The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: writing

  • Orpheus Dispersed

    Orpheus Dispersed

      There upped a tree! O absolute outstripping! O Orpheus singing! O tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even under cover came a new start, a sign, a transforming. – Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. Martyn Crucefix)     Characters CHORUS OF TREES THE TWITCHER THE MOON THE YOUNG…

  • August & Grain

    August & Grain

      The fields were sudden bare – John Clare       Across the field, a half-mile or more away – across a dry liquid rustle of oats – a combine moves … slow as a clock. Its smoke-& -dust plume flags its position as it cuts the first swath close to the headland’s hedge…

  • Recollecting Landscapes

    Recollecting Landscapes

    Rephotography, Memory and Transformation 1904-1980-2004-2014 Recollecting Landscapes documents over a century of landscape transformation in Flanders. The first step of the project dates from the early twentieth century, when Jean Massart (1865-1925), a professor of botany at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), initiated the photographic documentation of the Belgian landscape through…

  • To Dig a Hole (You Create a Heap)

    To Dig a Hole (You Create a Heap)

      Here’s a joke… Question: Who made money during the Gold Rush? Answer: The ones who sold the shovels.     “You were asked to dig a hole? Do you understand how that sounds very strange?” When I told this to a friend, they seemed perplexed. And while I was initially confused by their response,…

  • Enemy of the State

    Enemy of the State

    Botanical illustrations of the early modern period (1550-1800), the “big science” of their day, served as documentation of useful plants found in colonial territories. Plants such as tobacco, sugar cane, cinnamon, cotton and tea were but a few items deemed reliable “cash crops” during this era of global economic expansion. Botanical illustrations led the way…

  • Revisiting a Geography of Hope

    Revisiting a Geography of Hope

    To be a farmer, at any point in history, means you grow food. You steward the land – soil, water, air, energy, plants, and animals – and make a living from its increase. It seems simple, at least in purpose, if not in practice: Grow good food. Now, in the twenty-first century, awareness is growing…

  • Landscape Amnesia

    Landscape Amnesia

    As the last horse trailer passes you by on the potholed road you take an exit. Across a green pasture you park the car. You stretch your legs. Gravel grinds underneath the feet while walking towards the bar – “Tattan’s Ring View Bar” it reads on the yellowish plastered building. Flowers in pots await under…

  • Editorial: Fields

    Editorial: Fields

    In May 1982, American artist Agnes Denes began to transform a two acre empty plot at the foot of the World Trade Center into her work Wheatfield – A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill. In the prior months, truck loads of dirty landfill had been dumped on the site, consisting of rubble, dirt, rusty pipes, automobile…

  • Earth Turned Honey

    Earth Turned Honey

      Moksha The desert has no memory. Sun beats on its chest, collarbone glistens: I wait for rain, an angry sea filling the sky to break, blow, burn, make a new world order. Agave pierces clouds while amethyst mountains rest in heavy sleep. I have asked permission to make this desolate ground my home. Beneath…

  • Undertow

    Undertow

    Walking the Edge A trusted mentor once told me, having read my work, “You often write about the meeting places of land and water.” She was right, though I’d never thought about the habit before; my tendency to do so was neither intentional nor premeditated. “There are few things more ancient than humans walking to…

  • Untranslatable

    Untranslatable

      Chamomile Freak-show Poisonous in the wild, or so I was told, overtaking the verges on the main road, probably nothing after oversized daisies perhaps, a gem or relaxation abates. Mirror versus lamp, a stay of education. Stock complexity produces verse upon verse, selectively lit past occasion obliging, stranger things have happened, mug in hand….