[Insert Title Here]

I need you to help me choose a title, friends. This has nothing to do with Charles Williams (as far as I know), but hey: My blog, my rules. Anyway, I’m working on books one through four of my Sixteen Books To Write After the Dissertation, and #4 needs a title.

Here’s the idea. It’s a volume of weekly meditations on poetry as practical ecology. In each entry, I take a poem (not by me: a classic or contemporary work by somebody famous or noteworthy) and write a little meditation on what we can learn about creation care from it. Then I’ll end each entry with a practical tip for nurturing the earth.

I don’t know whether this is really a thing in eco-crit land. Those of you who do real ecological criticism: Is it ever practical in application? Or is it always and only theoretical? Well, I think it could and should be a thing, so I’m trying it out to see what happens.

I’ve been hand-writing these little pieces of creative nonfiction in a lovely cork-covered notebook given me as a graduation gift by a friend. Hand writing anything is such a luscious, precious sensory experience these days. I find it’s easier to listen to the narrator in my head who is good at determining my chosen audience, sensing what level of diction would be good for them, gauging their imagined feedback, and guiding my rhetoric. The slower pace means I can craft better sentences, too, using hand and ear and eye together in the structuring of syntax.

So I don’t have a complete sample entry for you, but here’s a partial one that’s typed up (and isn’t as good as those scratched out in cursive with a Micron .005 pen on rich paper). It’s just to give you an idea of the sort of thing I’m attempting.

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God’s Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Everything is packed full of the possibility to burst into beauty. Seeds are nearly bursting—and then actually bursting—with their coiled up burden, the tendrils of vine or tree. The word “charged” makes us nowadays think of batteries, charged full of electricity, ready to provide power. This is not a bad analogy: the bud is ready to turn on, to glow, to illuminate its surroundings. But nature is even better than a battery, because it doesn’t wear down. Its power doesn’t leach out when unused. Charge up your Tesla, unplug it, and leave it in the garage—and the battery wears down, even without driving. The energy leaks out. No so with this green and growing earth! The caterpillar in the cocoon, the chick in the egg, the larva in the compost heap, the seedlings in the shell: they will not wear down or wear out while waiting. Their coiled and waiting power grows, “gathers to a greatness,” until the moment when they explode outward with all their joy in flower. Hopkins’ phrase “flame out” makes me picture trumpet-shaped blossoms, like on the Esperanza, Honeysuckle, or Foxglove: flowers whose bright orange or scarlet cornets flash against their drab backgrounds, playing their own visual fanfare to announce their dramatic arrival.

If you want to understand the bit about “shining from shook foil,” take a piece of aluminum foil, crumple it up a little, smooth it out again, then go stand with it in a patch of bright sunlight, and shake it. Watch how the light sparkles, darts, dances, and flames off of the varied surface. Imagine instead of ordinary household aluminum foil, you have a sheet of gold leaf, or the background of one of those Medieval icons, sunbeams glinting off the precious foil. That’s how the glory flashes out of nature: a yellow jessamine blooming unexpectedly in a shady corner; a fountain of native grasses cracking the asphalt in an abandoned parking lot; a goldfinch darting through your field of vision, one bright streak and then gone. 

This glory, says Hopkins, is like something that seems kind of strange at first: “the ooze of oil / Crushed.” Well, we’ve got to get out of suburbia to see what he’s describing here. Have you ever eaten really, really, really good olive oil? I’ve never been able to afford a truly artisan olive oil. The closest I’ve come is watching Samin Nosrat gushing about it in the “Fat” episode of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. *describe the pressing, the ooze…

[*Another paragraph about how things wait, then burst out]

[*but of course, next Hopkins describes how we’ve ruined it.]

[*But it’s not used up! It will still come back. Chernobyl.]

Practical Tip: When you encounter those horrible, depressing places where nature seems thoroughly dead—a mini-Mordor in your own neighborhood—don’t despair! Clear away the debris of trade and toil, then leave it alone. Maybe help it out with some water and compost. It will come to life again, and you’ll be amazed.

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Okay, that’s an example. I hope to write 52 of these, one for each week of a year. But what should I call the book?? I’m hoping for a beautiful, memorable, poetic phrase that suggests poetry as practical creation-care. I’m using “Fold, Fallow, & Plough” as a placeholder in my mind (and my filenames). That doesn’t communicate enough, though. Got any good ideas? Thanks!