Poem for John Berger
By Shelly Armitage
Hi, I’m Shelley Armitage here for Poets on the Plains. I’m an emerita professor and writer who grew up in the small ranching and farming community of Vega, Texas west of Amarillo. Today I’d like to share a few ideas and a poem with you. Writing about and living on the plains are dear to my heart.
The New England poet, May Sarton, once famously asked: “Why is there no poet of the plains. ”Her remark followed her first visit to the Southwest in the l920s where she witnessed the great expanse of prairie which abutted, in stark contrast, the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Unlike the sublime mountains, the seemingly endless flow eastward like a sea of grass, as early explorers called it, was viewed as “the Great American Desert,”—no wood, no water. So perhaps Sarton had hit a literary nerve: was this landscape worthy of love? of art? of writing?
I grew up in the small farming/ranching community of Vega, Texas, its name reflecting the landscape—in Spanish “a grassy plain.” It seemed from the front yard you could see all the way to Amarillo and from the back yard, to Tucumcari. I was captivated by this view. As a kid in school I dutifully learned about others’ landscapes-- Frost’s pudding stone, Poe’s gothic interiors. I loved this literature of course but never saw myself in it. I longed for literary companions to walk with me in the nearby pasture, searching for horny toads and ground squirrels.
Ditto my university experience and career as a professor. One’s proper subject matter for study, teaching, and publishing was Hawthorne or Percy Bysshe Shelley, the classics. Certainly not even the supreme westerner, Willa Cather.
So having outlived that literary canon and joyfully seen it changed a great deal through the years, I now happily celebrate the complexity of our region and the meaning of kinship with the natural world. In writing Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, I discovered a lyric voice inspired by our sea of grass, by taking time, by checking fence, we might say. Perhaps now poetry, in this world of microwave towers and wind farms can further serve as an act of witness and conservation. Or what I call the process of sustaining wonder. Here is a poem from my latest poetry book, From A Sandstone Ledge, in which I question our perception of and relationship to animals. It’s entitled “Poem for John Berger” and more about him in a minute.
POEM FOR JOHN BERGER
African, the zookeeper said, the largest
I had only my plains variety for comparison:
bowling ball small, pinched face, fierce incisors
a conundrum of quills napping in the nearest elm tree.
The sheriff shot him down,
that one, whose nocturnal gnawing
was slowly killing my oldest most treasured tree.
Tree or porcupine, tree or porcupine
Which to save, which to go?
The thud awakened me as he fell from his perch
suddenly not some distant object easily irradicated
but one who could look back.
Close up he had paddy-cake paws like a child’s hands
Had I killed a part of myself?
And now these—a pair—eating not trees
but grapes and sweet potatoes and dog food,
no foe, no needed defense in this homely zoo.
Their claws grasp breakfast,
they gnaw into tomorrow, quills
a black and white rainbow glistening--
no warrior’s breastplate, no headdress adorned.
Just quills—sometimes used for writing—
now used by my looking
by my making my story
out of you.
Used with Permission
The poem reminds us, we used to talk to animals, didn’t we? No, I don’t mean the family dog and cat. I mean bears, cougars, ravens, and eagles. And they talked to us. But something happened when we began to see them as fair sport, trophies, fit for feed yards or timeable milking machines. The critic and philosopher John Berger in his essay, “Why Look at Animals,” writes: “Each year more animals depart/Only pets and carcasses remain. . .Now that they have gone/it is their endurance we will miss./Unlike the tree/the river or the cloud/the animals had eyes/and in their glance/was permanence.”
The poem questions a poet’s use of animals by objectifying them in a story. But the story may also reawaken us to nature’s integrity and perhaps our own. As we celebrate the often overlooked and forgotten, we may realize the power of nature to draw us into a greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit. A complicated matter, the matter of poetry.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Shelley Armitage, member of the Texas Institute of Letters and care keeper of the family grasslands near Vega, Texas.
Dr. Shelley Armitage is Professor Emerita and former Roderick Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, she is the author of ten award winning books including her memoir Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, a Kirkus starred book, and first book of poems, A Habit of Landscape, a Spur award winner from the Western Writers of America. She lives near the Rio Grande River in Las Cruces, New Mexico and manages the family grasslands near Vega, Texas.
