Palin Update: "Fruit Fly Research"

Er, autism? Isn't this a special needs concern for which Palin has voiced advocacy?

She scares the flarf out of me.

ROB BREZNY'S FREE WILL ASTROLOGY: Cancer

CANCER (June 21-July 22): "I like the dreams of the future better than
the history of the past," said Thomas Jefferson. It might feel a bit
unnatural to live as if that were your motto, Cancerian, but I hope you'll
try it for a while. Here's the experiment I propose: Whenever you have a
spare moment, visualize a pleasurable and interesting scene you would
like to create for yourself in the future. If a fearful image pops into your
mind as you do that, imagine yourself rolling that image up into a ball and
throwing it into a roaring fire. Meanwhile, any time your attention begins
to wander off in the direction of the old days and old ways, pounce on it
and redirect it into a vision of a fulfillment to come. Halloween costume
suggestion: the person you'll be five years from now.

Five years from now, I'll be above the speed limit (the double-nickel). Five months from now, I'll be planning my first vacation in years. Five weeks from now, I'll be wrapping Christmas gifts for my ever-shrinking family. Five days from now, I'll be canvassing for the last time this election. Tomorrow (at about 5 hours squared from now), I'll be leaving for dinner with various other members of my English department, and, ahem (name-dropping alert), a Mr. E. P. Jones. I'm so starstruck that I don't think I'll be able to pronounce his name, much less pose to him the questions about "A Rich Man" that have been engrossing me since I first read his work.

(PS I almost fainted when I met Galway Kinnell. I guess I'll take smelling salts tomorrow, to prevent the literary vapors).

This Day in History: October 27, 2008

October 27, 1932

Sylvia Plath
On this day, poet Sylvia Plath is born in Boston. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of biology and a leading expert on bumblebees. An autocrat at home, he insisted his wife give up teaching to raise their two children. He died at home after a lingering illness that consumed the energy of the entire household and left the family penniless. Sylvia's mother went to work as a teacher and raised her two children alone.

Plath was an outstanding student. She won a scholarship to Smith, published her first short story, "Sunday at the Mintons," in Mademoiselle while she was still in college, and won a summer job as "guest managing editor" at the magazine. After the job ended, she suffered a nervous breakdown, tried to commit suicide, and was hospitalized. She returned to school to finish her senior year, won a Fulbright to England, and went to Cambridge after graduation, where she met poet Ted Hughes in February 1956. They married four months later.

Plath took a job teaching at Smith, which she kept for a year before quitting to write full time. She and Hughes lived in Boston, and she attended poetry workshops with Robert Lowell, whose confessional approach to poetry deeply influenced her. Hughes won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1959 and the couple returned to England, where Plath had her first child.

Her first poetry collection, Colossus, was published in 1960 to favorable reviews. The couple bought a house in Devon and had a second child in 1962, the same year that Plath discovered her husband was having an affair. He left the family to move in with his lover, and Plath desperately struggled against her own emotional turmoil and depression. She moved to London and wrote dozens of her best poems in the winter of 1962. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical account of a college girl who works at a magazine in New York and suffers a breakdown, was published in early 1963 but received mediocre reviews. With sick children, frozen pipes, and a severe case of depression, Plath took her own life in February 1963 at age 30. Hughes edited several volumes of her poetry, which appeared after her death, including Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), and Collected Poems (1981), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

__________________
Stings

Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I

Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup,
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessive love I enameled it

Thinking 'Sweetness, sweetness.'
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?

If there is, she is old,
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush ----
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column

Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?

It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin

To scour the creaming crests
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone

In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,

The sweat of his efforts a rain
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Molding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.

They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her ----
The mausoleum, the wax house.

Eye Candy: Reds and Flatness

Ammi Phillips, Portrait of a Young Girl with Cat and Dog



Mark Rothko, 1956



Ammi Phillips, Portrait of Young Girl and Her Cat

Birthday of Berryman: From The Writer's Almanac , and Then a Word from Our Sponsor, i.e., Moi

It's the birthday of poet and scholar John Berryman, born in McAlester, Oklahoma (1914). His mother was a schoolteacher. His father, who was a banker, committed suicide when John was 12 years old. A few months later, his mother married a man whom she'd been having an affair with for the past year. They moved to New York, and Berryman went to a prestigious boarding school and then to Columbia University. He was an excellent student — a good poet and passionate about Shakespeare. He earned a grant to study Shakespeare at Cambridge in England. When he came back to the United States, he tried to get a job in advertising, but instead he went into academia. He became an "academic nomad" over the next decades, teaching at many different schools before settling at the University of Minnesota.

His personal life was tumultuous. He struggled with alcoholism and mental illness, and he was a chronic womanizer. One summer, two years into his first marriage, he fell in love with the young wife of one of his graduate students, and they began a passionate affair, which he chronicled in a cycle of 100 Petrarchan sonnets.

He made his name with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), a dialogue between Berryman and the 17th-century poet Anne Bradstreet. He worked on the project for five years, and it was so consuming that it led to the end of his second marriage. But critics thought the work was brilliant.

Berryman sought treatment for his mental illness, and part of his psychotherapy regimen was to keep a log of his dreams. Many of these dreams made their way into his poetry cycle Dream Songs. The poems were an enormous critical success.

He described his 385 Dream Songs as "essentially about an imaginary character named Henry, a white American in early middle age, sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss." He said, "These Songs are not meant to be understood. … They are only meant to terrify & comfort."

The first of the Dream Songs begins:

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point, — a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

Berryman was also a great scholar of Shakespeare. For decades he worked on a critical work on Shakespeare. Before publishing the book, he committed suicide by jumping off a bridge on the University of Minnesota campus on a January morning as students walked to class.

He wrote: "It is reassuring to consider that Shakespeare wrote four failures, plays that few have ever cared to produce and mostly scholars read. These failures are The Two Gentlemen of Verona, King John, All's Well That Ends Well, and Timon of Athens. The reasons for his failure in each case were different, but at least he was always capable of failure, and it is pleasant to know this."
__________________
I love Dream Song 4 perhaps the best:

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact that her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. -- Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls. --
Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.

________
One of the most startling achievements in "Dream Song 4" is Berryman's variance between lines of regular iambic pentamenter (the traditional English/love poem line) and the irregularity/variance of the lines of its interior monologues. Iambic pentamenter in the first two lines, and then BAM, twice. Next, an iambic pentameter line (or an almost perfect iambic pentameter line; there's a trochee to open the line, perhaps Henry putting the wrong foot forward with this social situation?); then an overlong line, just as the table is overfull with the girl's family and the following line with its mimetic variable stresses of springing on her). Genius, Berryman, just genius rhythmically. I could go on and on in quite some tedia, but you don't want my maunderings--you want the poem. (I will add, though, that in lines 8, 9 and the first half of 10, Henry's imaginary salute to the lady in its skewed-Sir-Philip-Sidney-sort-of-way is also completely a line of iambic pentameter).

This is among "My Hundreds," the poems I have by heart, and if you haven't read Beth Ann Fennelly's excellent essay in the current issue of APR, go find it. It's a beautiful pondering of why and what to memorize.

"Let Them Eat...Pancake!"

Just when I'm feeling guilty about splurging on $30 perfume from Avon, the RNC strikes again! This amount is nearly 2 years' worth of mortgage payments for Harvey and me. Un-frugal-believable. It becomes even more unbelievable when you consider that my English 101 comp. class researched the poverty level incomes in the United States, and in 2008 a family of four earning $21,400 qualifies as living in poverty. For singles, it's $10,400.

In order to glamourize Sarah Palin, the Republican party in a fortnight has spent enough on Max Factor to lift a family of four out of the poverty level, or two individuals out of the poverty level. I've even done the math for the $150,000 clothes expenditure: Seven families, 14 individuals.

I don't find Lolita or Finnegan's Wake offensive, but I find these expenditures obscene.

Found in Translation: Palin Abroad

Maverick
In Arabic, "a bird that sings outside the flock."
In Italian, cane sciolto or "dog without a leash."

Joe 6-Pack
In French, le beauf' plein de bière, "an uneducated, extremely conservative brother-in-law who is narrow-minded as well as racist."

Hockey Mom
In Spanish, madraza, boisterous mom.

Palin
In Esperanto, airhead. (Sorry, couldn't resist).

Can you imagine the problems that foreign journalists have with Palin when Americans can't tell her real lines from the scripted comedy of SNL, or from the output of a Palin cut-up generator?

More in the Thicket: Free Will Astrology

CANCER (June 21-July 22): As the stock markets came crashing down, a
different kind of global devastation received scant notice. The World
Conservation Congress revealed that 25 percent of the planet's mammal
species and one out of eight birds are on close to extinction. We're not
just talking about exotic animals in remote hideaways, but rabbits and
deer and cardinals and turtledoves. As you meditate on how to reinvent
yourself in the wake of the financial shifts, Cancerian, please hold a vigil in
your heart for the endangered creatures. The two crises are related, after
all. The greed to turn everything into a means of generating money has
led humans to both despoil nature and risk the crazy gambles that have
savaged the economy. The more you understand that, the better your
intuition will be as you make personal decisions affecting your future
relationship with money.

In a Rut: Winding and Unwinding

You shall see me wind my tongue about his heart,
Like a skein of silk.

Julia, The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster

Maybe this is just one of those weeks, but I'm finding everything--editing, teaching,writing, even reading--exhausting beyond belief. (Reading as exhausting? This has never happened to me before!)

I'm hoping for good news--about the election and otherwise in November. Till then, I'll keep trying to hack my way out of the thicket that October's become.

And Everything Was Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Rimbaud!

Caricature of Rimbaud, drawn by Verlaine in 1872. Rimbaud was born on this date in 1853.

The link above is to Patti Smith discussing her being "drawn to his affectionate contemptuous face." Here's a quote:


Biography cannot be looked upon as the Rosetta stone of a subject. Only Rimbaud could encode the atmosphere of his being. Arthur Rimbaud has written himself in A Season in Hell and Illuminations. There you will find him, with all contradictions intact. Only Rimbaud could wrestle, refine, and reinvent the civil war of his personality. And only fools would attach themselves to any singular notion of the poet; for all things are irrevocably entwined within the infernal stump of his existence.

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO'S THE UNFAIREST ONE OF ALL? (Editorial in the Buffalo News by Douglas Turner)

This is the best editorial I have read as far as debunking McCain's "maverick" status. (Please read the article in full at the link above. Turner also questions McCain's choice of Palin and offers a reason into what may have prompted McCain's selection of her as a running mate).

Here's the salient part of the article:

What's Happened to the McCain We Knew?

WASHINGTON — At a rally weeks ago, John McCain leaned into a microphone and asked in the tone of a dime-store pitchman: “Who is Barack Obama?”

The Republican presidential candidate could look in a mirror and ask that of himself, particularly after Wednesday night’s debate.

Where is the Arizona senator, the reformer, the “straight talker” who investigated Republican corruption in the Indian casino mess? Where is the author of campaign finance reform? Where did the friend of the poor immigrant go?

Do the haters now possess the soul of the onetime defender of tax justice?

McCain, who waited years to elbow George W. Bush out of the way, appears to have become all of those Republican insiders he once despised:

• Richard Nixon, the master of dirty tricks who tried to deploy the FBI for partisan purposes.

• Karl Rove, the exploiter of religious, sexual and reproductive wedge issues.

• Bush himself, who would follow any calculating jerk’s advice, particularly if it was risky, hard right and unyielding.

• And finally, the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., the grinning purveyor of the patriotism smear.

“And you launched your political campaign in Mr. Ayers’ living room,” McCain claimed in the third debate, referring to William Ayers, a onetime terrorist whom Obama repudiated.

McCain went on, “Obama chooses to associate with a guy who in 2001 said that he wished he had bombed more, and he had a long association with him.”

McCain’s choice for vice president, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, had already accused Obama of “palling around with a terrorist.”

Overnight Friday, the McCain forces ramped it up. I got a recorded message from the Republican National Committee at my Virginia home that said in part:

“Hello, I’m calling for the RNC and John McCain because you ought to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers . . .”

Obama debunked the smear during the debate. It is the worst I ever heard about that one candidate delivered against another.

None of McCain’s, Palin’s or the RNC’s charges are true. Nothing can make them so. Yet McCain & Co. keep piling it on, broadening the lie from “palled around,” to “associate with” and now “worked closely.”

The big lie worked for McCarthy, Nixon, Rove, Bush and Adolf Hitler. And it may work again in this era of chainsaw politics. It’s not funny or forgiveable. Should it disqualify McCain on grounds of character?

Now that McCain himself has rolled around in the gutter on national television, what will be left of presidential majesty, the demeanor of a chief of state, if he gets elected?

From an Interview with Beth Ann Fennelly by Luan Gaines: On Fearlessness

You don't withhold anything in your poetry. Where does this fearlessness come from?

If I could think of anything I wouldn’t put in a poem, I’d put it immediately, rather perversely, in a poem. Because poetry is play, is a game, though a serious one. And because I love thrift stores and the thrill of discovering the cool genuine item as opposed to buying, say, “distressed” jeans. And I love the energy that comes from the juxtaposition of different types of material, and I love the democracy of it, too. Here I’m thinking of how Marianne Moore would make use of a “low” poetic source, like a phrase printed on a Kiwi shoe polish can, and rub that up against some high culture reference to art in the Vatican. To me this tells us in words what Joseph Cornell’s boxes tell us with images--anything can be art, art is all around us. Look around you and you’ll find it.

In Tender Hooks, my inclusiveness took on a new aspect as I explored the emotional complexities of parenting. I felt such an urgent need to tell the truth that I didn't really think of what I was saying as controversial--I certainly never thought of myself as "fearless," but I'm glad for the compliment. I've learned since publishing the book that some of the honesty in the book is shocking to people. I got hate mail for a few of the poems inside, no kidding. A poem called “Once I Did Kiss Her Wetly on the Mouth,” which delves a little bit into the erotics of the mother-child relationship, was reprinted on Poetry Daily and the editor, Don Selby, forwarded me emails from readers who called me a pervert and a sicko. The emails hurt my feelings for a little bit, but I got over it.

_______________________
There's so much to think about in this question-answer. What are you afraid of facing/fessing up to when you write? For me, it's faith and questions about faith. I know other writers do this beautifully (Anne LaMott, Mark Jarman, Andre Dubus, Flannery O'Connor); it just scares the heaven out of me to tackle faith outside of a diary page.

I have recently taught a poem of Fennelly's called "Gong." My students love its brevity; I love it as a mother-child koan.

Joe the Plumber's Caught with Cracks in His Story

One of the things this article doesn't mention is that "Joe the Plumber," "Joe-6-Pack," and "hockey mom" are all stereotypes. You can literally hear the condescension dripping in McCain's voice when he refers to these "little citizens".

Here are my thoughts: If Joe W. makes more than $250,000 a year, he deserves no additional tax cuts. He deserves to pay more taxes than someone who makes $25,000 a year. (See #1 below). According to the article, Joe W. hasn't paid any taxes in a while. Why is he held up as a paragon of normal, law-abiding citizenry? Again, more vetting should have taken place by the McCain staff.

I have my own suggestion for tax reform. If you are prejudiced enough that you don't support same-sex marriage/civil unions being recognized by the government, if you think that the government has no business "interfering in" or legally defining marriage/civil unions, if you have signed any of the so-called "Protection of Marriage" resolutions, put your money where your mouth is and voluntarily DO NOT TAKE the "married filing jointly" savings break on federal and state income taxes. If you choose to take these deductions, yet argue that the government does not have a primary role in defining or regulating marriage, you are being hypocritical. (See #3 below). I don't have the accounting skills to crunch the numbers, but certainly $500 to $1000 or so in extra taxes from each couple of the "millions" on the Religious Right would help out our current economic crisis. $500 times 1 million families, well, that's a significant savings, isn't it?

There are three biblical precedents for this:
1. "Render unto Caesar the thing that is Caesar's." Your taxes are Caesar's. God is telling you to pay them, and pay them fairly without complaining.
2. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." If your heart is truly in the "wrong" right-wing place, if you support discriminating against other couples who have Constitution-guaranteed rights, ante up to the IRS and don't take the marriage deduction.
3. "Woe unto you, you whited sepulchres." In the whole New Testament, I can find no reference to Jesus' getting mad, except at hypocrites like the Pharisees who misused the temple and God's word for their own political ends.

I support same-sex unions. I don't see that a church or its more reactionary members have any business defining marriage to the government, any more than the government has a right to define religious beliefs to a church and its members. That's the definition of separation of church and state.

(I will also freely admit I have a prejudice against church interference in marriage. The church to which I belonged 22 years ago refused to marry Harvey and me because I was divorced. We are one of the couples who were joined in a "civil union." I'm glad we had that option, and I wish it were extended to all committed couples. I have learned to respect the right of the individual church to choose not to perform any ceremony of marriage. What I don't respect is the church or its members nosing into the territory of federal/state legislation to inflict its restrictive views on others).

The church's intrusion into government bothers me; so does the Republican Right's insistence that eloquence is "evil," that using language properly and effectively is "suspicious." I wonder if the McCain-Palin ticket considers Webster, Roget, Strunk and White, worthy of Homeland Security interest. Maybe these are 3 more texts that Palin might hypothetically ban from public libraries...or maybe these are works she herself should "pal around with."

Rob Brezney's Free-Will Astrology: Weekly Horoscope

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Sometimes it makes sense for you to be
conservative and cautious and skeptical of novelty. A periodic immersion
in the slow-motion approach helps you maintain a strong center of gravity
and allows you to be true to yourself in the face of the pressure you get
to be like everyone else. The past few weeks have been such a time for
you, Cancerian. Soon, though, you'll begin to feel urges to take some
risks, instigate fresh trends, and express yourself with more daring and
expansiveness. Are you game?

______
Well, I'm daring enough to go to AWP...in February, in Chicago...not knowing how many others will be in our MSU mass collision and slinging of Samsonite room. (that should be novelty, you betcha fer shur, wink). Who else is headed there?

Update: Click on the link above for some Halloween/nursery rhyme delight about who's kept...

McCain-Palin? Are You Kidding?

McCain's temper, spoiled-brat character, and the destruction of the US Forrestal:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain

Sarah Palin's ties to a secessionist organization that is arm-in-arm with "neo-Confederate" groups (link above) in Salon. This article describes the cronyist political firings for which she's become known.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/10/10/palin_chryson/index2.html

Read these vetted articles and see if in good conscience you can support any other ticket than Obama-Biden.

Going Green: 77% less energy, 73% less water....

100% more style. Coming soon to a laundry room near me!

Babies in Boxes & Uncles in Bowlers--Antique Postcard

An Open Message to Sarah Palin, One Christian to Another

When your words are filled with hate and motivated by political greed, when a crowd is chanting Kill him, kill him, and you look on, smile, and do and say nothing to stop the furtherance of hate, you definitely are following a biblical precedent, and it's not What Would Jesus Do?.

Stop condoning racism. Don't think that a "clean campaign" means "washing your hands" in the manner of Pontius Pilate. You are hurting the witness of all Christians by your actions.

Yeah, I went there.

McCain and Obama Debate Two: "That One"

I am disheartened to realize that it's the 21st century, and John McCain used this term to refer to Barack Obama. "That one" has long been a racist term where I live (the tightest notch in the Bible Belt), and its use has connotations of fungibility, of dehumanizing and belittling someone else by not even referring to his or her name. It's the in-the-sanctuary-at-church substitute for other racial epithets.

Hearing this from McCain on national television during a presidential debate saddened me, but it didn't surprise me. After all, in the 2008 primaries, McCain referred to a "tar baby" situation. In the 2000 campaign, McCain over and over again characterized certain Asians as "gooks." Click the link above for one citizen's response to these slurs that McCain uttered repeatedly during the 2000 primaries. This is a powerful indictment of McCain and ought to receive just as much airplay now as it did in 2000.

Check McCain's voting record on civil rights issues, and see why the ACLU gives him a 0% (yes, zero percent, no number omitted) favorable rating. Look at his pick for vice president--Sarah Palin and her supporters are fanning the flames of racial division in Florida. This is demagoguery taken to its lowest common denominator.

(I'm also still amazed at Palin, or maybe her speechwriters, for quoting Reagan at the end of the Biden-Palin debates:

"It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.”

DO you know the threat to our American freedom about which Reagan was warning, the enemy toward whom Palin doesn't want to wave the white flag of surrender? Medicare. This quote is taken from a radio ad from 1961).

VOTE OBAMA-BIDEN.

RIP, Hayden Carruth

"I was the man, I suffer’d, I was there." (Galway Kinnell quoting Whitman, praising Carruth's poetry of witness)

Here are two I love:

Of Distress Being Humiliated by the Classical Chinese Poets

Masters, the mock orange is blooming in Syracuse without
scent, having been bred by patient horticulturalists
To make this greater display at the expense of fragrance.
But I miss the jasmine of my back-country home.
Your language has no tenses, which is why your poems can
never be translated whole into English;
Your minds are the minds of men who feel and imagine
without time.
The serenity of the present, the repose of my eyes in the cool
whiteness of sterile flowers.
Even now the headsman with his great curved blade and rank
odor is stalking the byways for some of you.
When everything happens at once, no conflicts can occur.
Reality is an impasse. Tell me again
How the white heron rises from among the reeds and flies
forever across the nacreous river at twilight
Toward the distant islands.

___________________________________

The Cape Cod Blues

Well, the wind from the ocean's a dark, dark wind
and the ocean is dark as well
and the shrieks of the sea birds flying

sound like the damned in hell
the houses are dark, the people dark
the mussel dark in his shell
the water that crawls on the strand is sighing

a legend of torment to tell
and broken down in the little town
a tower with a broken bell
is clanking a dire death-knell

Give me my upland forest
with its ferny glen, its glade
of the hazelbloom in a dappled shade,
where I and the earth-girl dwell.

Very Yeats-y...