For the past year I've not written on this web site because (as anyone who googles me knows) I've maintained a web site, for my neighbors, on the great blue herons who nest in my neighborhood. The nesting area is threatened by development, not that they're an endangered species, yet I would still be sad to see them gone.

The heron site ended up under my name, when I'd intended to use a pseudonym, so that my public writing life would not be "soiled" by this purely local endeavor. And why do I regard the mixing of the two as soilage? Why don't I want it known that I spend/waste/utillize time not just in the supposedly high-minded task of writing poems but also in trying to make real change on a purely local level? Beats me. But I do not underestimate my capacity for shame.

The irony is: the heron web site may have hurt the herons. It alerted everyone to their presence, everyone including the developer, who promptly laid out his roadbed through the rookery (though the impact of the road waits to be seen).

One of the reasons I haven't written anything here is that for the past year I've been writing on a web site/blog that is devoted to a great blue heron rookery (nesting area) in my neighborhood that is threatened by development and which state biologists hadn't been aware of. The result is that the developer must build in such a way that minimizes impacts to the herons (which are not endangered). And the primary victory is that herons continue to nest there despite logging of the development site and the access road to the development, which runs through the rookery.


Here is a poem about the GBH that someone made me aware of when I was blogging for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Turns out that it is Portland's official bird, and William Stafford was commissioned to write a poem about it.



Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron" by William Stafford

Out of their loneliness for each other
two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch
forward and become suddenly a life
lifted from the dawn to the rain. It is
the wilderness come back again, a lagoon
with our city reflected in its eye.
We live by faith in such presences.
It is a test for us, that thin
but real, undulating figure that promises,
"If you keep the faith I will exist
at the edge, where your vision joins
the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light,
feet that go down in the mud where the truth is."

This anthropomorphosizes the bird a bit more than I would like, but I think it is terribly difficult to write "the civic poem."

I'm off Harriet (the poetry foundation's web site) and have been entertaining thoughts about coming back here. Not to post my poems (because I want to give them time to find their vessels) and not to trumpet my own career (don't go anywhere to speak of) but perhaps to post a poem occasionally or to steer people to something good I've read.

Meanwhile, I do appreciate everyone's kind words.

Lucia is posting at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.

I’m sorry for not stating here that I’d let my anthology go dormant. One reason was that I didn’t think anyone was looking at it, but recently I finally opened it up and there were many comments. So to those people who did check in—thank you for reading my posted poems, it gives you a sense of a my (boring, middlebrow) taste. Maybe I will take the anthology up again at a later time, because on re-reading those poems, many of them forgotten by me (so much for the memorization), I realized how much I like them.

For now, though I wanted to say that I am blogging (part-time, another questionable experiment) for the Poetry Foundation, which is affiliated with poetry magazine. So you can read my maundering for the next few months at poetryfoundation.org. You will find there a wee heading that says “blog.” I’ll only be posting once a week, though, through the month of August. Perhaps that will motivate me to start posting poems again. Or not. So far, I’ve learned that the blogging world is a little rougher than I’m temperamentally suited for.

I’m sorry for not stating here that I’d let my anthology go dormant. One reason was that I didn’t think anyone was looking at it, but recently I finally opened it up and there were many comments. So to those people who did check in—thank you for reading my posted poems, it gives you a sense of a my (boring, middlebrow) taste. Maybe I will take the anthology up again at a later time, because on re-reading those poems, many of them forgotten by me (so much for the memorization), I realized how much I like them.

For now, though I wanted to say that I am blogging (part-time, another questionable experiment) for the Poetry Foundation, which is affiliated with poetry magazine. So you can read my maundering for the next few months at poetryfoundation.org. You will find there a wee heading that says “blog.” I’ll only be posting once a week, though, through the month of August. Perhaps that will motivate me to start posting poems again. Or not. So far, I’ve learned that the blogging world is a little rougher than I’m temperamentally suited for.

Explanation for extreme lapse: I had to kill off my feeble attempt at blogging, or not-blogging, because I was already spending so much time at the computer that spending additional time there, or here, simply became excruciating to my legs and back. Plus my tendency is to acquire enthusiasms, and drop them, I know.

The modern preference is for the improvised product over the polished one. Hence: reality TV, blogs. Such a distillation is flawed of course because then how come people aren't rushing out to buy jazz CDs?

In my writing I've perhaps gone overboard on the polish and hope to learn to improvise, to allow for more raggedness. But no one needs to read my ragged maunderings, and there are already so many poetry sites.

Now I've gotten a service dog (no dropping that enthusiasm for a decade: this seems longer than my lifespan but it seems important to simply forge on. Otherwise the wheels lose their ability to gain any traction at all.)

Onward.