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The Importance of Walking in Poetry: Part 3

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Walking in nature is an ecological activity. It is so first within the ecology of our sacred bodies; second, in the ecology of our bodies moving around in natural environments; and third in the ecology of our communities. When we take the time to walk in nature, we become better humans, contributing more patiently, compassionately, and thoughtfully to the ecology of humanity. If we’re not walking around and getting at least a few thousand steps in, then our body is breaking down, for simple lack of movement. We need to move, walk, get the blood and lymph circulating to supply the ecosystem of our body with all its nutrients, and clear out waste and dead cells. This is true on numerous levels…physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. If our body is breaking down, then so is our scene, mind, soul, spirit, human and non-human relationships. Out with the old, and in with the new.

Idyllic autumn light bathing the valley between meadows and forests

What does walking have to do with poetry?

The four main ways in which walking helps to read and write poetry are:

Observation

Inspiration

Rumination

Reading

We set the pace in part one of The Importance of Walking in Poetry series, talking about observation . Then we discussed inspiration.

The beauty of nature is its non-human aspect. Nietzsche suggested that people who love nature do so because nature never judges us.

Today we’re going to focus on ‘rumination,’ and we mean this in a Nietzschean sense. We are spiritual cows standing placidly upon the plains of this fertile earth, with thought walking as giants above us, casting long shadow into our mind. We take a bite of mind and chew. Slow, and thoughtful, we bask in this skewed light of existence, catching glimpses of in-sight.

Nietzsche introduced his idea of rumination in the preface to Genealogy of Morals (1887).

Walking in nature allows us to think in a soft and slow manner. Remember to lift your chin and look approximately 20 degrees above the horizon. Aim for the tops of trees half a football field ahead of you. This allows gathered mental insights to flow gently down through shoulders, belly, thighs, calves, and toes. Allow your mind to dictate its terms, and parts of your body to respond with their own rebellion. Form an integration of mind and body through the wilful act of walking. 90 minutes is ideal, usually somewhere around 10,000 steps.

Pyrenean cows along Tristaina river in the pyrenees of Androrra

To ruminate is to think, and to think is to know we exist. The ecological act of walking in nature situates our body within an environment that neither we nor any of our species created. We are forced to give ourselves over to the fact that we are not our own maker. There is something greater, older, wiser, longer-lasting, and more wilful than ourselves. This realisation is really good for writing and reading poetry. Kind of a Poetry 101 class where you get a syllabus listing Trees as Unit 1, Unit 2 is Water, 3 is Sky, 4 is Earth, 5 is Your Body on Nature, and 6 is Language, which ties it all together.

Bamboo Park (Wangjianglou Park) in Chengdu, China. Your author spent over a decade ruminating in this park, usually with a flask of tea and pad of paper, maybe a book or two.

I recommend a good browse, both before and after your walk today, through the Igneus Bookshop. There you’ll find over three decades of collectibles by masters of poetry and existence by authors such as Peter Laska and Richard Martin, writers who have done more than their fair share of rumination, digesting the very difficult to digest grasses of philosophy and politics, alchemizing realisations in stanzas and lines of poetry.

The Importance of Walking in Poetry: Part 1

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Let’s talk about how walking benefits poets and readers, bringing the mind’s eye into focus. In walking, we observe the world and people around us, get inspired to write about it, ruminate on how to get it just right on paper (or onscreen). Walking also helps for reading and appreciating poetry. Tie up your shoelaces, put on a hat and coat (’tis the season), and let’s head out into the world on foot. Need experience? Need a refresher? Need some perspective?

Put down those car keys! And go for a walk. A long one….like at least 6000 steps, the more the better. The more you walk, the clearer your mind gets. Your shoulders will slide down, you will breathe.

When you get back from your walk, browse through the Igneus Press bookshop, there’s free poetry and ‘fo on poets. Check out the White Quartet by Richard Martin, a series of 4 books that reflect on natural spaces inside our psychology. Wonderful for thinking in the woods.

Forest Bathing decreases stress levels. Stress is never good for writing.

Observation

The four main ways in which walking helps to read and write poetry are:

Observation

Inspiration

Rumination

Reading

Today we’re going to focus on observation.

So what is observation. Same as looking, right? Not exactly. A lot of times we look at something, but don’t really see. This is because our minds are multi-tasking genius bots. Our minds have multiple tracks and levels of thought, memory, visualisation, and imagination going on, all at the same time. To make things crazier, all these tracks and levels organise around our ego, around a sense of self. Now, many of you know as well as I do, there is more than one of us in here.

Spray from crashing waves can be invigorating. Poems are everywhere here.

So where does observation come into all this? Well, taking a walk may be your one clear shot at quieting down all this noise. Particularly for writers, these extra thoughts get in the way of our authentic voice…distracting us, confusing us, not believing in us, dividing our vital qi 气. In Chinese poetics, qi (sometimes spelled chi 1Chinese characters, like 气, have to be Romanized to help us Romance-language-speakers to sound them out. The old system of Romanization used to be the Wade-Giles system, but more recently the Pinyin system is used. So in older books translating Chinese terms, the former will be used. In current scholarship, the latter will be used. Other examples in addition to qi & chi (Pinyin & Wade-Giles), common examples are Dao/Tao, and Yijing/ I Ching. As if Chinese wasn’t all Greek to begin with, LOL) exists both inside and outside of us. A poet’s qi connects with qi outside of them-self, thus the foundation is laid for a good poem. The natural and ideal state of observation is one in which our qi 2This word’s so cool it deserves two footnotes. Just want to mention that qi is translated roughly as pneuma, or breath. But it’s not breath like living organisms’ breath, but breath or ‘energy’ pervading all that exists connects with qi around us.

You may recall how Buddhism and Daoism incorporate meditation into daily life. This slows down our thoughts in order to allow our qi to regulate. In modern parlance, we talk about regulating our nervous system. We talk about nervous system or qi depending on whether we base reality on Exoteria or on Esoteria. 3Just kidding…I mean that it doesn’t have to be either/or…either qi is real (and thus Buddhism and Daoism would hold the keys to calming us down and helping us be more observant), or the nervous system is real (and thus modern science on stress is right), Exoteria and esoteria can co-exist in our now Aquarian Age.

In walking, once we’re ten, fifteen minutes in, we begin to look slightly upwards, above the horizon of sight, say, at the tops of trees far ahead, helping our spleen meridian to cleanse 4According to Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture, one of the 12 meridians is the spleen. Good health depends on all 12 meridians allowing the flow of qi along their networks. According to neural science, looking slightly up will help your mind enter into Theta, a state of meditation and calmness.

Walking within different ecosystems will inspire different thoughts and feelings.

Now THIS is the stuff of poetry. Observations are seeds of reality which will now live inside of our mind, heart, and body. They gestate, culminate, and wait for inspiration to come. The poem will now begin to speak within us, based in observations we’ve made in communion with the world and people around us.

In the next part of The Importance of Walking in Poetry series, I’ll talk about ‘inspiration,’ the second major way in which taking a walk helps us to read and write poetry.

Footnotes

  • 1
    Chinese characters, like 气, have to be Romanized to help us Romance-language-speakers to sound them out. The old system of Romanization used to be the Wade-Giles system, but more recently the Pinyin system is used. So in older books translating Chinese terms, the former will be used. In current scholarship, the latter will be used. Other examples in addition to qi & chi (Pinyin & Wade-Giles), common examples are Dao/Tao, and Yijing/ I Ching. As if Chinese wasn’t all Greek to begin with, LOL
  • 2
    This word’s so cool it deserves two footnotes. Just want to mention that qi is translated roughly as pneuma, or breath. But it’s not breath like living organisms’ breath, but breath or ‘energy’ pervading all that exists
  • 3
    Just kidding…I mean that it doesn’t have to be either/or…either qi is real (and thus Buddhism and Daoism would hold the keys to calming us down and helping us be more observant), or the nervous system is real (and thus modern science on stress is right), Exoteria and esoteria can co-exist in our now Aquarian Age
  • 4
    According to Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture, one of the 12 meridians is the spleen. Good health depends on all 12 meridians allowing the flow of qi along their networks.

Golden Week – celebrating the legacy of Peter Kidd, Igneus Press founder

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Peter Kidd formed Igneus Press in 1989 to make a home for the poets and polymaths he’d collected, or who’d collected him. William Kemmett and artist James “Deac” De Crescentis are pictured here; composer William Bland, P.J. Laska, and Richard Martin were part of the early formation of Igneus.

dce: Pete was my guru – he would always answer my questions with complete honesty, and then give me a little tidbit to chew on later. Like this bit on agnotology (n.) – the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance:

S.K.: He fought cancer for 6 years, and not just one kind. A few years before he passed away on June 12, 2020, he was undergoing radiation on his neck for thyroid cancer, which involved him laying down flat (extremely painful for him, due to the lesions in his spine caused by multiple myeloma, the primary form of cancer he was fighting) with his head pinned down underneath this mask.

The mask was made as a mold to fit the shape of his head and shoulders. Dad always had claustrophobia, and told many tales of how he spent the time in the machine under this mask ‘fighting the azuras,’ deep in meditation doing war against forces of evil.

Sophia Kidd and her father Peter Kidd

Azuras are a familiar motif throughout Pete’s writing. I was familiar with the Asuras, a class of beings in the lore of India; but Pete always spelled it with a z, connoting rocky formation azure in my mind. I love a good two-fer. So I spelled that way in my poem “constellations” as I processed my grief upon his passing:

but cosmic trajectory, surely
an Azura or two, the exact same
footprints on another plane

-dce 06.13.2020, Annandale

Pictured here is Peter, reading from Richard Martin‘s White Quartet series for a documentary we were filming shortly before Peter’s passing…We’re trying to figure out how to release the footage we have in a cogent form.

In the meantime, here’s a still image of a man in cosmic motion.

dce: I knew Pete since 1997 as an online presence. I met him in person in 2018 in Canyon, Texas. Here’s an excerpt from that tale, which can be found at debnation.com:

Peter Kidd, November 2018, Canyon, TX

Over roast chicken we discussed Bill Bland‘s poetry while his music emanated from the neighbor room. We moved on to David Starobin‘s recordings – these are snippets of Pete’s New England history. I took notes in my sketchbook during dinner conversation. Pete’s given me homework: Black Mountain College, the side-stone in a Japanese garden, so many other things. He took us into the bowels of what currently serves as Igneus Press. Several lifetimes are stacked one against the next, and my storyteller’s mind was overwhelmed with juxtapositions. “Kemmett used to say for twenty years he always kept a noose in the trunk of his car.” Pete reached out and tugged on a rope hanging from the shed’s ceiling. “Here’s mine.” 

This year we’ve registered the business, repaid the website hosting and maintenance bills, rehauled the bookshop, and engaged a fulfilment center to store all the books and fulfil orders made on our website. It’s expensive. Dad left me a little money to do this, but we’re moving through that quickly. We really want to keep the press going. Our small team is willing to do all the work out of the love in our hearts for Dad. But we can’t do this without your help.

Peter Kidd often compared poetry to gardening. A small business is like a garden. It needs to be guided, nourished, protected, directed.

A gentle reminder and plea, as well, for your support of Igneus Press, the small independent poetry press Dad established in 1989. We’ve really jazzed the place up and as a small group of volunteers, we need your support: not donations, but your patronage of the Igneus online bookshop. Order a book or two, bring them into your home, your bosom, your mind, your spirit, and allow these poems to sing out into the world through your own awareness.

Here’s Dad giving the final reading of his life, from his final set of poems.

Sophia wrote on what would have been Peter Kidd’s 74th birthday: “One year ago today, I celebrated Dad’s birthday with the Stone family in Canyon, TX, with homemade chicken soup, pulled pork and a great cake. It was an evening of bliss. Dad was feeling strong, walking around, even bouncing around like a champion. He was writing poetry again and feeling ready to move into the next best phase of his writing.

He had seven days to live.”

Mini-Contemplation 49a:

shot out of my lounger chair

at noon, today, morning after infusion

under the influence of steroids

sharing empathy with baseball players

and why it’s fun to hit all those dingers

– PETER KIDD, 25 JULY 2019

As the Dark Sea Braces for Light

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A Review of Sighting Icarus, by Richard Martin
By Sophia G. Kidd

Sighting Icarus (Buy this Book)
Poems by Richard Martin
Igneus Press, 2020, 24 pages

18 poems all-up; we begin with ‘Flight Check’ and end with the book’s title poem, ‘Sighting Icarus.’ Each poem, with its calculus of moon and star, of unknown and thought, performs a light structure; stanzas of two to four lines, one to four stanzas per poem. Externalized thought is combined with internalized image to wrest from inwardly the readers’ insight and delight; as in “Instant Metaphysics”: “The indelible delicacy/ of the unknown/ haunts being.” We see the unknown as something delicate, a possibility of love; as in “Preparation”: “Love embraces the unknown/ to become whole.” Perhaps love is that which dares to break the chain between cause and effect, to attend to life as bees do, in “Lovers”: “Lovers light amid flowers./ Bees approve, buzzing/ mindlessly.” 

Richard Martin is a philosophical poet, and we begin mid-air, in-flight, already on the journey of life. First image placed on the altar of our experience are thoughts, themselves: “I’m strangely happy./My thoughts are wax replicas of the unknown./At night, I burn them for heat and light.” In the pantheon of Martin’s poem, life is separate from our thoughts of it; as consciousness tends the fire of psychic night, burning day’s thoughts for fuel enroute through astral dream-scape. One expects his flight to be through the fantastic, the Empyrean of all space and time; but it is not. The author, weightless, confines himself to the humble space of his own home: “Nothing weighs me down./ I soar through the house/ without notice.”

“Splash” rolls out philosophical value and color: ontology: “I’m inside myself”: the mathematically planar being of numbers through which our experience turns: “rotating in a plane/ of numbers”; time: “We’ll meet at the end of time,/ that’s what you say,” as if self and other could ever resolve in time; identity and reflection: “There are no mirrors/ to guide us, reflect/ who we are”; and finally stars which fall to earth, into “ponds of recognition.” Then in the next poem, “Beach Stroll,” we are launched by the first line into a consideration of sitedness: “We think we’re here, / believing in the substantiality/ of thought.” Again, thought and substance, mind and body, Cartesian exploration into the nature of existence among elements which fall and reflect, among rules and laws of being outside of time, inside of number. However we must never think that Martin’s poems serve philosophy first. He serves, above all, the image; as in the second stanza of “Beach Stroll”: “The ocean is slate gray/ with a white mustache of waves / that extends for miles,” a taste of the poet’s maritime and spatial awareness. 

One may wonder what such pure speculation on the nature of day and night, stars and ponds, love and thought, the unknown and the mindless has to offer us in a time of tumultuous social change and political deception. Where’s the activist in this poet? What’s the philosopher got to do with us today? The activist is the poet who believes in de-territorializing the world of our mind, in wresting that which is mapped from the hands of ideology, of cartographers who rape and pillage not only  earth, but our sense of being on it. The activist is in the philosopher who reopens the gap between self and poem, between language and thought; so that real choice may arise, and image may strike root in our soul.  We end with “Option” in its entirety, which performs this revolutionary labor:

“Some retire into loneliness
after long and arduous journeys.
Others praise the sun,
the way it melts the sky
into a feast of colors.”

Other images and concepts in Sighting Icarus include the best ‘capture’ of daybreak over the sea I have read in any language, from any period of time, in “From a Window.” Martin’s ability to merge his body of lived experience with words is uncanny. While this poet is known for his humor and wit, this book is serious; devoted to a sadness which leads to promised daybreak, as: “The dark sea braces for light.”

An pure example of the Igneus aesthetic, this chapbook, as with the other three in the White Quartet series, is published on white paper and card stock cover; title, byline and publisher’s masthead in Times New Roman black ink. This aligns with Igneus founder and late publisher Peter Kidd’s preference for ‘a clean aesthetic’ with nothing obscuring the poetry.

About the White Quartet series: Sighting Icarus is the latest and third in a four book chapbook series designed by the author and late Igneus Publisher, Peter Kidd. The first in the series, Hard Labor, came out in 2019, with Cosmic Sandbox released later that year. Richard Martin has dedicated Sighting Icarus “In Memoriam Peter Kidd,” a moving gesture in nod to decades of love and friendship. The final book in this series, Hobo Return, will be published with Igneus in early 2021. 

About the Author: In addition to the White Quartet series, Richard Martin has also published Strip Meditation (2009) with Igneus Press. Other Martin titles include: Ceremony of the Unknown (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), Dream of Long Headdresses: Poems from a Thousand Hospitals (Signpost Press, 1988), White Man Appears on Southern California Beach (Bottom Fish Press, 1991); Modulations (Asylum Arts, 1998); Marks (Asylum Arts, 2002); boink! (Lavender Ink, 2005), Sideways (Obscure Publications, 2004),  Altercations in the Quiet Car (Lavender Ink /Fell Swoop, 2010), Under the Sky of No Complaint (Lavender Ink /Fell Swoop, 2013) Fungo Appetite (unarmed chapbooks, 2014), Buffoons in the Gene Pool (Lavender Ink /Fell Swoop, 2016), and Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Martin is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry, founder of The Big Horror Poetry Series (Binghamton, New York, 1983-1996) and a retired Boston Public Schools principal. He lives in Boston with his family.

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Igneus Press Founding Mission Statement

Igneus began in 1990 in the parking lot next to Charlie’s Tap on Green Street, Cambridge. Wally Butts sat in the back seat, me at the wheel, Bill Kemmett in the navigator’s seat as we caroused after a Stone Soup reading at Charlie’s. We were in my blue Chevy station wagon shooting the bs, whining about how at 45 and 60 years old we did not want to send our poems, hat in hand to 30-year-old publishers. Things like that were normal after- hour’s conversation. Bill and I had been getting together since 1972 when Stone Soup Readings were held in a small book store on Cambridge Street in Boston beneath Jack Powers’ apartment. Jack was the driving force behind street and Beat poetry in Boston. We hosted all the old Beats when they came to town: Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti and many others. Wally came on the scene in 1976 from Rochester, NY.

Anyway, I was living in New Hampshire in the 90’s running a design/build landscape company, so I had the skill sets of a small business person. Hence, I threw out into the conversation, “The hell with ‘em all. Let’s start our own press.” Kemmett was skeptical for all the obvious reasons, distribution, the technical issues, the ability to acquire credibility. He told us,” It would never work.” Wally, on the other hand was very excited by the idea. He had run White Raven Press in his earlier years, so he brought some process to the table. He also had a manuscript, a collection of solid poems from the past ten years of his life titled The Required Dance, by W.E. Butts.

For the next two months Wally took a bus from Boston to Manchester, NH.  I would pick him up at the Greyhound station, and we would spend two days and a night working on his manuscript, shuffling poems, examining forms of other publications in pursuit of our own unique style and look. We gradually siphoned down all our home work to a very simplistic aesthetic using Times Roman. The cover would be simple:  title above a photo with the  poet’s name in smaller font beneath the photo. We wanted the emphasis to be upon the text of the poems. This was a time when most publications were morphing into glossy covers and esoteric fonts. Our covers were to be flat colored, heavy-weight paper. As time went by, and we did many many books of poetry and plays, we varied from that formula, but to date it is the main form we use.

Once we had the The Required Dance typeset and ready to go we kept searching our minds and imaginations for a cover image. One Sunday I woke up and over coffee told Wally I had the image. I got my five year-old daughter to put on her ballet tutu, and we set out into the day. I had a specific granite boulder in mind at woods edge of a baseball field in town. We helped my daughter climb  onto the boulder, eight feet high and 15 feet around. There she danced for us as we shot a dozen pictures of black and white film.

Old friend Gary Metras, Adastra Press, gave me the phone and address of Ed Hamilton at Celecom Corp in Longmeadow, MA. This began a relationship with Ed, an 18 year apprenticeship really, on how to prepare a book, size of runs, qualities of paper and cover stock to mention a few.  I gave him Wally’s book and the front cover along with a picture of the poet, small biography and several blurbs from fellow poets on the back cover. He gave me a call in two weeks to come get the books. Wally drove down with me to Longmeadow, and that was the birth of Igneus Press and of The Required Dance, both which have taken on a life of their own. W.E. Butts is now the residing Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and Igneus Press has put into print some 50 books in the past 22 years.

The next two books came out together:  P.J. Laska’s The Day the Eighties Began and Willam Kemmett’s Flesh of a New Moon. As we picked up momentum and interest an incredible thing occurred, a spontaneous cooperative formed, or as Peter Laska would say, “without design “ One poet might do the typesetting for a few books, another would contribute funds towards the publication of a poet they admired. In some cases two or three poets might take a mass of poems, and edit it down to a powerful book. Another poet might take on building a brochure for upcoming releases. I would say in more than half of our books, as many as 4-5 other poets made contributions and gave sweat equity to midwife books. James Decrescentis, a good poet in his own right and a fine painter, hosted the book parties at the Piano Factory in Boston for some 20 years. We would fill the room with 40 people and sell as many as 35-50 books at these readings.

Years ago I made an attempt, just once, to acquire matching NEA grants. Part of the application was to state the mission of the press. What I said then remains true today. I was always looking for the greatest diversity of work that had compassion and concern for the human condition. I worked hard not to  become a “school of poetry,” not be regional, to create a press that would represent my glimpse of who and what I think is interesting and important in this era of contemporary poetry. I have always considered it a labor of love. When it threatened to become less than that, I took a 5 year hiatus.

In the beginning I was astonished at how many really good poets from 45-85 were in need of a venue for manuscripts that were in most cases 10 years in the making. So, I feel fortunate in having so much quality poetry to work with that includes the likes of Vincent Ferrini, Richard Blevins, Joel Dailey, Richard Martin (my partner in crime on several issues), Sanford Dorbin, Roger Taus, and on and on. I have treated the press much like I do a landscape with certain elements like focus plants and waterfalls, stone walls and canopy of trees.

Most of the poets I published have evolved into significant poets 22 years later. I restarted Igneus two years ago with some new releases. I am giving into the elements of evolution, and with the unselfish help of my daughter, Sophia Kidd, Igneus Press is building a website in order to offer both past books and present books. Some have become collector’s books, certainly the deceased Ferrini’s, Butt’s books and other earlier books. It is my hope to introduce to a new generation to some of these fine writers, as well as introduce these writers to a new generation.

Peter Kidd, Publisher, 9.2.2012