William Johnson

RIBS, A TROUT AND A LILY

by Willam Johnson 

The making of a poem can be reckless and unpredictable, a groping after voice and form.  “Cathedral” was a long time coming, and, I now think, will never be complete.  Officially, it began on a backpacking trip I took with my two sons.  Memory says we fished into evening at a mountain lake.  In rain the boys hiked to camp without me.  Worn out as darkness fell, I carried a rod, pack and lunker trout after them.  When I rested under a cedar, something stirred in me.  It was a presentiment, held by rain, lightfall, the woods and a growing awareness they bore me.

My sons appeared in early drafts, and I strove to keep them in.  They remain as an invisible breath.  One image became central:  a rib-cage that lay near the trail.  As I worked on the poem, I began to feel these bones had waited a long time for me.  In near-dark I couldn’t see them clearly, but rain soaked the woods with expectation. 

And dread arose—over the trout, whose life I had taken, the bones themselves, and my feeling “parched and bitter” and alone.  If fear has an object, dread is faceless, an encounter with pure nothingness.  Out of it floated a solitary lily.  It grew in the bone-house where it tipped spilling rain.  If “Cathedral” has a sanctuary, it harbors not only a flower, but the ineffable mystery of being here.

Over time the poem became less narrative (‘what happened’) and more lyrical (‘what it felt like’).  A lily—floral Persephone?—sprouted in the house of death—well-spring of lives and poems.   Even this draft only scrapes the surface rain washes away.  If poetry bears a felt change of consciousness (Owen Barfield’s phrase), then “Cathedral” houses indwelling life, as a kinship with death. 

The poem’s last line came as a shock.  The power of dread, I now see, came to include our ecological crisis, which was less apparent to me in the early life of the poem.  That rainy hike now traverses a planet on fire.  How nourishing those raindrops have become.  The ribs, elk perhaps, offered me a gift both beautiful and uncanny. 

The forces that would make our earth, and us, dead, inert things, are tenacious.  Our call is to nurture not things, but images, the lilies within and without us.  The difference between an image and a thing is that a thing is drained of life, while an image bears it within, where it can be shared.   In a cage of bones, a lily tips, spilling rain.

Elizabeth Carls

“on Trespassing”: A Walking Meditation on Borders Real and Imagined

I’m interested in boundaries both real and false—the ways in which we as human beings attempt to compartmentalize and contain, the ways we divide our landscapes into states and nations, the ways we assign genres to the things we read and write. This is a theme I explore frequently in my writing in general and in the essay, “On Trespassing” specifically. Metaphorically, borders real and imagined show up in this essay in several ways—my own act of trespassing, the coyotes and beavers who cross property lines, even the micro-organisms decomposing the porcupine defy containment. It is an expansive essay, as was the walk that inspired it. As such the essay also contemplates, as I frequently do, the ill-defined border between ourselves and our environment.

The boundary between ourselves and our environment is permeable. There is no real barrier that separates us from nature nor it from us. I am interested in exploring through my writing practice the way the places we dwell affect us as much as we affect those places. How we carry the places we interact with in our bodies, how our environment has an emotional and sometimes physical impact on us, and how in turn, we have an impact on the natural world. “On Trespassing” is an essay very much about people’s relationship to the land, the idea of land ownership, land use, and land abuse.

I have a background­—both through education and vocation—in Conservation Biology. Because of this background in the natural sciences, I feel an obligation to resist describing an overly idealized version of nature in my writing. I’m compelled to be honest and accurate in my descriptions—to discuss the extirpation of animal species, or the conversion of forest and prairie to agricultural land, for example—while simultaneously being artful in the expression of my ideas, being mindful to not produce writing that is overly academic or dry. I am always aware of how the line between art and science gets blurred in the practice of writing, especially writing concerned with the natural world. I am mindful to walk that line carefully.

“On Trespassing,” is in many ways a walking meditation on borders both real and imagined. What I hope to have accomplished in this essay is the same thing I hope to accomplish in much of my writing—that is, to gently invite readers to join me on this walking journey, to contemplate along with me the ways in which we engage with the natural world, and to consider how we impact the places we engage with just as those places impact us. 

Dorothy Wall

Dorothy Wall on “My Grandson Wants to Go to Chernobyl”

Naturally, my poem started with my grandson, inveterate champion of animals large and small, his comment, off-hand and serious, when I told him about an article I’d read on the rebounding wildlife in Chernobyl: “I’d like to go there.” He’s drawn to animals, also the unusual, the intriguing. What could be more compelling than a wild place denuded of people, drifting backwards in time to its original state, given over to animals.

Early memories of my grandson, at 3 or 4, are of him climbing on a small stump and lunging over the edge of the compost bin, head-first, to get at the delectable worms and crawly things. Thrilled! Or heaving aside our garden rocks to discover worms and salamanders beneath, his up-reached hand showing me his wriggly treasures. At 4, he came racing to our front door, and when I opened, announced, “I’m an entomologist!” a word he’d just learned. 

The curiosity and freshness of a child, the regression to a pre-human state of nature at Chernobyl, the birth of a poem–all kin on some level. I read what I could about the processes going on at Chernobyl in our absence, human absence. After the nuclear power plant explosion on April 26, 1986, an area called the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 1,600 square miles, was sealed off to people. Villages abandoned, left to the weather, power lines sagging. But wildlife thrived. Scientists studying the area were taken by surprise at the degree of regeneration, the growing populations of wolves, brown bear, lynx, beaver, owls, eagles, hawks, bats, swallows. Even swans swimming in a radioactive cooling pond. An incredible testimony to adaptation and survival in the face of our destruction, the speed with which nature finds new opportunity. This is what my poem celebrates and marvels at, the imperative to live and multiply. And the remarkable, sobering fact that radioactivity has had a less lethal effect on wildlife than human presence. 

2023 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Split Rock Review and Split Rock Press are thrilled to announce our nominations for the 2023 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Congratulations to these Split Rockers and all the nominees this year!

Split Rock Review Nominees

Sarah Kotchian — “Count”

Martha Silano — “Once,”

John Wojtowicz — “Confessions of an Illegal Turtle Keeper”

David M. Brunson — “Removal”

Emry Trantham — “Three Raccoons”

Stacey R. Forbes — “Flying north, a war story”

Split Rock Press Nominees

DJ Hills — “Leaving Louisiana,” “It’s Monday and I Don’t Have HIV,” and “Leaving Baltimore” from Leaving Earth.

Rebecca Macijeski — “stopped clocks,” “small house,” and “what she thinks of me” from Autobiography.