Issue 4.3
Fall 2024
Reflection
This poem is from my WIP of poems on land art written when I curated the first land art show in Oregon and co-curated the second. I wanted to write landscape poems in the same sense that a painter paints landscapes. These sometimes are simply what the eye sees everyday (maybe not so simple) and aesthetic exercises in composition and color. My poems have the same goals. I write narrative too but these landscape poems eschew story for pace, form and imagism.
The Mountain’s Rationale for the Rocks
​
I addressed them in stages,
had a conversation about calcium.
I put the tired ones in the audience,
I deposited the ones with spirit in my show pockets.
Of my soil, my soul
went in a meandering line.
I allowed ruin to travel the back side,
until it was indistinguishable from the front side
and this is how I grew.
Merridawn Duckler is a writer, visual artist and curator from Oregon and the author of INTERSTATE (dancing girl press) IDIOM (Washburn Prize, Harbor Review) MISSPENTYOUTH (rinky dink press) and ARRANGEMENT (Southern Most). New work in Seneca Review, Interim, Posit, Plume, Painted Bride Quarterly. She was winner of the Beullah Rose Poetry Contest from Smartish Pace. She is an editor at Narrative.
Merridawn's Recommendations
Kenneth Rexroth Greek Anthology Poems,
James Tate Absences
Robin Coste Lewis Voyage of the Sable Venus
Gwendolyn Brooks Collected Poems
Eduardo Corral Slow Lightning