Sometimes poems flow in and out of the larger circuit of the arts, alert to possibility.
Dissonance emerged from walking through a landscape. While writing these poems, I found that trying to write out of sheer immediacy – envisioning the most direct possible relationship to the land – caused blocks. The solution required expansions on my process.
I carried a camera through the place. It was helpful to tap into photography’s conflicted honesties about recurrences from the past, about temporal distances, evoking time’s willingness to enter and exit the body.
Poem and photograph, they precede each other. Invite them in. Watch them propel each other to new locations.
Dissonance dwells around a dirt road. Dirt roads appear stable, but with time you perceive that they exist in flux. Dissonance became a book of time.
Time turns various and nervy – a click marking a photographic moment, a slow burn of interior pain. Photographs interrupt time, invite you into its astonishment. They propose other dimensions, reminding us that even our thoughts enter the past as they travel through the mind.
The majority of the photographs I took for this project served the writing process and aren’t directly visible in the completed book.
In the end, the task of framing community fell more to the poems. Rural residential community condenses into polytemporal planes, its non-humans apparent alongside humans. Therefore, the beavers.
Scientists, naturalists, and neighbors mark how riparian architecture is defined and redefined by beavers. Sometimes scientists took care to separate themselves from naturalists, marking a specialized gaze they would train upon rivers and beaver ponds. The era in which we have lived produced science capable of portraying the beaver as a creator of new futures, leaving behind the pinched tones insisting that those futures are a nuisance to the human community:
Removal of beavers is a detrimental wetland disturbance, and reintroduction of beavers in degraded stream reaches has been both proposed and used for rehabilitating human-impacted watercourses and restoring wetlands.i
To one side, a dirt road built and rebuilt all throughout the seasons by the entities known as The Town. To the other, a place where beavers – to the extent they’re permitted – engineer their own kind of town.
Each spring gathers uncertainties around a beaver pond. Beavers appear and disappear, industrious and half-submerged and alert, flickering ciphers.
They are not alone. This year, people are disappearing through holes in the northern landscape.
The dirt road passing the beaver pond moves through foothills. The view of the road, from the road, is quietly topped by ridgelines. Here we are contained, and the rains bring condensations of time.
Beavers respond to gravity, moving up and down, and side to side.
Our goal is to determine how far beavers ventureii
Also our goal is to venture. Taking a camera outside interrupts your continuity with the land.
Agents of disappearance cause disappearances, and history flickers.
The sentences refuse to flow. They interrupt each other.
Interruption is more than a stop on the scale of attentiveness. It prompts your next instant of attention, some unsettling of the mind, a new surface of stillness through which you might drop.
A poem became an afterlife for a photograph.
Values and attitudes in the city had changed, and there was now a prejudice against fur, especially fur from wild animals, and consequently the price for beaver pelts had fallen to the point where it wasn’t worth the trouble to do such hard and cold work anymore. You make better money, he told me, waiting until March and making maple syrup.iii
A self became as a breakdown in continuity. A poem became as longings trailed by a photograph.
Action passes through the valley. Which becomes the aftermath: a photo, a poem, or an act? Keep walking.
Again it is spring. Here we go. Again we weigh the presences and absences of beavers. And guess what? Photography is no longer outmoded. News arrived of today’s astonishment:
We seem to witness today a kind of internal slowing within time, perhaps even a falling out of sync of art and the times.iv
Quick and the precise moment might be gone. That was a day, or one of them anyway, zipping through art’s heterochronic landscape. But again the now approaches, steeped in a new astonishment: the gravity of people being disappeared. Flickering through the Vermont landscape, yanked out of sync, expelled from the frame. Try to perceive their lines of motion, falling toward Louisiana or some elsewhere.
When family members were suddenly arrested and disappeared they could be physically absent for weeks, months or years, with their whereabouts unknown to relatives except for second-hand information, such as reports that they had been seen in a detention camp or in some other secret place. This situation interfered with the process of grieving. How could one grieve for a loved one who may be alive and reappear?v
One person recently resurfaced. Sometimes he appears in photographs, nervous and alert, a flickering cipher for the times.
i. Stoffyn-Egli, Patricia, and J.H. Martin Willison. “Including Wildlife Habitat in the Definition of Riparian Areas: The Beaver (Castor Canadensis) as an Umbrella Species for Riparian Obligate Animals.” Environmental Reviews 19 (January 1, 2011): 479. doi:10.1139/A11-019. 480.
ii. Stoffyn-Egli and Willison. 481.
iii. Bailey, Thomas. “Listening to the Music of the Ompompanoosuc.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 4 (September 2009): 837–47. doi:10.1093/isle/isp110. 845.
iv. George Baker. 2023. Lateness and Longing : On the Afterlife of Photography. The Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Collection. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=nlebk&AN=3300548&site=eds-live&scope=site. 9.
v. Roizblatt, Arturo, Niels Biederman, and Jac Brown. “Extreme Traumatization in Chile: The Experience and Treatment of Families.” Journal of Family Therapy 36, no. Suppl 1 (May 1, 2014): 24–38. doi:10.1111/j.1467-
6427.2011.00555.x. 30. My thanks to Cole M. for the conversation that reminded me of this part of the study.
