Brenda Jones was in the right place at the right time, when this red fox danced across Carnegie Lake not that many weeks ago.  As I turn my new life over to NJ WILD, it is this wildness I seek.

Ten months ago, –when Ilene Dube of the Packet insisted that I create and maintain a nature blog, infused with some poetry, for the purposes of encouraging appreciation and preservation of nature–, I knew the blog’s name had to be NJ WILD.  Even though I couldn’t have told anyone what a blog is, at that time.  But I knew its essence is WILD.

Now NJ WILD has a life of its own.  Last week, official statistics reported over 500 viewings in over 30 countries.  The primary-hued pie chart showed a hefty red slice of known/local/repeat viewer-participants, and to you I am profoundly grateful always.  But, by far, the preponderance of contact comes through “Search Engines.”  A phrase I’d never heard a decade ago.

Ilene has launched me on a global voyage.  What I want to know, now that we’re all in this together, known and unknown, is WHY is WILD so important to me?

If I cannot see and say WHY WILD is essential, how can I urge you to seek and to save it?

What many do not know is that, last summer, on the heels of beginning NJ WILD, the Muse of Poetry battled the Muse of Preservation, and Preservation won.  Although co-founder and publicist of Princeton’s Cool Women Poets, I have turned aside the writing, the publicizing, even attendance at most poetic events.  No more nightly critique sessions with U.S. 1 Poets, Delaware Poets, Bucks County Bards, let alone the treasured monthly critique time with Cool Women.  They go forward without me, having brought in two new members.  I, however, have chosen Preservation, am taking the WILD path. Read the rest of this entry »

Author and teacher of writing at Columbia University, Gladys Taber, once blurted my all time favorite plaint about the concept of ‘Summer Reading’.  I paraphrase somewhat –

“Whoever invented ’summer reading’?  I may be hot, but my brain’s all right!”  I would trumpet this from the rooftops.  In fact, I go to opposite extremes.  Summer is when I take on the big ones, because there seem more hours in summer days, more luminous hours. 

The summer when our Princeton US 1 Poets Cooperative was all abuzz over member, Jean Hollander’s superb poetic translation, with scholar husband, Robert, of Dante’s Inferno, I read theirs and Ciardi’s back-to-back.  Another summer was a natural for re-reading Moby Dick; followed immediately by the splendid Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund.  After “It was the best of times, the worst of times,” Naslund’s opening sentence of that epic novel is my hands-down winner:  “Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.” 

So I don’t pick up Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, A Year on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, because it is summer.  Read the rest of this entry »