Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today’s piece was contributed by (Nelson) Howard Miller, who has been one of the major contributors to Poets’ Corner (you can find the full collection at https://theotherpages.org/poems/). Anything with the initials NM next to it, is something he selected, transcribed and edited.

Hayden Carruth (1921 - 2008) lived much of his life in Vermont where he earned his living through a combination of farmwork, editing various literary magazines, and teaching at a number of colleges and universities.

He wrote thirty volumes of poetry, and much of it draws upon his experiences with nature and farming, and with the people of rural New England. He is also considered a significantly philosophical poet. He often writes formal poems -  using meter, rhyme, and set forms, especially the sonnet, but also writes highly rhythmic free verse influenced by jazz and the blues.

He also has a number of longer poems; I particularly like the early pieces "Journey to a Known Place" and "North Winter" as well as the later "Vermont."

Today’s poem The Ravine (https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10005076) is a nature poem which is also a philosophical meditation on identity, relationship, and meaning.

The poem opens with a detailed description of the ravine in summer -- grass, weeds, one dead and two live animals.  The speaker then contrasts what he sees with the appearances of the ravine in both spring (flooded) and winter (snow-filled), in both cases hidden from view.

Over "geologic time," the ravine will change, either vanishing altogether or becoming deeper; recognizing these possibilities brings "sorrow," because the speaker sees not individual things but "relationships," how things are connected rather than the beauty of what is individual and unique; there is a sense that, for him, something is lost as a consequence.

Finally, he questions what these relationships themselves may mean, but he cannot arrive at an understanding and ends the poem by twice repeating his own puzzlement:

"I wonder what they mean.  Every day,

day after day, I wonder what they mean."

Thanks for Listening

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