| From West by Northwest.org Arts & Letters Reflections from Mount Saint Helens By Darcy Cronin Apr 29, 2005
Twenty five years after the 1980 eruption, poet-essayist Gary Snyder and ecologist Jerry Franklin will share experiences and writings from Mount Saint Helens. Join us for an evening of poems, ecological lecture and photographs that reflect on themes of destruction and renewal, lessons from cataclysms, and the long term history and future of an iconic Northwest terrain. Together they attempt to frame the questions, What do science and the humanities each contribute to understanding such places? And how does Mount Saint Helens inform its two million human neighbors' understanding of their place in nature? May 18th, 2005 Poet Gary Snyder with ecologist Jerry Franklin, an extraordinary researcher and observer of disturbance and restoration processes. Doors open at 6:30 PM with images of the mountain by Oregon photographer Gary Braasch. 7:30 PM Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall Portland, Oregon A poem Hay For The Horses He had driven half the night From far down San Joaquin Through Mariposa, up the Dangerous mountain roads, And pulled in at eight a.m. With his big truckload of hay behind the barn. With winch and ropes and hooks We stacked the bales up clean To splintery redwood rafters High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa Whirling through shingle-cracks of light, Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes. At lunchtime under Black oak Out in the hot corral, --The old mare nosing lunchpails, Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds -- "I'm sixty-eight" he said, "I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that's just what I've gone and done." by Gary Snyder More information: From the Beat Page on Gary Snyder: "Snyder won the Pulitzer prize for his collection Turtle Island in 1975. In addition to the mentioned works, Snyder's other volumes include: The Black Country (1967), Regarding Wave (1969), Axe Handles (1983) The Old Ways (1977) and No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992). Currently, Snyder is a faculty member at the University of California at Davis." © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org |
