Category Archives: Nature Writing

Chris Kluge Leaves Poetry Treasures by the Hudson River

(This essay appeared in the October/November 2015 issue of The Country and Abroad.) Take Me To The River Chris Kluge invited me to bring a gift for our walk beside the Hudson River: a line of poetry, a button, a … Continue reading

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Why Poets Should Write About Dirt

(Several weeks ago, I accepted the challenge of writing a poem about each of the four elements, which made me realize how badly I’ve neglected my education in dirt. About fire I had to plenty to say, ranging from fond … Continue reading

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Flying Over the Catskills

(This essay appears in the Spring 2012 issue of The Country and Abroad.) Isn’t a vacation an adult version of running away? Mine always leave me wishing I didn’t have to return home to some drudgery or other. My dread … Continue reading

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The Beacon Mountain Poem

Long before I grew enamored with Beacon as NoBro (North Brooklyn) with its gentrifying main street of art galleries and funky coffee houses clustered in restored brick buildings at both ends, I encountered it as a prison town. (“Be-A-Con,” a … Continue reading

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Hart Crane Hears the River

For years, I’ve been mesmerized by Hart Crane’s poetry as dazzling verbal displays that suggest stories lurking within their densities but always favor ecstatic language over explaining what’s going on. To read his poems aloud is to hear jazz pouring … Continue reading

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Voices in the Ice

For several years each February close to Valentine’s Day, our traveling poetry salon wrapped itself up in scarves and pulled on our boots for the sandy half mile trek out the Saugerties Lighthouse, where Patrick Landewe, the keeper, greeted us … Continue reading

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“The Slow Walker” Has Time to See Nature

The truth is that few hikes offer what you could honestly call an adventure. The dangers and challenges that you overcome as you clamber up rocks or snowshoe down hillsides are ones that you and countless others have handled many … Continue reading

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Water flows downhill (until it doesn’t) by Spider Barbour

(Naturalist, musician, and all around nice guy, Spider Barbour writes a nature column with Anita Barbour for the Woodstock Times. On Sunday afternoon, December 4th, he will join Michael Perkins and me for a reading at 1 pm at the … Continue reading

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The Early Saga of the Bald Eagles on the Ashokan Reservoir

(This early chapter in the saga of the Bald Eagles who nest at the Ashokan Reservoir—a story that is both triumph and soap opera—appeared in the September 4, 1997 Woodstock Times.) As manager of the Lazy Meadow motel on Route … Continue reading

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Trees, by William Weaver Christman

(In 1934, on the verge of turning seventy, Christman published this essay in a local literary magazine called Trails. A lifelong farmer in Duanesburg just west of Albany County, he’d always enjoyed literature; earlier in his life, he’d corresponded with … Continue reading

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