I don’t like nature writing. It’s hard to live up to; and is (mostly) boring. I’ve thrown a lot of books across the room refusing to go further. Moral lessons abound, life changing experiences, transcendence, often with an underlying stench of preacher. Unless you’re a developer, it’s hard to find people who won’t tell you they love nature….with a capitol ‘N’. Our experiences in Nature tend to be non-verbal, or drowned out in cliche. If she could talk, she’d be fascinating. If only the river beside me could translate what it’s saying. What’s worse: the I-Phone’s constant image ‘capturing’, or the poverty of language? Nature doesn’t get credit (for all she gives us). In my Saran-wrapped life, I suffer anorexia. When I find a writer who touches truths I have felt but don’t have the capacity, or time, to clarify, I grab hold as to a lifejacket. Here’s one:
William Carlos Williams, a giant of 20th century poetry, wrote his wife a poem in his seventies apologizing for the hurt he did her, a love poem. Growing inside the poem, Asphodel, and planted in fertile dirt, are a few lines : “It’s difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day from lack of what is found there.”
Williams was a family doctor in Patterson, New Jersey. I figured he must have signed hundreds and hundreds of prescription slips. I asked Glen Horowitz, a book dealer, if he could find me one, and he did.
