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GIVING A VOICE TO PLACE

GIVING A VOICE TO PLACE. Hope Coulter for Dr. Amanda Hagood’s WRITING THE NATURAL STATE. The urge to describe. It is a desire, an immediate impulse in the face of wonder or pleasure or feeling confounded or flummoxed. . . --Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Words.

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GIVING A VOICE TO PLACE

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  1. GIVING A VOICE TO PLACE Hope Coulter for Dr. Amanda Hagood’s WRITING THE NATURAL STATE

  2. The urge to describe It is a desire, an immediate impulse in the face of wonder or pleasure or feeling confounded or flummoxed. . . --Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Words

  3. Carmel Point ~ ROBINSON JEFFERS The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses— How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rock-heads— Now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite, Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

  4. Sleeping in the Forest ~ MARY OLIVER I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

  5. Fidelity, accuracy, precision

  6. Setting and story

  7. For All ~ GARY SNYDER Ah to be alive on a mid-September morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up, holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern rockies. Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes cold nose dripping singing inside creek music, heart music, smell of sun on gravel. I pledge allegiance I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun With joyful interpenetration for all.

  8. Talk-back to “For All” • Line 1: “Ah, to be alive • Line 2: on a [add your choice of time] • Next lines: Describe a specific locale, including at least three of your senses. • Ending: Add a scrap of language from some other, recognizable context (the way Snyder lifted from the Pledge of Allegiance). Play with it.

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