Wild Muse
Wild Muse was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Awards
Most of my poems are self-explanatory, but a few glosses may be in order. The faux epigraph for “Grandmother Gourd” was cobbled from a much longer scientific report. The T. S. Eliot epigraph for “Layers” is from the sequence entitled “East Coker” in Four Quartets. It is one of my many non-sonnets, which allude to that tradition while ignoring most of the rules.
Danzón is a Cuban social dance from the early 20th century, and my “Danzón” is probably a gesture to commemorate my five years in a salsa band. “Ode Ending with a Line by Roethke” is another of my so-called décimas, 10-line poems which have little resemblance to their Spanish forebear, a competitive improvised form that strictly rhymes. “Danzón” adheres to a rhyme scheme; otherwise, my use of rhyme is more often spontaneous, though I have to beware of my tendency to end with a rhymed couplet (probably residue from the Shakespearean sonnet).
The minimalist “Ode” below is with tongue in cheek, since Keats’s odes were sometimes ten pages or longer. The allusion to “Nanook hooking a walrus” is from Flaherty’s early documentary, Nanook of the North (1922), the Hemingway reference is to his novella The Old Man and the Sea. The last line is from “The Waking,” a villanelle by Theodore Roethke, another early influence, though I switch pronouns in the quote (“we” instead of “I”).
The line in “Swallows” alludes to a book title (The Amazing Zhang Women) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, where I took my Chinese daughter when she was still in high school. Her family name is Zhang, so I referred to her thereafter as “my amazing Zhang woman.” “Howl for Susan Powell” is for a poet friend who was invited to be guest of honor when Yellowstone reintroduced wolves in the 1990s. Another non-sonnet, it gently pokes fun at Ginsberg’s epic from the 1950s (initially called “Howl for Carl Solomon”) by referencing an actual “howl” from Susan’s pet wolf, Kegan. I was reassured it was a gesture of rare distinction.
“Why France Sold Us Louisiana” is largely history as slapstick, based on the catalog of horrors from chapter two (“La Salle’s Luck”) of Bob Lancaster’s The Jungles of Arkansas (University of Arkansas Press, 1989). “Rock-Skipping on the West Fork” is possibly my response to a Miller Williams poem I admire, his “Poem for Emily” which appeared in Poetry Magazine shortly after the birth of his granddaughter. Unfortunately, Miller passed away a few years before the age forecast in the poem. So when I turned 67, I summoned my son back from Minnesota and hurried to skip stones on the White River. After all these years, he still kicked my butt. Like Miller’s poem, mine also scans and rhymes. Though rhyming is now out of fashion (except in hiphop), it’s one of my few poems I can recite from memory. It also echoes my lifelong admiration for Emily Dickinson.
In closing, it makes me happy that more than half these poems lack a first-person pronoun. I enjoy escaping my ego and slipping into nature, placing our human foibles in a larger frame, beyond calendar time and into geological time (“Grandmother Gourd,” “Layers,” and “Double Exposure”), not just hoping for transcendence but for a kind of redemption as well.
Shadows of Mount Sequoyah
Dana Tiger taught me how to say
the word “cedar” in Cherokee. It
tangled my Aryan tongue at first,
so I practiced until it felt natural.
Passing my arboreal elder tonight,
I say “a-tsi-na” aloud then repeat,
certain it hears and can understand
the sound we humans once assigned
to an aging sentinel guarding our hill
I’m sure it will be here after I’m gone,
still anchoring its thin layer of topsoil,
still bending its gnarly arms in the wind.
Though I have the gift of mobility,
I probably wouldn’t notice if you
cut me off at the knees, my roots
left behind years ago in Oklahoma.
Grandad would sit in the summer shade
carving talismans out of red cedar,
leaving them scattered about the yard
to be deciphered a lifetime later.
Wild Muse event poster
“Gerry Sloan, meanwhile, brings a conscious reflectiveness to his work of nature lost, nature gone, yet remembered, pulling back layers both in nature and expression.”
— Lynn Cline, review of WILD MUSE: Ozarks Nature Poetry, Ozark Watch, Fall/Winter 2023–24.