Happy #EarthDay, #RecordStoreDay, #NPM17 #phenology

Today, April 22, 2016 is Earth Day. It's also #RecordStoreDay and the 22nd day of National Poetry Month.

Yesterday, we celebrated the actual arrival of Spring-like weather here in the North Country, we had dinner at the local drive-in. It was a cool evening but nice contrast to a morning which started with a skim of ice coating the now unheated bird bath.

leaf out reflected in bird bath ice

Photo by J. Harrington

The twenty-second suggestion for celebrating National Poetry Month is that we "Subscribe to American Poets magazine or a small press poetry journal." I already subscribe to American Poets, but hadn't yet come across the CLMP Directory of Independent Literary Publishers. Unfortunately, this seems to be my week for finding warts on resources suggested by the American Academy of Poets. One of my main interests is poetry (and literature) of place. I searched on the CLMP site and found listed a journal, Elsewhere. The accompanying link, however, goes to a blog site with a similar name but little, if any, relationship to literature or poetry. (Back in the days when the internet and I were both much younger, I learned to run a "link check" at least once a week.) A little sleuthing on Google revealed the following as the correct linkage for ELSEWHERE, A Journal of Place. I know of other journals of poetry of place [such asWindfall], but they didn't show up in a search of the data base. Searching for journals that focus on prose poetry also yielded nothing. Sigh! It's sort of like needing to know how to spell a word before one can look it up in the dictionary. On the brighter side, poking around on the internet looking for obscure things is sort of like intellectual gunk holing, even if you don't find what you started out looking for, other discoveries often compensate.

Earth Rise: we're all in it together

Earth Day

By Jane Yolen

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me.

Each blade of grass,

Each honey tree,

Each bit of mud,

And stick and stone

Is blood and muscle,

Skin and bone.

And just as I

Need every bit

Of me to make

My body fit,

So Earth needs

Grass and stone and tree

And things that grow here

Naturally.

That’s why we

Celebrate this day.

That’s why across

The world we say:

As long as life,

As dear, as free,

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me. 

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.