This week's column in The Washington County News gives some background:
Although I travel to parks and wilderness areas every chance I get, I am lately curious to see what is close at hand and am walking various roads in this small town to catalog the wildflowers that are here virtually "in my backyard" (or over one hill or the other). The slideshow embedded here will show the flowers (which will be updated fairly often in the initial stage of the project). The Picasa album is here (with flowers named):
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Catching Up
I have not been very careful to keep up here lately. Come again soon. In the meantime, here are a few columns of interest from The Washington County News:
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
A Fortune of Flora
I know all about a gaggle of geese, a covey of quail, and the exultation of larks. What about trillium? If a flower patch is a flower patch, should we call a trillium patch a trillium patch too? I guess one could.
Maybe, instead, we can go with a triumph of trillium. That’s what I’d call what I saw Sunday afternoon up near Holston after trekking four miles with my faithful dog Spot in search of spring wildflowers. We walked and walked, and walked some more, and then I paused for a cyclist, only to spot the first trillium of my season. After that, I was rapt. I was triumphant.
There was the single trillium, the trillium growing in groups, the trillium on the side of the hill, and the trillium sprouting at my feet. And Spot’s. It was the trillium of fairy tales, and it was the trillium you want to alert all your hiking buddies to. The red was the red of zircon, redder than the rhizome of a bloodroot, as red as red. There were a lot of little white wildflowers too.
Maybe, instead, was it more than lot? My teachers, cautioning us to be precise, always said never to say “a lot.” No, I didn’t count. I can say there was a plethora of bloodroot, though, an abundance of spring riches sprinkling the ground like jewels.
Bloodroot with its angel wings, or what one also terms basal multi-lobed leaves, delivers up not a red flower but a white one. This wildflower was springing up here and there, here and there and everywhere, even more ubiquitous than the trillium, at least where I was walking up the Virginia Creeper Trail.
Should I call what I saw patches of bloodroot? Maybe, instead, if there can be a bouquet of pheasants, surely there can be a clot of bloodroot. And if there is a clot of bloodroot, there must surely exist a hovering of trout lilies (not to be confused with a hover of trout).
I spied the hovering of trout lilies in the vicinity of my triumph of trillium. I was, in fact, photographing trillium, having fastened Spot’s leash to my ankle so she wouldn’t jerk my hand just as I was pressing the shutter-release button on the camera, when I noticed mild yellow lilies atop their spotted trout-like leaves.
These lilies were just as breathtaking a piteousness of doves Spot and I passed on our Sunday stroll, just as startling as any mutation of thrushes. This is the first year I have learned to see trout lilies blooming, and they are surely the kin of all those lilies that neither toil nor spin.
On the edge of a rock, a council of columbines nodded, not quite ready to bloom. A wood of violets encouraged them. What a lovely afternoon to be out with our wildflowers, to be one among a host of humans (and hounds) reveling in all that springs up from the ground beneath our feet.
Reprinted from The Washington County News, 15 April 2009.
Maybe, instead, we can go with a triumph of trillium. That’s what I’d call what I saw Sunday afternoon up near Holston after trekking four miles with my faithful dog Spot in search of spring wildflowers. We walked and walked, and walked some more, and then I paused for a cyclist, only to spot the first trillium of my season. After that, I was rapt. I was triumphant.
There was the single trillium, the trillium growing in groups, the trillium on the side of the hill, and the trillium sprouting at my feet. And Spot’s. It was the trillium of fairy tales, and it was the trillium you want to alert all your hiking buddies to. The red was the red of zircon, redder than the rhizome of a bloodroot, as red as red. There were a lot of little white wildflowers too.
Maybe, instead, was it more than lot? My teachers, cautioning us to be precise, always said never to say “a lot.” No, I didn’t count. I can say there was a plethora of bloodroot, though, an abundance of spring riches sprinkling the ground like jewels.
Bloodroot with its angel wings, or what one also terms basal multi-lobed leaves, delivers up not a red flower but a white one. This wildflower was springing up here and there, here and there and everywhere, even more ubiquitous than the trillium, at least where I was walking up the Virginia Creeper Trail.
Should I call what I saw patches of bloodroot? Maybe, instead, if there can be a bouquet of pheasants, surely there can be a clot of bloodroot. And if there is a clot of bloodroot, there must surely exist a hovering of trout lilies (not to be confused with a hover of trout).
I spied the hovering of trout lilies in the vicinity of my triumph of trillium. I was, in fact, photographing trillium, having fastened Spot’s leash to my ankle so she wouldn’t jerk my hand just as I was pressing the shutter-release button on the camera, when I noticed mild yellow lilies atop their spotted trout-like leaves.
These lilies were just as breathtaking a piteousness of doves Spot and I passed on our Sunday stroll, just as startling as any mutation of thrushes. This is the first year I have learned to see trout lilies blooming, and they are surely the kin of all those lilies that neither toil nor spin.
On the edge of a rock, a council of columbines nodded, not quite ready to bloom. A wood of violets encouraged them. What a lovely afternoon to be out with our wildflowers, to be one among a host of humans (and hounds) reveling in all that springs up from the ground beneath our feet.
Reprinted from The Washington County News, 15 April 2009.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The Cleft of the Rock: Chapbook
Finishing Line Press announces the publication of my new chapbook, "The Cleft of the Rock," with presales January 30-March 13. To order, if you like, visit Finishing Line Press, click on "New Releases and Forthcoming Titles," scroll down to Mitchell, and go from there. Release date is May 1.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Turchin Center for the Visual Arts (Boone, NC)
It's true: No matter where you go, there you are. I found myself this weekend at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, NC, where I spent time in galleries with work by Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, and Charlie Brouwer.
Charlie Brouwer is from Floyd, VA, just up the road. His work, in a show called "Hope Remains: Parts I & II" grew on me. I started with drawings that literally drew me into them, perhaps because of the words that often framed the images. "If only we could reat the writing on the leaves...." Brouwer wrote on one. Quoting Goethe on another, he said, "My purpose in making this journey is...to discover myself in the objects that I see." That quotation perhaps summed up my journey yesterday. I often visit museums and galleries to discover myself. Along with the drawings, Brouwer created some structures of plank wood and ladders, intriguing symbols. His show will be up until April 18.
The Motherwell prints drew me in too. With them, turning from one to another, I had one of those haunting experiences that validates Goethe's remark and makes you want to write a poem (I did, later). Finishing with the photographs by Warhol, I had to mix it all up in my brain: images and sculptures from nature, abstractions presenting the essential, photographs recreating images: everything was a memory of a memory.
When I was a child, I spent so many of my Saturdays in the Columbia Museum of Art. I know why.
Charlie Brouwer is from Floyd, VA, just up the road. His work, in a show called "Hope Remains: Parts I & II" grew on me. I started with drawings that literally drew me into them, perhaps because of the words that often framed the images. "If only we could reat the writing on the leaves...." Brouwer wrote on one. Quoting Goethe on another, he said, "My purpose in making this journey is...to discover myself in the objects that I see." That quotation perhaps summed up my journey yesterday. I often visit museums and galleries to discover myself. Along with the drawings, Brouwer created some structures of plank wood and ladders, intriguing symbols. His show will be up until April 18.
The Motherwell prints drew me in too. With them, turning from one to another, I had one of those haunting experiences that validates Goethe's remark and makes you want to write a poem (I did, later). Finishing with the photographs by Warhol, I had to mix it all up in my brain: images and sculptures from nature, abstractions presenting the essential, photographs recreating images: everything was a memory of a memory.
When I was a child, I spent so many of my Saturdays in the Columbia Museum of Art. I know why.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Blue Fifth Review: Pushcart Nominations
Sam Rasnake has announced his nominations for the 2008 Pushcart Prize from poems published in Blue Fifth Review this year:
They include the following poets and poems:
- Collin Kelley, Patty Hearst on the Occasion of Her Presidential Pardon (Broadside #10, Spring 2008)
- Jeff Mann, Writers’ Tour of Kayford Mountain— October 16, 2006 (Spring Supplement 2008)
- Felicia Mitchell, Zen and the Art of My Brother (Broadside #11, Summer 2008)
- Oliver Rice, Minarets, Incense, Beggars (Winter 2008)
- Amy Riddell, Lament (Fall 2008)
- Susan Terris, See a Cliché, Be a Cliché (Broadside #9, Winter 2008)
I am honored to be in this company. "Zen and the Art of My Brother" has acquired a readership, at any rate, since being published as Broadside #11, and for that alone I am blessed.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Hospital Drive: Words, Sounds, Images
Hospital Drive--a publication of the medical school of the University of Virginia that features "original creative work that examines themes of health, illness, and healing"--has published four poems:
These are poems from the book manuscript entitled "The Lost Language of Dragons" (title poem and many others published in the Dead Mule chapbook). It goes without saying that poems that aren't about my mother are fictionalized, the names made up to match my imagination, though the poems are based in real experiences and emotions.
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