I went to the Botanical gardens a few weeks ago. Mainly I was there to get some work done, and the gardens are a nice place to read or write. But I remembered, while I was there, an assignment that a teacher once had us to called Word Gardens.
Continue reading “Word Gardens”Tag: Poetry
Transcendental confusion
I was in high school when I first read Walt Whitman. I remember being introduced to the idea of Transcendentalism, finding something about it intriguing, and liking something I read by Whitman. He’s lumped in with both the Transcendentalists and Romantics, but if you think of Transcendentalism as the American spin on Romanticism, or as two highly entwined movements, that makes a lot of sense.
I picked up a copy of Leaves of Grass somewhere, in which the poem Song of Myself is prominently featured. When I read it, I realized with excitement that I was already familiar with it. I was in a choir as a child, and someone picked out several passages to arrange into a chorale piece. It’s about innocence and death, which Whitman seamlessly entwines without allowing it to become dark…
You have the ocean
I’m very much a 90s child; I careened through my tween and teenage years in the last decade of the 20th century. Grunge and alternative music ruled the radio back then, which I now nostalgically regard as the backdrop of my adolescence. But in my heart, I was more of a Lilith Fair and Tori Amos fan.
I came to explore the wreck
I remember spending summers on a small island where my extended family members lived. Off one of the piers where we used to go, a ship had once wrecked. You could still see parts of the wood sticking up out of the water, blackened and weathered.
