tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post6718423175766505469..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Wyo-Booming, 1979 (I)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-37222211737583329582010-03-30T02:16:12.219-07:002010-03-30T02:16:12.219-07:00One reader has expressed (in a comment on another ...One reader has expressed (in a comment on another post) some confusion as to the provenance of the writings in this post and the one below it. I hope I've explained what there is to be explained in the course of these two comment threads. <br /><br />Perhaps, though, a fuller sense of the background to this "survey" may be found <a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/for-edward-dorn-ii-wind-river-canyon-in.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-84746138589911637452010-03-29T15:07:33.751-07:002010-03-29T15:07:33.751-07:00Good to hear you have travelled safely, Steve.
A ...Good to hear you have travelled safely, Steve.<br /><br />A long voyage... from grey cloud to grey cloud?<br /><br />every day, “order” of<br /><br />grey cloud above<br /><br />('Twas mildly springlike in your absence, have you perhaps brought winter back with you, hidden in your shoe?)TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-1132531425715202012010-03-29T08:25:32.556-07:002010-03-29T08:25:32.556-07:00Tom,
Good to see this here today, especially havi...Tom,<br /><br />Good to see this here today, especially having just flown back over it, snowdrifts still in full force heading west last week, below clouds yesterday). Check out Michael Gregory's paintings at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Chelsea for a view of the west without quite so much human intervention <br />(http://www.nancyhoffmangallery.com/). . . . Meanwhile, this small offering ----<br /><br />3.29<br /><br />grey whiteness of cloud against invisible<br />ridge, red-tailed hawk calling on branch<br />in foreground, wave sounding in channel<br /><br /> meaning sensations with gap<br /> between them, or word<br /><br /> of either, two word example<br /> every day, “order” of<br /><br />grey cloud above shadowed brick building,<br />bird gliding to the right across from itSTEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-79941658083189714062010-03-29T06:07:29.471-07:002010-03-29T06:07:29.471-07:00Michael and Elisabeth,
Very grateful for Michael&...Michael and Elisabeth,<br /><br />Very grateful for Michael's post linking to this. <br /><br />Yes, maybe it's the poignancy of our sense of all that's been lost that lends urgency to this desire we have to work on saving what's left.<br /><br />Up against, of course, that accompanying or following sense of time's winged chariot breathing at our backs, reminding us how very late in the "game" it is.<br /><br />But in reflecting upon the meanings there might be imbedded in the very evocative term "the soul of the landscape", I find myself travelling in the mind (my only vehicle, these days) back to the road survey 31 years ago that led to these writings, and remembering something of that enormity of scale Leigh has now spoken of.<br /><br />For in Wyoming it is above all the vastness of space that lays a world out before the traveller, the skies without end, the distances so clear, it is not uncommon, coming down out of higher elevations, to see a place for forty or fifty miles before coming to it.<br /><br />And the scale of the excavations we saw in that survey was of similar amplitude, mind-boggling, almost beyond descriptive words. <br /><br />I am struggling to say that perhaps what we think of as "soul" in the more intimate landscapes to which we are accustomed implies a term difficult to apply to spaces of this order of magnitude.<br /><br />The soul of the Wyoming landscape, maybe, is no one's but its own.<br /><br />(Everything is nothing but itself...)<br /><br />When I first published some of these poems, Ed Dorn, with whom I had been travelling, and the best-informed student of Western landscapes and landforms and histories I have ever known, wrote a small essay on the work.<br /><br />He spoke of how the West has always been plundered, violated and exploited, e'er since white men first came, initially with their covered wagons, later with their four-by-fours, and plastic boats on hitches inevitably trailing behind.<br /><br />"...But *Of Course* the West wouldn't be the West if that weren't so. There are, it is true, types who want to protect it, who want to throw themselves in the way of the Behemoth, who feel a 'relationship' with it. Some are sort of married to it, others just live with it, but that's stretching the latter term quite a lot, There is no geographical location more subject to nostalgia and that was also true from the first paintbrush. The yearning for its savagery was a nostalgia projected on the huddled masses of the East.<br /><br />"Life along the Overthrust Belt is lonely... This is just the same old inconvenience it always was. Still, there is no doubt that a traveller as late as Fitzhugh Ludlow could describe a beauty which was more raw than laid open..."<br /><br />But the place we saw in 1979 was more than anything else rent, ripped, torn, and laid open. <br /><br />Parts have been "reclaimed", parts have "recovered" or will "recover"...until, that is, the time comes again when it becomes "economically viable" to again rend, tear, and lay open.<br /><br />It is perhaps only the soul-lessness (in, again, the more intimate human sense of soulful) of the place that will be its defense against these creatures who are born to violate, these men, in the end.<br /><br />Ed thought of these poems, by the way, as "essays" or "comments":<br /><br />"[These] miniature essays do the traditional service the lingering traveller in The West has done over the decades. The best of western literature has always been acute observation, whether from geologists or poets. There have been more geologists than poets, as difficult to swallow as that may seem in the present statistic. But the worth of these comments is far beyond observation..."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-16330996661783478752010-03-29T03:37:49.423-07:002010-03-29T03:37:49.423-07:00Michael Lally directed me here. These are powerfu...Michael Lally directed me here. These are powerful images and even more powerful words, Tom. Scary and awe inspiring at once. Thanks.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-90764796266686567562010-03-29T03:37:15.800-07:002010-03-29T03:37:15.800-07:00It's the scale of that '.. violet dusk and...It's the scale of that '.. violet dusk and lonely horizontality' that often shocks us little islanders. From the madness of a Spiral Jetty out of control, or maybe that should be our ability to control too much, to the melancholic romance of a calloused hand and landscape..https://www.blogger.com/profile/00532376301529981186noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-88869387258343208952010-03-28T19:37:49.140-07:002010-03-28T19:37:49.140-07:00Tom,
What a brilliant little book this serial pos...Tom, <br />What a brilliant little book this serial post is. The wonders of the web that you can get it done and out and in my eyes and mind and ears and heart so instantly. Makes up a little for the broken hearted wretchedness of what you call the "raped" landscape. When I lived in Southern California I always missed what I used to call "the landscape of my soul" as in the East I grew up around, the denseness of the trees in some spots and the rolling hills no one has beheaded yet. I am grateful to be back despite the changes and the ghosts. But what would it do to my soul if I was a native of Wyoming or Appalachia or so many other naturally stunning places that are being permanently altered for the worse? Sorry to go on so long, but this post got to me even more than yours usually do. <br />MichaelLallyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05310472614196384595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-58417453537857842922010-03-28T14:30:38.133-07:002010-03-28T14:30:38.133-07:00Otto,
I've been, but here I am again.
Elmo,...Otto, <br /><br />I've been, but here I am again.<br /><br />Elmo,<br /><br />I think it may be possible to say that going into the earth after the "old" forms of energy would at least create jobs. Judging by what we saw in March '79, that was obviously the case. Plenty of jobs. Plenty transitory though. And a plenty ugly scene all in all.<br /><br />I mean, this set of writings is a sort of "capture": of a moment of cultural history, a snapshot of a transient-labouring wildcatter America with a romance all its own but also a special kind of denseness all its own. The greed to rip carbon out of the earth is a special kind of greed. It's not the conquistadors, who were at least after bright shiny things. The object of all this was simply to get anything that could be burned. A lot of the slurry pipeline product was going to Texas and Louisiana. The coal trains likewise were taking great parts of Wyoming out of Wyoming to heat and light up the East and Southeast and Midwest & c. The inevitable image of the raped landscape still lingers in the memory.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-27917759452216575632010-03-28T13:39:19.559-07:002010-03-28T13:39:19.559-07:00a poet can see the whole world
in a grain of sand
...a poet can see the whole world<br />in a grain of sand<br /><br />what do you suppose would happen<br />with the average person, town,<br />city, state when the minimalist<br />approach to use of natural resources takes hold......a lower<br />standard of living....bankruptcy<br />ie as it is now in many places...<br /><br />science plus capital to transition<br /><br />it won't all be clean<br /><br />preserve what you can<br />when you canElmo St. Rosenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-50359314648994476892010-03-28T07:39:45.015-07:002010-03-28T07:39:45.015-07:00I've never been -- but now I feel like I haveI've never been -- but now I feel like I have~otto~https://www.blogger.com/profile/08859835662556335529noreply@blogger.com