Earth National Park

Poems by Dennis Fritzinger

Poetry Vortex Publishing

Crescent City, California

if I knew how to do it

I’d arm all the bears

so there’d be bear militias

in the mountains somewheres

So begins the poem “Support Your Right,” a personal favorite from Earth National Park. In this short volume of poetry, Dennis Fritzinger introduces numerous nonhuman protagonists such as “Mother Vulture,” “Angry Red Squirrel,” and “Ambassador Frog.”

Most common of all are the bears. A Black Bear with a pilfered radio listens to the traffic, spying on the humans. A human in a restaurant eats blackberry jam and turns into a bear. The bears in “Support Your Right” tote guns and protect the wilderness from humans.

Several of the poems are polemics on direct environmental action, while others are statements of the author’s earth centered philosophy. These two threads are interwoven with the poems written from the animals’ various points of view. Each of the three threads compliments and amplifies the other to make a unique whole.

Earth National Park is a delightful collection of poems by Dennis Fritzinger, moderator of the Warrior Poets Society list serve on Yahoo Groups and editor of the Warrior Poets Society page in the Earth First! Journal. From the introduction, “A New Pledge,” to the final poem “The Yellowstone Fire,” Dennis emphasizes his philosophy of “nature knows best.”

“Vermin: A Notebook”

Poems can stop bulldozers.

John Kinsella

Poetry Foundation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org, and in Poetry, December, 2009

For me, poetry has no point in existing if it’s not to be a prompt or aid to political and ethical change. This is not to say that a poem should be political or ethical instruction, but rather that it might engender a dialogue between the poem itself and the reader / listener, between itself and other poems and texts and between all of these and a broader public (whatever that might be). I see myself as a poet activist – every time I write a poem, it is an act of resistance to the state, the myriad hierarchies of control, and the human urge to conquer our natural surroundings.

Though this quotation sums up Kinsella’s argument, it is not the point of departure for his essay. He begins with a description of a trip to town, “the shire,” in his native Australia. From that description he abruptly transitions to gunshots fired outside his house the previous Friday night. Fox hunters have crossed the public land of a refuge and intruded onto his private property in search of their quarry. When he attempts to intervene, a shot is fired in his direction and he summons the police, feeling his family is in danger. He bitterly observes that these sportsmen are likely staunch defenders of private property rights which they have now violated.

            Kinsella then describes a Saturday trip to the shire where again shots ring out. This time, a group is shooting corellas, a species of cockatoo that have congregated in the town’s trees and are considered a nuisance.

            Through the point and counterpoint of these descriptions he weaves his own story as one trained in the sciences, living on the land outside the town, and carefully constructing poems as a response to the world around him. His poems though, go further than describing and responding to the world around him. They are calls to action. In his words, he is …resisting through poetry the industry of pleasure and control that comes from hunting and exploitation of the environment, I am, also, I believe, writing the survival and liberty of animals (including humans).

The Creation

New York

ISBN 978-0-393-33048-9 pbk

            Pastor, I am grateful for your attention. As a scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the creation, I have done my best here to brief you and others on subjects I hope will be more a part of out common concern. My foundation of reference has been the culture of science and some of secularism based on science, as I understand them. From that foundation I have focused on the interaction of three problems that affect everyone: the decline of the living environment, the inadequacy of scientific education, and the moral confusions caused by the exponential growth of biology. In order to solve these problems, I’ve argued, it will be necessary to find common ground on which the powerful forces of religion and science can be joined. The best place to start is the stewardship of life.

            So begins Chapter 17, the final chapter, of Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Creation. Wilson wrote the book as a letter to a Southern Baptist preacher, and has no fear of directly referring to their differences. He begins with a reference to his own early experiences in the faith, his departure from it, and their common roots as Southerners.

            Within the framework of this unique approach, Wilson describes subjects already known to his readers: the importance of nature as our home, the destruction of nature by habitat loss, invasive species and other causes, and the love of nature (Biophilia). The Creation is a book long appeal for science and religion to find common ground and protect the natural world.

Desert Solitire

Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey

“What do the coyotes mean when they yodel at the moon? What are the dolphins trying so patiently to tell us? Precisely what did these two enraptured gopher snakes have in mind when they came gliding toward my eyes over the naked sandstone? If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new, or some truth so old we have all forgotten it!”

The above passage appears near the beginning of Desert Solitaire, the first of Edward Abbey’s books to catch my attention and reinforce my love of wilderness. His descriptions of the parched landscape in and around Arches National Monument are both eloquent and revealing whether he is describing the arches themselves, the rivers and springs, the wildlife, or the rocky terrain. The descriptions reveal that Abbey was a first rate naturalist.

The book, Desert Solitaire, does not stop there. Abbey also included an angry polemic on mechanized (he uses the term industrial) tourism, decrying the destruction of natural parks by roads and motors. He felt that the parks are best seen on foot.

The book also includes stories of the people of this desert land. Abbey appears to be sympathetic with the solitary prospector, unable to compete with corporate mining interests, the small rancher put out of business by agribusiness, the unemployed cowboys, and the Indians. For a man sometimes labeled a misanthrope, he includes a lot of sympathetic stories of these people.

My favorite of all the essays and stories in this lovely book though is simply titled “The Moon Eyed Horse.” In this narrative, Abbey walks up a box canyon trying to recapture a feral horse, blind in one eye and roaming the land after escape from a local ranch. The horse lived on its own for several years. He fails to capture “Ole’ Moon Eye,” and seems sympathetic to the horse, almost appearing to envy its wild state.

Though Abbey’s work is often cited as forecasting a future where the work of man continues to erode wilderness, his most prophetic passages are perhaps those in the chapter titled “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.” In this chapter, Abbey has joined a search party to find an elderly man missing in the desert for two days. Coming home from this job he recorded his feelings of identifying with the dead man. The passage prefigures his own illegal burial in an unmarked grave in the desert by sympathetic friends carrying out his last request, years later:

“I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.”

            - Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman

The Canoeist (Nonfiction)

John Manuel

ISBN 0-97189-747-6

I remember rolling under the canoe; the way the water muffled the roar of the rapid and softened the sun’s glare.  All around me were bubbles, millions and millions of them, rushing along at the same speed.   We are like this – souls traveling through space.  We are born in the tumult of the river, carried along by forces we cannot control.  And we’re also beautiful in the way we hold the light, murmuring to one another on this journey toward the surface, our short spiraling lives.

I stayed under for a long time, safe from the waves crashing overhead. The water ran warm and deep. There was no need to panic, but my air was running out. I kicked out of the thigh straps and burst into daylight. –Page 208

The quotation from page 208 is but one example of the excellence of the narrative prose which fills John Manuel’s book from beginning to end.  The river in this passage was Tennessee’s Ocoee, portrayed as an ultimate challenge for canoeists, a river generally reserved for Kayaks and White Water Rafts.

The author’s trip down the Ocoee is the climax to a journey that begins on the peaceful waters of the Chagrin River near his parent’s home in Cleveland, Ohio.  Along the way he canoed such well known waterways as the Allagash (Maine), the Nantahala (North Carolina), and the Chattooga (Georgia).  This last was the whitewater backdrop for the movie Deliverance based on James Dickey’s novel of the same title.

The Canoeist is neither a how to manual for boaters nor a simple recounting of whitewater adventures, though many adventures appear among the stories.  Manuel skillfully weaves in the story of his family and his career along the way.  Within the pages he recounts emotional distance from his father, a hard nosed businessman who taught him canoeing skills but never understood his career path as a conservationist working for nonprofit organizations, or his later decision to become a writer.

Manuel also recounts the friendships he gained along the way and the courtship of his wife Cathy, a strong canoeist in her own right.  He tells the reader about his son and daughter, and his determination to maintain a healthy relationship with them and not repeat the separation between him and his father.

Manuel’s ability to weave these many stories into a unified whole reveal his skill as a gifted writer. The canoeist is an enjoyable read.

Meditating with Annie Dillard by Ray Zimmerman

This profile appeared as the installment of my Nature’s Bookshelf column in Volume 8 Issue 6 of Hellbender Press (November/December, 2006), Knoxville, Tennessee. The publication was named for a large species of salamander (The Hellbender), native to the American southeast, and has since ceased publication.

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately and was largely ignored as an author by his own generation. Unlike Thoreau, Annie Dillard lived in a cabin on Tinker Creek and emerged a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Although Dillard has been compared to Thoreau and the other New England Transcendentalists, many reviewers see her as more similar to Melville.

Many natural history writers concern themselves with the how – the great question of all science. Dillard is concerned with why, a question more at home in theology than in science. She comments in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that some people extol the thriftiness of nature where the leaves of trees are recycled into soil to grow more plants. She then asks if it would be more efficient to keep the leaves on the trees in the first place.

Dillard is horrified at the wastefulness of nature. She notes that many insects lay thousands of eggs, only to have most of them eaten, sometimes by the parent. She compares this scheme to a railroad company building thousands of locomotives and turning them loose on a section of track that can accommodate only three. At the end of their experiment, the company would learn that only three locomotives were necessary. She imagines a board of directors chastising their managers for running the company in such a wasteful way. She then states that nature is wasteful in exactly such a manner.

Although this line of thought seems to put Dillard outside the mainstream of nature writers, she is in fact a keen observer of the natural world. Early in the pages of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she sees a frog skin shrivel in the grasp of a diving beetle. She observes a shed snake skin with a knot in it, a creek overflowing its banks and flooding the neighborhood, and a praying mantis laying eggs. She augments these observations with remembrances of her childhood experiences. She recalls viewing pond life through a microscope, and watching a moth hatch inside a glass jar.

In Holy the Firm Dillard continues her metaphysical probing. She asks what the relationship is between the temporal and the eternal. In the first chapter, she seems to be echoing the statements of Saint Francis of Assisi, who said “Praised be You our Lord through mother earth who governs and sustains us.” In the second chapter a child is badly burned in an airplane accident, and Dillard wrestles with the eternal question as to why the innocent suffer. She seems to receive the very answer received by the Old Testament character, Job. The answer is that suffering is part of the world and that we are too small and insignificant in view of the beauty and vastness of the universe to question its nature.

After publishing one book each in the genres of literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and memoir, Dillard returns to the narrative nonfiction style in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. Here she records travels in China and Israel. She observes Chinese peasants working in a field and a crab digging for water near a Kibbutz. She describes clouds and a tsunami off the coast of Bangladesh. She describes the extraordinary lives of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and the Ukrainian Hasidic Rabbi Baal Shem Tov.  She continues to ask why suffering is part of the human condition, and why evil exists.

Aside from her many books, Dillard has published several poems and short works of fiction and nonfiction in periodicals. These are listed on her official web site, http://www.anniedillard.com. The site also includes a list of derivative works: paintings, music, and one act plays carried out by others but inspired by her work. Most of these are derived from Holy the Firm.

Dillard’s writing style is perhaps best illustrated by a selection from the first chapter of Holy the Firm. She had been reading by candle light one night when a moth, drawn to the light, got caught in the wax at the top of her candle. It was gone before she could respond. The following passage is a hallmark of observation and narrative:

“And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The month’s head was fire. She burned for two hours until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

Sidebar – Dillard’s Published Works

Tickets for a Prayer Wheel - Poems

University of Missouri Press, 1974

Several poems have titles indicating natural history, but are actually metaphysical. The title poem is an invitation for the eternal to break into the temporal.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Nonfiction Narrative

Harpers Magazine Press, 1974

Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction

This book received mixed reviews when it was released. Eudora Welty, the great Southern writer, said that she was uncertain of Dillard’s intent and that the writing left something to be desired. A portion of her review, and segments from other reviews, are available in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Volume 3 (Gale Research Company, Detroit, Michigan).

Holy the Firm – Meditations

Harper and Row 1977

In this work she asked what relationship the temporal has to the eternal. She then asks why the innocent must suffer.

Living by Fiction – Literary Criticism

Harper and Row, 1982

This book is a technical work primarily useful to graduate students in university literature programs.

Teaching a Stone to Talk – A Collection of Essays

Harper and Row 1982

This book includes essays on natural history and metaphysics. The essay on the Galapagos Islands is an excellent investigation into creation and evolution.

Encounters with Chinese Writers – Journalism

Wesleyan University Press, 1984

The author identifies this work as jolly journalism.

An American Childhood – Memoir

Harper and Row, 1987

The author tells her own story.

The Writing Life – Narrative Nonfiction

Harper and Row 1989

This book includes some practical tips for writers. The author advises writers to edit ruthlessly and to throw out unnecessary prose, even if it is that on which they worked hardest. Several chapters appeared previously as essays in periodicals.

The Living – A Novel

Harper Collins, 1992

This fictional work is set on Bellingham Bay in Washington State.

The Annie Dillard Reader – Selected Reprints

Harper Collins, 1994

Mornings Like This – Found Poems

Harper Collins, 1995

Dillard mined old books on natural history, theology, and navigation for these lines. They are rearranged into poems. The meaning of the poems is far different from that of the original text.

For the Time Being –Narrative

Knopf, 1999

After working in several other genres, Dillard returned to the nonfiction narrative for this book. The author weaves several themes together into a unified whole. The book includes narratives on birth, death, the nature of evil and current events. She includes stories of the Jesuit Palentoligist Teilhard de Chardin and the Hasidic Rabbi Baal Shem Tov who expressed religious fervor by dancing.