and Internal Insomnia. She has most recently been published in Victorian Violet Press.

Come, take my hand and we will walk
through silver night luminous with light
from moon and city

There a shadowy nighthawk
shivers by and veers
away from sight.

We will talk of common things,
of tasks and children, as we have
these thirty years and more.

Inca doves moan themselves to sleep
in citrus soaked air;
a widow scurries back against the wall;
her shimmering web reflects
an ominous glow.

When love first touched our hearts,
it touched our tongues;
days passing in a clutter of words.

Now, mundane conversation conveys
a silent language, ours alone,
explains a touch, a glance, a smile

and we acknowledge with this secret speech
the fused flesh and mind
we have become.

A rabbit flushes white against the prickly pear.
Overhead, high on that wooden pole,
see, it is the outline of an owl.

____________________________________________________________________

Judith has been a Master Gardner and a volunteer at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix for twenty years. She loves the desert and often writes about it in her poetry. She has degrees from BYU, Boston University and a Creative Writing certificate from Phoenix Community College. She has had poems published in Irreantum, Dialogue, Segullah, and Exponent II.  Last March she participated in a reading tour of Mormon  women  writers organized by Dr. Holly Welker and Dr. Joanna Brooks. She also enjoys playing duets with the birds in the backyard on her Native American flute.  Judith is also the poetry editor for Exponent II.  You can reach the online forum for Exponent II here.

The photo accompanying Judith’s poem is titled “Nighthawk 2″ and was taken by Margarethe Brummermann, who granted permission for its use.  Margarethe is  a biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a watercolor artist.

I love the hour that hangs its weightless haze
of yawn across my bed. An ivory wrap
of humming stillness, spectral dance embossed
in thimble-light. I love the wentletrap

of thoughts and gurgled chants that twist before
white shoals of sleep. The bend and blur of night
with loveliness and brokenness inside
soft vagaries that pivot in the light.

I love the hour subservient to dreams,
when day’s satiety leaves remnant sky.
And all beheaded moments shed their wings
into a hushed reluctance as they die.

______________________________________________________________

For Karen’s bio and more of her work on WIZ and a link to her featured poetry at The New Formalist, go here.  You can also search on her name at WIZ using the search bar at the bottom of the left-hand column.   Karen has published several poems on WIZ, all of them well worth a read.

The photograph of the wentletrap is by Steve Jurvetson.

Submit your nature poetry, prose, or pix to wilderness@motleyvision.org.  Please allow two weeks for response.