Postcards from the Volcano

Field Notes on Future Nostalgia: Poetry, Metaphor, Memory, Nature, Wonder

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once   

As quick as foxes on the hill …

I’ve pinched my newsletter’s title from a Wallace Stevens poem that hits me where I live without fail. My notion is to take it as a touchstone and a stepping-stone in roughly equal measures. Scroll down for the full text.

“A Postcard from the Volcano” reads like a ghostly briefing on an apocalypse in the wings, an unsent memo to an unknown future that will know nothing of us after the end of the world as we know it. I also hear it as a fugitive spell or charm against the erasure of collective memory and all we feel in our bones.

And is it by some turn of the screw an apt metaphor for our own doomscrolling Anthropocene? Time will tell. Or as the Auden line runs, “Time will say nothing but I told you so.”

The eclectic stuff you’ll find here – sometimes in long-form, sometimes in short takes, sometimes in bower-bird mashups – will pretty much gravitate towards the middle of a freehand Venn diagram where the natural world and the scientific method shares head-space with the lyric impulse and the literary imagination.

Taxonomy meets Poetry. Epiphany meets Ecology. Metamorphosis meets Metaphor.

Fact meets Fancy. Bard meets Bot. Genetics meets Poetics. Optics meets the Rainbow.

Orpheus, meet Linnaeus. Dante, meet Darwin.

Roll over Audubon and tell Aristotle the news.

I’ll mostly be writing on things that keep me at the desk and things that keep me up at night. Sometimes they’re the same things.

A short list of running headings will be posted soon.

David Barber – Bio Sketch

Writer, writing teacher, sometime critic, erstwhile editor, ex-inkstained wretch, lapsed nature poet.

Instructor in the Harvard Writing Program and Harvard Extension School since 2010.

California native, New England transplant.

Author of four books of poetry.

Currently at work on a California biography-cum-memoir (Incredible Land: In Search of Basil Woon), a series of essays on field guides and found poetry (working title: Description Is Revelation), and a book-length composite poem of sampled aphorisms and punchlines from Heraclitus and Sappho to Gertrude Stein and Groucho Marx (Dark One: A Mashup), among other projects.

Miss Moore said it best: Omissions are not accidents.

POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once   
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes   
Made sharp air sharper by their smell   
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones   
We left much more, left what still is   
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow   
Above the shuttered mansion-house,   
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look   
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,   
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems   
As if he that lived there left behind   
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,   
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936)

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