+ do you like nature? do you like writing? +

This is Gary Snyder, from the cover of his book, "The Gary Snyder Reader". He seems friendly and he most likely has a wonderful laugh.

I am 'live streaming' (I am live...-ing?) from my +American Nature Writing+ class and I thought I'd share with you a sliver of what we're discussing. I'm giving you around 0.00000025% of my total $40,000/semester value of an education right now. You all now owe me ....... somewhere around 22 cents? More? Less? I'm not a math major.
We are pursuing a discussing involving Edward Abbey (my future husband) , Gary Snyder, and Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek".


Professor Robert Kern + words of the wise:
- there is a broad conception of nature writing that is yet to be discovered
- stray away from literary devices, poetry, as a way to talk about nature and deleting human influence upon its impression [this sounds slightly impossible]
- or be like Annie Dillard who doesn't know what she's seeing till she verbalizes it, glorifies and celebrates it through language, metaphor, and grander associaton
- in nature there is mystery, applicability, fantasy -- Dillard hunts out the wild by finding objects in the woods (for example) and turns them into a fantastical story that she calls 'a rush of freedom and beauty' > this isn't nature writing, this is a cartoon! fiction! versions of nature writing are quite boundless
- Edward Abbey would possibly hate Annie Dillard's writing style
- " a crop of urban houses" - The Big Read by Robinson Jeffers = reminds me of Levvittown, Long Island, = the phrase is a nauseating oxymoron

favored poem:

Ripples on the Surface
Gary Snyder (1993)

"Ripples on the surface of water
were silver salmon passing under—different
from the sorts of ripples caused by breezes"

A scudding plume on the wave—
a humpback whale is
breaking out in air up
gulping herring
—Nature not a book, but a performance, a
high old culture.

Ever-fresh events
scraped out, rubbed out, and used, used, again—
the braided channels of the rivers
hidden under fields of grass—

The vast wild
the house, alone.
the little house in the wild,
the wild in the house.
both forgotten.
No nature.

Both together, one big empty house.

+notice the lack of description and simplicity that strips away human layers of language to a barren photographic account +