Inspiration Archive

Invisible Gardens: Cultivating Interpretive Possibilities

By
Legacy
Published: August 7, 2009Posted in: InspirationTags: , , ,

by Wren Smith

“When we garden, whether we realize it or not, we bring to bear our previous life experiences, our memories of childhood and travel, our family relations, our readings, our dreams and aspirations, our moral standards, character flaws, our sensuality, and grandiosity of spirituality. All of these are part of the invisible garden.”

—Dorothy Sucher, The Invisible Garden

wren_smithFrom my upstairs window, my desk overlooks my sprawling garden. Usually, on a day off, that’s where I’m either puttering around, weeding, planting, or just gawking. (I do a lot of gawking!) Yet today, despite the fact that the sky is bachelor button blue and the air is pleasantly cool, I’m compelled to write about gardening in an attempt to get at the core of something that has been nagging at me for weeks. Like gardening, writing has a way of bringing to fruition things previously hidden. I love Dorothy Sucher’s idea of the invisible garden, in which she confirms my suspicion that there is far more to gardens and gardening than meets the eye.

As an interpreter, I like to think of this green-tinted invisible realm as the place where seeds, memories, and meanings (ours and our visitors) germinate; and what blooms is sometimes expected and sometimes a surprise. When tended, this garden has the potential for creating some new way of thinking about life and thus our programs, projects, and encounters with others. Garden metaphors are so prolific that I may sound like “Mr. Gardener” from Peter Sellers’ movie Being There. Nevertheless, I can’t help but muse as I gaze upon my own visible and vibrant garden, illuminated by soft morning light. The pink and red Shirley poppies twirl in the breeze like country dancers in their pink and red skirts, near the blue puffs of bachelor buttons; the rainbow chard gleams darkly and the row of lettuce casts a chartreuse smile. No, I must dig a bit deeper; even at the risk of stating the obvious, or worse, gilding the lily.

Interpreters are gardeners by nature.
We plant seeds when we provide provocative experiences—experiences that may become fruitful, perhaps years later. Not only do we plant the seeds, but sometimes we add water or compost to the seeds planted by others. Sometimes we weed, sometimes we mulch. Regardless, there is an act of faith that someone else will add to our efforts—will water, weed, or cultivate the seeds we plant. Gardening, even for our own pleasure is, after all, a community love affair with hope, involving interactions and exchanges on so many levels. This is especially true for our invisible gardens, the ones that we carry with us. We share our ideas, colorful stories, and dreams, and others share with us. Gardens, and plants in general, teach us the importance of reciprocity. Cross-pollination creates new possibilities. A garden, either real or metaphorical can be a garden of interpretive delights—one that hums, buzzes, blossoms, blooms, fades, and blossoms again, in ways that are sometimes hidden.

Wren’s garden mirrors the memory of her enchanted trip to the strawberry farm as a child.

Wren’s garden mirrors the memory of her enchanted trip to the strawberry farm as a child.

Often there are others, even those who aren’t trained interpreters, who add interpretive “green” magic that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.Such experiences also plant seeds in the imagination and become part of the loamy fertility of our invisible gardens. One of my earliest memories is from a you-pick-it strawberry farm near my hometown of Shelbyville, Kentucky. The farmer not only provided opportunities for us to pick strawberries to take home or to pop directly in our mouths, she also set a table in her garden for us children to make strawberry shortcakes. While only four or five years old, I sat wide-eyed as a daisy, drinking in the loveliness. The simple but elegant table surrounded by flowers, lush green hedges, and wonderful winged creatures—birds, butterflies, and bees coming and going about their business. Some I observed diving head-long into trumpet-shaped lilies, others hovered gingerly on glistening wings over gold-dusted stamens.

Yes, the table was adorned with a lovely white lace cloth, napkins, and crystal bowls, piled high with whipped cream, sugar, and strawberries. But there was something more, something akin to magic emanating from that experience, something that planted itself in the receptivity of my childhood imaginings.Decades later, as I prepared a small outdoor table for dinner guests, I gazed at my own lush gardens and the memory from my childhood at the you-pick-it strawberry farm winged its way back with the full force of its significance. I looked around at the incredible beauty before me—my lace tablecloth, red and white slices of apples on a blue plate, pink lilies catching and holding the colors of the setting sun, bees and butterflies gathering their treasures from the blossoms. Everything was glowing and humming. I realized that this childhood experience had become a part of me, and I realize now, after reading Sucher’s book, that the experience has become a part of my invisible garden.

Creating a garden that mirrored this early experience helped me realize that images can act as potential seeds in our lives.
Encounters with the vital force of nature, especially when young, can shape the landscape of our lives. Indeed, that happened with me. I created a world that sprouted directly from those buried memories of my enchanted trip to the strawberry farm so many years before. Images from special times and places can provide moments of deep seeing or being, and have the potency of seeds. Like seeds these images are capable of being carried about in our psyches for years before germinating.

Isaac W. Bernheim, the founder of Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, carried the image of his beloved trees with him from his childhood homeland of Germany when he set sail for America in 1867. Although just a teenager, soon Isaac was traveling from village to village with his horse and a peddler’s pack of Yankee notions through the Pennsylvania forest. I can imagine young Isaac among those towering trees with the morning mist scattering the sunlight, producing that marvelous and meditative Tindal effect. Perhaps those mornings of solitude surrounded by trees provided the idea growing conditions for the seeds that eventually sprouted into a 14,000-acre arboretum and research forest. Could such a legacy have grown without those first seed images planted early in his childhood?

The idea that we become what we truly see or behold is nothing new. Even William Wordsworth’s proclamation that “the child is father to the man” (and woman) attests to this idea. Finding ways to use this notion creatively may be needed more now than ever, especially as the age of technology supplants much of our direct contact with nature. Richard Louv’s highly acclaimed book Last Child in the Woods attests to this change in culture and seems to give voice to the collective consciousness on this matter. Regardless of your view on technology with its rewards and drawbacks, we are challenged to find ways to provide this and future generations with experiences that have the potency of seeds. These experiences help root us to the earth and can become partners in the way we approach life. We also have an obligation to create worlds that are worth replicating, full of green and growing things, flowers, the hum and buzz of fellow creatures and wild places—visible and invisible gardens!

It is up to us to create experiences that nurture deep seeing and being.
While it may not be desirable for us to plant lots of enchanted strawberry gardens (especially when you consider the realities of heavy pesticides used for such), we do need to create worlds or experiences that nurture deep seeing and being. When we do, we not only plant a seed but we also make a map out of memory, a map that can lead us and our visitors deeper into our own natures, deeper into the heart of the world, and perhaps deeper into the heart of the great mystery. Isn’t that what really happens inside a seed? Isn’t this interpretation at its best?

The farmer who made her you-pick-it strawberry farm such an extraordinary experience probably had no idea what would sprout from her extra effort. She must have known however, the value of spreading magic and planting real and invisible seeds. You may never see the results of the extra effort you make to create visitor experiences that plant possibilities for beauty, understanding, or a sense of connection. Rest assured, though, your efforts may be more fruitful than you’ll ever know.

Wren Smith is a poet and an interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest. Wren welcomes your insights and comments at Wren@bernheim.org or 502-955-8512 x227.

In the Beginning Was the Word: Demystifying Poets And Poetry

By
Legacy
Published: May 20, 2009Posted in: InspirationTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by Will LaPage

willlapageWe are all poets, and every poem is an interpretation.

The poet is no more mysterious than is the scientist. One is in love with words, the other with numbers. For either, it’s the beauty of the formulation that counts, not its acceptance. For Einstein, E=mc2 was pure poetry. That it could change the world was in distant second place to the breakthrough in understanding it encapsulated. For Robert Frost, the imagery of two roads diverging in a wood was an equally elegant formula for describing life. The thought that schoolchildren might be repeating the lines somewhere ages and ages hence probably never crossed his mind.

We are fond of saying that poetry has the power to awaken the senses, but these two examples suggest that we ought to credit the poet, at least, with somewhat more modest objectives. The acceptance of a poem is profoundly anticlimactic; as W. H. Auden so poetically observed: “The publication of a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” The formulation is everything; if the poem resonates with others, that’s a bonus.

It seems highly unlikely that Emerson was the first to challenge us to seek out our inner poet, but he probably said it best by insisting that our poetry will come out in other ways if we choose not to write it. In fact, the ability to live our poetry seems vastly superior to just committing it to paper. While we may deny our inner poet, we cannot deny our feelings, our senses, and our emotions—the very intangibles that make us distinctly human and distinctively individual. Those things are the essence of life as well as the building blocks of poetry.

If we are all poets, living our poetry, then it follows that poetry is all around us. If you haven’t noticed any today, try putting on the glasses of your inner poet so that you might enjoy the poetry in a falling leaf, a random act of kindness, a passing cloud, or a tax refund. Just in the past few hours, I witnessed three acts of living poetry that are not easily converted to the written word. On the morning news, I heard a report of a dog rescuing a litter of kittens from a burning building. This was followed by an item about a mortgage buyer, at auction, giving the home back to its tearful owner. Later, while kayaking on the White River, I watched a grandfather teaching a child to fly fish and then how to gently release his catch. Such living poetry almost defies written interpretation, and yet, each contains the paradoxical seed of a great poem.

Just as a painting or a photograph is not the real thing, a poem is always an inadequate interpretation of living poetry. As with the painting, the written poem contains no small amount of artistic license. The poet has no obligation to accurately portray the scene, only an artistic obligation to be interesting. Like any good interpretation, poetry is an attempt to artfully portray a story, provoking interest, while seeking to be relevant, focused, and informative. I particularly like Max Bodenheim’s definition because it neatly addresses all of these criteria: “Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the wind.” In these nine words, Bodenheim demonstrates two additional principles: those of economy of words and organization of thought—the right word in exactly the right place!

With the possible exception of prehistoric rock etching, poetry may well be humans’ first attempt at interpreting their world. For centuries, in the absence of a written language and readily available writing materials, the poet/bard, sometimes using musical accompaniment, provided our primary interpretations of life and history, using sagas that were provocative, interesting, relevant, focused, and artful. The principles of interpretation, not articulated until the mid-1950s by Freeman Tilden, were firmly in place in the ancients’ job description for their poets. The Roman poet, Horace, writing in 65 BC, called poets “the first teachers of mankind.” Now, more than 2,000 years later, poetry remains unconstrained and undiminished by today’s still limited tools of communication technology. In the current resurgence of interest in poetry, we may actually be seeing a backlash to the growing impersonality of modern communication.

Poetry is intensely personal because it is fundamentally emotional, calling on our senses and getting us to think in different ways about the accepted and the commonplace. It is no coincidence that totalitarian regimes are known for locking up their poets or, at the very least, keeping them under surveillance and labeling these basically peace-loving artists-with-words as dangerous to the state. For the oppressor, words are dangerous because they promote thinking, and while words cannot be purged, wordsmiths can. Most of us would agree with Rudyard Kipling that “words are the most powerful drug ever used by mankind.” And then along comes Pablo Neruda, who nicely puts that power in perspective by pointing out that “peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”

“I am not a teacher, but an awakener” says Frost. The poet is not content with limiting sensorial exploration to the traditional five of taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell. Our senses of peace, place, and purpose are fertile fields for poetry to explore, as are intuition and the sense of wonder, because they allow us to look inside ourselves and discover not just our inner poet, but our inner nature, our beliefs. To allow ourselves an open mind to examine the paradoxical in our beliefs may be the ultimate sense of freedom—freedom to discover one’s self.

Some of our less physical senses are no easier to turn off than are the senses of taste or touch. Along with senses of beauty and danger, our sense of direction (our inner compass), the sense of time (our inner clock), and the senses of balance, motion, and distance all work to keep us out of trouble as we literally and metaphorically create and walk the tightropes of our lives. Spidermen, indeed!

The collection of senses connecting the inner self with the world around us, often curiously labeled common sense, provides endless fields for poetic exploration. Without, at least, a sense of humor we’d be hard pressed to deal with the often bizarre situations that the world throws at us. A sense of appropriateness is invaluable in countless settings where the dictates of order, civility, behavior, proportion, and protocol define social acceptability. In fact, our sense of appropriateness has been one of our richest sources of both humor and poetry.

Over time, we develop complex senses of justice and honor as we maneuver among the land mines of fairness, respect, loyalty, pride, ethics, and responsibility. Our sense of worth guides us in making judgments about needs and wants, and cost versus value. And our sense of compassion naturally reaches out to embrace love, caring, sympathy, empathy, and sadness. Just imagine how many times the injustice of unrequited love has diminished someone’s sense of worth over the millennia.

In poetry we find a safe haven for dealing with the paradoxical nature of life. Our human inconsistencies are wildly evident throughout our common senses. For example, the senses of pleasure and guilt seem to have neatly teamed up to fuel two of the world’s largest economies: entertainment and religion. And, our sense of the spiritual or supernatural allows us to cope, at least in superficial ways, with the phenomena that science has yet to explain—the sacred, the metaphysical, the mystical, and the magical. If God could create the perfection of something like a tree, why bother with fools like me (with apologies to Joyce Kilmer)?

Our many senses exist at remarkably different levels of development and respond to an infinite variety of settings, making us truly sensate and, hopefully, sensible beings. It is not just our sense of beauty, but every one of our senses that exists in the eye of the beholder. But “poetry is something more than just good sense,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That something more is how we feel about what we sense, feelings that range from indifferent to passionate. The poet creates “weapons of mass instruction” by combining two common household ingredients: words and passion.

If poetry does have the ability to awaken our myriad senses, it surely does so by recognizing the paradoxical in life and laying it bare with passion and clarity. And, if poetry is to fully use its ability to interpret life, it must be available, it must be demystified. It must be appreciated and valued for its emotional logic, just as we value science for its analytic logic.

Emotional logic—the realization that humans can be simultaneously subjective and objective, that there are truths that are satisfying to both sides of the brain—may well be what poetry does best. The appeal of poetry is the appeal of words, and the appeal of words is the appeal of the imagination. It is tempting to substitute the word power for the word appeal, however, power is not the right word simply because poetry is to power as waves are to the shore. Power, for the poet, would only be a burden. Poetry does not play in the power arena; it is the voice you hear after the arena grows silent, when the players have left, when the light of dawn reminds us that the arena is not the real world we live in.

“When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” —John F. Kennedy

Will La Page is the author of Voices from the Park, and A Park is A Poem on the Land, available from PublishAmerica.com, and Parks for Life, from Venturepublish.com.

The Poetics of Interpretation

By
Legacy
Published: April 1, 2009Posted in: InspirationTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by Wren Smith
March/April 2009

wren_smithIn Interpretation for Park Visitors, William Lewis introduces the concept of the interactive threesome. In describing this dynamic “Y” intersection where You the interpreter meets Your visitors at Your site, Lewis inspires the poet in me to see the similarities between the interpretive and poetic processes. After all, at the heart of interpretation is a poetic sensibility that is dynamic, creative, and inspiring.

Exploring the Work and Words of Poets can Inspire our Interpretive Efforts
We interpreters are as busy as most in the whirlwind of modernity. However it’s good to slow down and listen to other voices, to find amid all the details and deadlines still pools for reflection that resonate with our inner landscape. The poetic landscape is such a place. Freeman Tilden said, “An interpreter must be some kind of artist and at best a poet.” He understood that the same processes used by poets to hone their skills are also necessary to create powerful interpretive experiences. As you read the following excerpt from Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, substitute the words interpretation and interpreter for poetry and poet and you will see that the passage rings true. Both disciplines arise from the same fertile earth and the inner landscape and both, arguably, have similar aims.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also it began through the process of seeing…feeling… hearing … smelling, and touching, and then remembering—I mean remembering in words—what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives. A poet uses the actual, the known event or experience to elucidate the inner, the invisible experience….

Whether writing poetry or prose, employing certain poetic devices helps make our language livelier and more evocative. In his book Interpretive Writing, Alan Leftridge reminds us that “poetry can provide emotional/intellectual responses not always possible in prose.” He also discusses how interpreters can and should use active verbs, alliterations, analogies, metaphors, similes, contrast and comparisons, and other techniques to clarify and energize their message. Although most of us routinely employ many of these poetic devices, we can become more attuned to their interpretive implications when we ponder our shared processes.

Poets use tangible things to convey intangible ideas, linking the known with the unknown.
Poet William Carlos Williams said, “There are no ideas…but things.” Williams was not suggesting that ideas don’t exist at all, but merely reminding us that ideas (whether shared by a poet or by an interpreter) are only available in the context of real things.

Mary Oliver echoes this notion in A Poetry Handbook.

In every instance something has to be known initially in order for the linkage and the informing quality of the comparison to work…. In the metaphoric device, this essence is then extended so that it applies to an unknown thing.

Beginning poets often omit concrete details from their early efforts. They try to tell rather than show their readers what they mean. They may write verse after verse containing “beautiful, lovely, peaceful days” and other similar abstractions. As they gain experience, however, they learn the value of using a more rooted language. Instead of saying “the beautiful blue sky,” they might say, “the sky, like a piece of polished turquoise shone above our heads.”

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda celebrated everyday things in much of his poetry. The following lines are from his poem, “Ode to a Pair of Socks.”

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd’s hands.
Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.
I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin….

By naming, knowing, or noticing the details of that which they love, poets can celebrate these “things.” In 1920, German-speaking poet Rainer Maria Rilke makes it clear in a letter to a friend, however, that really noticing or knowing about these “Things” can be difficult.

These things, whose essential life you want to express, first ask of you, “Are you free?”… and if the Thing sees that your are otherwise occupied, with even a particle of your interest, it shuts itself off…. In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the center of the universe….

Interpretive Implications: Like inexperienced poets, new interpreters may be tempted to tell their audiences about beauty, loss, or the threat of extinction but fail to show them, either literally or figuratively, what they mean. Like poets, our awareness and our language should be “rooted” in the good earth of particular “things” or concrete imagery. Such attentiveness honors the vital force that we find there. Attention to the small details is essential but so too is the larger picture.

Poets sometimes bridge a perception gap between the small details and universal ideas by using a “telescoping” technique.
Poet Leonard Nathan, in A Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher, tells of a phenomenon discussed among quantum physicists known as the Principle of Indeterminacy. According to this principle, the more we concentrate on the details the more we miss the whole and the more we concentrate on the whole the more we miss the details.

Using contrasting perspectives poets strive to reveal how the large world is infinitely connected to the small. When a poet focuses on something small and close at hand (say an acorn), then attempts to perceive the tree or even the forest, he or she is employing a telescoping technique. The following familiar lines by William Blake illustrate this approach:

To see the universe in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower; hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.

When poets contrast the small world of details with the larger world of ideas and vice versa, they invite their readers to experience the ordinary in the light of the extraordinary.

Japanese poet Issa evoked the image of a mountain reflected in a dragonfly’s eye. Photo by Cris Knopf.

Japanese poet Issa evoked the image of a mountain reflected in a dragonfly’s eye. Photo by Cris Knopf.

The Japanese poet Issa appears to have employed this telescoping approach in a famous haiku, by evoking the image of a mountain reflected in a dragonfly’s eye.

Interpretive Implications: Try switching back and forth between the small details, for instance the flowers of big bluestem, back to the big picture, perhaps noticing how prairies are havens of diversity, and back again. Telescoping is one way to scope out and develop potential themes. This technique also helps ensure that our interpretive efforts don’t become so immersed in details that we lose the big picture.

Like poets, we interpreters simultaneously delve into the processes of distillation and expansion. You give either a poet or an interpreter a peach, and both may attempt to share the hum of the whole orchard.

Poets use imagery not only to paint a picture but also to create effect.
Mrs. Shye, my seventh-grade teacher, took our class on an imaginary journey into the heart of a lemon. She invited us to close our eyes and imagine a lemon on the desk in front of us. She suggested we notice the shadows cast by the lemon, to feel its weight, to hold and roll it around in our hands. She encouraged us to notice the tiny pores and the knobby place left by the stem. She invited us to slice our lemon with an imaginary knife, to pick up and examine a lemon half, to notice the little translucent packages of juice and the white rind forming its wheel-like pattern, to smell and squeeze the lemon, to hear its juiciness. Soon, all of us were virtually bathing in this sensory-rich citrus experience. But that wasn’t all! Mrs. Shye ended our journey by asking us to take a big bite of that lemon! An audible gasp erupted from the class as we felt our faces contort and the saliva flow.

Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Lemon” invokes imagery to help us see this fruit as a cathedral. Photo by Vangelis Thomaidis.

Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Lemon” invokes imagery to help us see this fruit as a cathedral. Photo by Vangelis Thomaidis.

Notice how Pablo Neruda leads us on a journey into the heart of the lemon through his use of imagery in a few lines from his poem “Ode to a Lemon.”

Cutting the Lemon
the knife
leaves a little
cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light of topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades…

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch.

Interpretive Implication: Learning to speak “imaginese,” poets and interpreters can evoke hidden worlds.

Although my first journey into the heart of the lemon was over 30 years ago, I never forgot the experience or what I learned about the power of imagery. Interpreters who effectively use imagery can help visitors experience the tangible world in new ways. Through imagery, we can offer our audiences experiences rich in mood and meaning and sometimes even transport them to other times and places.

Conclusion
Basho advised the poet writing of a pine tree to learn from the pine tree. When we interpreters go directly to the source of our wonder and inspiration we “fill the well from which we will draw.” When we allow our focus to switch from the small details to the bigger picture and back again, we create a footbridge across perception gaps. When we use language rich in imagery, we cultivate the possibility for illuminating encounters with the resources we cherish. The interpretive value of such a synthesized encounter is often greater than the sum of its parts. Both we and our visitors not only hear the music of prairie flowers but also of distant stars. Not only do we help our visitors forge emotional and intellectual bonds with our resource but we enable them to see the “trees” and the “forest.”

As interpreters, we share much in our labor with many fine poets and songwriters as we attempt to convey the passion we feel for the places we love. Kentucky poet Wendell Berry puts it beautifully in “Life’s a Miracle”:

I believe that this need for a whole, vital, particularizing language applies just as strongly to the sciences as to the arts and humanities. For the human necessity is not just to know, but also to cherish and protect the things that are known, and to know the things that can be known only by cherishing. If we are to protect the world’s multitude of places and creatures, then we must know them, not just conceptually but imaginatively as well. They must be pictured in the mind and in the memory: they must be known with affections, “by heart,” so that in seeing or remembering them the heart may be said to “sing,” to make a music peculiar to its recognition of each particular place or creature that it knows well.

***

Wren Smith is a poet and an interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest. Wren welcomes your insights and comments.