I am a reader, and occasional purchaser, of contemporary poetry. That puts me in a group no larger than holding capacity of your average college stadium. Now if you wanted to gather the people who write poetry together, you would probably have to lease every facility in NFL for the weekend. But those of us who simply read, without being "in the business" as it were, are a vanishing small minority. If you doubt it, keep in mind that the average press run for a volume of new poems is in the range of one thousand to three thousand copies. The current estimated population of the United States is, as I write this, 295,186,847. You work out the percentage of the American public which can be expected to buy a new work of poetry. Nonetheless, poetry is one of the things I love, and I do my best as a reader and book buyer to support the work of living poets I admire.

The reason I bring this up is the book sitting on the top of the bedside reading shelves, The Best American Poetry 2004, courtesy of the local library. Every year, I helplessly pick up the latest installment in the series, drawn like Charlie Brown to Lucy holding that football. Every year I end up sorting through line after line of solipsistic nonsense by folks who seem actively hostile to the sound and rhythms of speech in English. Ah, but hope springs eternal. I will let you know how it goes with this year's volume, and will follow up with a list of a few contemporary poets I do enjoy.

In the meantime, you could do worse than spend some time with Dana Gioia's website. Beside being the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he is also a fine critic and poet in his own right. While you are there, be sure to read his 1991 essay, "Can Poetry Matter?"

The tragic reports and film footage coming in from the countries bordering the Indian Ocean serve as a reminder of the unexpected power of moving water. Right before Christmas, we had a line of thunderstorms accompanied by "significant wind gusts." What you see in the picture was our reminder of the unexpected power of moving air. While Susan watched, a pocket of 50 mph winds picked up the sheep shed and flipped it on its roof, taking out a big chunk of our fence in the process. No harm was done beyond the obvious damage, for which we are grateful.

The first lamb of the season. The mother behind him is not actually possessed, though she is a little irritated. Lighting is tricky in the barn and the digital sometimes needs a flash fill when shooting in the dimmer corners. Unfortunately no one seems to have an automatic sheep "blue-eye" removal setting.

Sheep in Afternoon light

Yesterday was a beautiful day, unseasonably warm and just right to finish the job of taking down the old barbed-wire fence. After much delay and a few attempts to sneak back to the new video game, I finally got older and younger sons motivated and out by the long drive leading to the in-law's house. The wooden posts for the new fence were already in the ground, waiting for new wire mesh to be stretched tight from post to post. The old fence was a scraggly ad-hoc affair consisting of four strands of rusting barbed wire on short metal posts. The sheep had taken to going though it like ghosts walking through walls. Like ghosts, they had also taken to appearing in places where they were neither wanted nor expected. Hence the new fence. We took down a few individual strands to save for later use, but there was more old wire than we wanted or needed to salvage. The oldest started rolling strands together in a ball as the youngest and I unclipped the wire from the old metal posts. The further he rolled, the larger it got, until he was struggling behind a waist high ball of barbed wire, like a snowball from some metallic storm. The last post came out of the ground with the sun setting over Hogback mountain. We drove up to the in-law's house, old posts rattling in the back of the farm truck, tired and hungry and ready for my mother-in-law's New Year's Day dinner.

"So I wrote you a long letter. . .
I filled it up with love from start to end.
You have always deserved so much better,
so it's a letter I could never send."

Bill Mallonee
"Long Letter"
"Dear Life" Outtakes

I am usually not one who makes New Year's Resolutions, so it is with some trepidation that I announce my intention to post at least once each day for the coming year. 2004 was a Dickensian year in that it could best be described in that famous opening from A Tale of Two Cities; "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." There was so much that needed saying that the accumulated weight left me all but speechless. A quick look back shows that this blog was silent three hundred thirty one days out of three hundred sixty six last year. I resolve to do better and commit to leaving no trivial opinion or observation unrecorded if needed to fill space. Perhaps a little depth may come out of the increased volume.

Over the last couple of years Gideon Strauss has been propagating an exercise whereby people list fifty things they love. I propose to give it a try. Since I need material, I intend to drag it out one item a day over the next fifty days, in no particular order, with a little commentary for each item. For those few of you still checking in, thanks for dropping by and I'll see you in the morning.

If you are a visitor from Bishop Seraphim's Live Journal, greetings and welcome. I started this weblog on a rainy Sunday afternoon in March of 2002 and have been posting with varying frequency ever since. In recent months the ratio of writing to photographs has tipped heavily towards photographs. If one picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps I have kept up with my earlier intentions after all. The photographs, with very few exceptions, are my own, taken here on the farm with my trusty, but now obsolete, Olympus D-400 1.3 megapixel digital camera. Some of my favorite pictures are now scattered in the archives available on the right hand side of the weblog. I have two other web projects, both far more neglected than this one. For a while I double posted weblog entries over at this live journal site. It has been dormant for a while and I am deciding what to do with it. I also have a second weblog, The Suburban Ascetic, which I use for occasional longer pieces on Orthodoxy in the modern world. (By "occasional" I really mean "once in a blue moon.")

Please feel free to stay a while and browse. If you see a picture you like, you are free to use it. Just give me a credit and/or link back. By the way, clicking on any picture will take you to a larger version.

Sheep in the yard take a break after a hard morning's grazing.

More llamas

Sheep and leaves

Llama against an autumn sky

Morning Cloud and Fall Color 10-22-04

Who says that poets love the mountains?
Mountains, mountains---
            I'm tired of writing about them!
Thousands of peaks and thousands of ranges
            seem to throw themselves at me.
I have to rest three hours for each hour of climbing.

When your desk is piled high
            Where can you put another book?
When your stomach is full,
            How can you go on eating?
I have no use for more green slopes
            and mountain mists---
I'll wrap them in a package
            and send them to my city friends.


YANG WAN-LI "AT AN-LE TEMPLE"
(Trans. Jonathan Chaves)

Morning 9-23-04

Alma

Skyline Drive Sunrise 9-14-04

ram: n. a male sheep
v. to strike with violence

With dusk changing rapidly to darkness, we were down at the barn trying to herd sheep by the single light shining out into the middle pen. A gate sprung open, our eight rams had mixed in with a dozen or so ewes in the barn lot. This is not good for your breeding records, so the younger son and I were thrashing around in a waist high mob of wooly backs in a half-lit barnyard. Like some sweat-soaked, near-sighted, anti-Noah, there I was frantically trying to divide male from female so they would not go together, two by two. The sheep were being sheep, that is to say, that they were not cooperating. I was not happy and said so. At length. Using a full and varied vocabulary gained from sixteen years working with cops and criminals. We finally got the impromptu ovine singles mixer to move into a smaller pen where there was more hope of catching the rams and giving them the bum's rush back out into the upper pasture without their new girlfriends in tow. I had my back turned trying to close the gate when February, until then a favorite ram, slammed me squarely in the back. With Newtonian inevitability, I in turn slammed into the gate, throwing it back open. The younger son, faced with the sight of his father hopping around like Quasimodo and hollering like Homer Simpson showed maturity beyond his years by neither fleeing nor dissolving in laughter.

Later, when the aspirin kicked in and I stopped wondering how much freezer space the offender would take up as mutton chops, my wife assured me that it had just been a love tap. If he had been really serious, he would have hit me much harder.

It has been a while since I updated this site. If you are reading this, thank you for still being interested and stopping by. I will endeavor to be more regular in my postings over the next month. In the meantime, here is a poem from Wallace Stevens that captures many of my evenings of late:

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

This, believe it or not, is the site approved by the outgoing town council for the location of our new Wal-Mart. The Shenandoah River flows behind the trees at the edge of the field. I once described the folks in my neck of the woods as "conservatives with something left to conserve." Less and less it seems.

Sunset over Skyline Drive July 7, 2004