“Can we believe when beholding this landscape, with only a few buds visibly swollen on the trees and the ground covered eight inches deep with snow, that the grain was waving in the fields and the apple trees were in blossom April 19, 1775?”
                                         --from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, April 14, 1852

     Certainly, we don’t have eight inches of snow just now, and in fact, we are due for warm weather this week, but not for long, and it has been a very late spring, a very long winter. Some people are predicting this will be one of those years with no spring to speak of, right from snow to swimsuits.
     Yesterday, I went to the Akron Art Museum and arriving early, was able to walk around to Quaker Square with my light rain coat on. I also had time to see the Rodin Exhibit. It is up till Mary 18th and pretty breathtaking to see, even just stepping off the elevator to the edge of the exhibit and even though I don't approve of what he did to Camille Claudel.
     The occasion was the “Spoken Word” series, emceed by Elton Glaser and featuring George Bilgere reading from his new book, The Good Kiss. He gave an excellent reading, sort of like Billy Collins with an edge, a nice edge that keeps the poems memorable as well as the reading engaging. Then the winners of the 2003 “Spoken Word” competition, including Mary Grimm (who won first place as well as honorable mention and read both poems) and Ray MacNiece & Neal Carpathios (who didn’t make it). Lynn Powell of Oberlin was there, as well as Alice Philbin of the Cuyahoga Valley Nature writers, and I met some new poets in northeast Ohio, including Philip Metres, a Cleveland poet who won third place and had an epigraph which fascinated me. I did not get to meet his wife, Amy Breau, who also read her award-winning poem.
     The reading was held in the room exhibiting the work of the previous artists in residence from Cuyahoga Valley National Park, including poets Ray MacNiece and Debra Connors and photographer Steve Farley, who was leaving his residence when I arrived for the first time a year ago. Steve had a really fascinating project where he took a group photo, then put it on a graph and gave each student a section of the graph to reproduce in some other art form. I loved the idea of individuals interpreting a part of the whole.
 

      Today we began the school’s residency a day early because it is Easter week, and we will be shut down on Friday. I met with two trail groups from Horace Mann middle school, which is in Lakewood, Ohio, and we wrote acrostic serenades, combination form I invented for my poem, “Serenade for my Goddaughter.” In part, I was encouraging the students to imagine the upcoming Night Hike. These are a few of my favorite lines from the day:

“Ontario hikes by them at night/…Yes, oaks…are beautiful in the evening.”—Tiffany

“Sparkling diamonds in the deep, dark sky/ Take their time to be big and bright.”
      --Kathleen

“Rain sparkling down from that/ Everlasting sky./ Even when it turns to dusk, the pond still/Sparkles through the night.” –Camille

“Night hawks swerve through the stars in the dusk./In the dark, when I look up the lightning bugs glow….”—Morgan

“Even the oldest deer crosses rivers to get to the sky in the evening.” –Kaitlyn

For some reason, they got off on Sasquatch, or "Sasquash," whether it is an urban, I mean rural, myth (my position) or a real (everyone else’s opinion) creature, and one student, named Jason, wrote a Sasquatch acrostic serenade on his name:

NIGHT

Joining
A
Sasquatch in his
Over-emotional
Nightly rage

Jumping 
Around in the light of the 
Stars, which are
Over our heads every
Night.

     And then, all the arguments for/against gross animals:
 
 

SNAKES (by Ray) Snakes wander thru the forest at night, New and old are all Around, Kept in the woods Especially at night Snakes are awesome then.	BUGS (by Matt) Bugs are nasty at night Underground Giants Slitherin at night
FROGS (by Dillon) Frogs are cool, they really Rock. Sometimes they go Out of sight. They jump around at night Give people a fright.	BUGS (by Kurt) Bugs don’t bug me. They are cool. Ugly, but smart too. Grow a little every day. Some are not very safe at night.

 

Wednesday, 16 April 2003

“Horace Mann says that he killed a bullfrog in Walden Pond which had swallowed and contained a common striped snake which measured one foot eight inches in length. Says he saw two blue heron over a fortnight ago. He brought me some days ago the contents of a stakedriver’s stomach or crop….He brought me also some time ago the contents of a black duck’s crop.”
                       --from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, April 16, 1861

     I was amazed to come across these references to Horace Mann just as I am working with students from Horace Mann School. I believe this is what people today call, “Synchronicity,” and we used to call, “coincidence.” Still, I got interested, wondered if Thoreau’s Horace Mann referred to the very same one, especially since the guy is still at it in Thoreau’s journals on April 20th, “H. Mann brings me the hermit thrush.”
      Sure enough, in researching, I find that Mann was originally from Massachusetts, one of the many Calvinists who became a Unitarian, one of the 19th century New Englanders trying to transform education—I think of Bronson Alcott among them. Mann's big push was for public education, starting first in Massachusetts (which could still use some pushing in that direction) and then nationally. 
     Interestingly enough, Mann has an Ohio connection too in that he came to Ohio to be President of Antioch College. He died in 1859, and in September of 1859, Thoreau entered this little tirade:

            Dr. Bartlett handed me a paper to-day, desiring me to subscribe for a statue to Horace Mann. I declined, and 
            said that I thought a man ought not any more to take up room in the world after he was dead. We shall lose 
            the advantage of one man’s dying if we are to have a statue to him forthwith…At this rate they will crowd the 
            streets with them. A man will have to add a clause to his will, “No statue to be made of me.” It is very 
            offensive to my imagination to see the dying stiffen into statues at this rate. 

     Of course, what Thoreau in his rant—which reminds me in such passages of the exaggerated anxious tone of a Village Voice journalists—forgets (no doubt willfully) is that we don’t build statues to everyone, that the few who get statues may need to stand as a reminder to us. And while we are going to get statues of all the Revolutionary War heroes and politicians, how nice to have someone propose one to a person whose life was about bettering the world through education, who said in a commencement speech, “Be ashamed to die before you have won some battle for humanity.”
     By the way, I cannot even begin to imagine what Thoreau thinks of that facsimile of him in that fake cabin in Concord, far from the actual site. But I’ll bet he approves of the site up on the hill where the cabin really stood, just a plaque and a pile of rocks that visitors continue to stack when they visit. Perhaps the idea of the fake cabin is to keep the riffraff out of the real woods, much as Minnesotans believe their winters keep the riffraff out. (The few, the hearty, the Minnesotans!)
      ANYHOW, in the index to Thoreau's journals, I learned that the Horace Mann  who ran around bringing all these reports of animals and animal organs to Henry David was Horace Mann Jr., two years after Horace Mann Sr.’s death in 1859, when the family returned to Massachusetts from Ohio. The autumn before the above 1861 entry (September 1860), Thoreau reports that young Horace was collecting shells back in Ohio, but had a tough time of it since hogs ran loose there then and ate all the mussels up.Yes, Yellow Springs, Ohio, where the hogs run wild (and the people, wilder.) 
     It seems that Horace Jr. was then a teenager  who loved nature. I imagine he sort of attached himself to Thoreau as a parent or teacher figure when his dad died. As a matter of fact, I just learn now, looking it up in a book (not online) of Thoreau's correspondence, and not, I swear before writing the Minnesota comment, that Henry David and Horace Jr. took a trip to Minnesota in the spring and summer of 1861. Doesn't it all just go round?
     Yesterday was an absolutely glorious warm day, warmer than anything I have known yet this spring, so I set out to see another end of the park. In fact, I ended in another park all together, the Hinckley Reservation. There was a manmade waterfall and hiking paths there, and I got out on them, came across many senior citizens walking, and we discussed the willows being the only things budded yet,  their very chartreuse-y green. 
     Today one group of Horace Mann students wrote persona poems, imagining they were one of the organisms. I loved this opening of a poem the student titled, "It's Hard to Be  Centipede":

"I inch my way around. I hope I won’t be found by those big things that squash my centipede friends.”—Morgan

And this tiny quatrain:

HERON (by Nick)

I am usually lonely
stalking my prey.
Sometimes I can stay
here all day.

     The other group of sixth graders read John Haines’s poem, “If the Owl Calls My Name,” and I asked them to imagine what they would do if an animal here called to them by day. One said this:

If the deer would speak to me in the afternoon, we would hunt for sappy trees and tall grass, and chase butterflies through the green forest.—May

And T.J., who wrote a long, elaborate ambitious acrostic poem on Monday, wrote this today:

WHEN THE SPIDER CALLS (by T.J.)

at sunrise 
from his web

I’ll wait for the sun to rise
then climb up his web
to meet  him.

We’ll talk a lot
and eat pizza.

We’ll sit on the couch
and watch T.V.
of weird
reality shows.

As the sun begins to 
set, I’ll depart,
fulfilled with happiness.
 
 
 

Thursday, 17 April 2003

“It is remarkable how the American mind runs to statistics. Consider the number of meteorological observers and other annual phenomena. The Smithsonian Institution is a truly national institution. Every shopkeeper makes a record of the arrival of the first martin or bluebird to his box. Dod, the broker, told me last spring that he knew when the first bluebird came to his boxes, he made a memorandum of it: John Brown, merchant, tells me this morning that the martins first came to his box on the 13th, he ‘made a minute of it.’ Beside so many entries in their day-books and ledgers, they record these things.”
                                           --from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, April 17, 1854

     Today was the last day of my six-week residence and so an end to this particular record. I am struck by recent accounts of “Bloggers,” who record their life daily (daily!) and at length online. ("Blog" is portmanteau for "Web Log.") Thoreau didn’t even know the beginning of it. One Iraqui in Baghdad was making daily, even hourly entries of what the war was like for a commoner there. At some point, his blog just disappeared. Several writers keep blogs, some political analysts, one of whom is attributed with running Trent Lott out of the Congress for stating his dated views about how good the good old days of segregation were. The regular pundits had become to take such Lott statements for granted, but the amateur ws more shocked by them and repeatedly said so.
     I was out walking with one of my two trail groups this morning, asking them who Horace Mann was. I never heard their answer but heard about their English teacher instead. They had already packed to go, and were waiting for the other half of the camp to finish final presentations. 
     We finally all got together in an open field for closing ceremonies, rather a sort of tossing our voices to the wind as the students stand in a HUGE outdoor circle and the microphone isn’t working. I sort of screamed a final two poems, a very fun, silly rhyming one by Kathleen about a Canada goose who gets a massage from a masseuse with his best friend Bruce, and this final one from Helen, who like T.J., wrote very ambitiously this week:

HERON DAYS (by Helen)

The heron calls in the deepest, darkest of mornings
when the dew has just fallen.
I’ll wait until he opens his wings and digs for fish
so early in the morning.
Sing sing o wise and beautiful guardian of the creek,
speak your beautiful heron words
of soaring above it all,
build your nest of pine and oak
teach your babies of the greatness of the world.
When you go to sleep, you will remember
all the beauties of your day,
you will fly overhead and see
the crystal reflection of your long body
and you will open your beak
and I will jump into the crystal water
and make a splash
which will give the grass more dew.

     After the closing and lunch, I had two meetings, the second, the exit interview, a bit difficult for me. I have been trying to suggest to the program administrators  for two weeks now that the Artist in Residence program would do well to have clearer planning procedures for residencies. They seem to have convinced themselves that they do, and I just don’t recall the ones we had. Yes! I’d like to shout, I recall them and they were confusing, fragmentary, and unhelpful. Nothing was put in writing, nothing stated on how the contract would be fulfilled and facilitated. (And in fact, it was neither and not just for me but many of the artists here.) 
    Interestingly enough, the exit interview was all put into writing—or rather, my words were typed up. Whenever I asked the administrator to respond to the questions posed to me, I got nonce replies. For example, I responded at length to the question, “How do you feel the use of two core groups, each seen twice, went?” I then asked what they thought, and I received a brief  response, something like, “It is one model. There are others.” Deep sigh. 
     Now I have hours and hours of packing and cleaning to do. It is not my style to put a big job like this off, but I was working so hard with the Horace Mann kids and the exit meeting time was never determined until the last minute so now at home at 6:00 p.m., I have all that to do. Next step is to break down the computer.
     Perhaps before I do, it would be good to let Thoreau have the last word, "Man [ahem] does not travel as easily as birds migrate. [S]He is not everywhere at home, like flies....My home, then, to a certain extent is the place where I keep my thick coat...and some books which I cannot carry; where, next, I can depend upon meeting some friends; and where, finally, I, even I have established myself in business" (August 19, 1851). Ohio will probably always be one of my homes, and certainly I have had coat, books, dear old friends, and six weeks worth of intense work, journalling and being with children here. But it is a journey to my other home that I make tomorrow, not as easy a migration as the sparrows flying back to Capistrano or the buzzards returning to Hinckley-- though the Boston Marathon is Monday, so there will be throngs awaiting there, just as they wait for the swallows and the buzzards.