Meredith Stricker is the author of Alphabet Theater, a collection of performance poetry and visual art forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. She is an award winning mixed media artist and writer whose work has appeared in numerous exhibits and publications including: Conjunctions, chain, Five Fingers Review, Iowa Review and anthologies from Norton and Milkweed Press. Her collection of essays and images, THINGS THAT SHINE, received a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. MUSE, a collection of poetry was a finalist for the National Poetry Series Award. She served as an editor for the innovative literary journal HOW(ever) and now works as a partner in an architecture and art studio on California's central coast.
The Village Voice writes of her work: "the past is reworked as ancestral languages and new languages meet. For Stricker, the linguistic search becomes an effort to regain all of our losses, "the bee hum of all languages".
About her poem,"The Intelligence of Leaves", Meredith Stricker's writes, "The Intelligence of Leaves" is from a collection Live Trees, writing which has been deeply embedded with living both on the coastal and inland sides of the Santa Lucias
Each day I would write down what I gathered from long walks into the backcountry and along the coast. I have wanted to make poems like trees where I live -- pines and cypress scattered along ridges overlooking the Pacific, and oaks, buckeyes and sycamores spread through interior canyons and fields. To bring the raw sprawl of ink on paper, interweaving cross-outs, cross-currents, like clouds or foam on waves, tangled branches, the marks of snakes imprinting dust.
And also to include the thinking in between -- as short notes or essays (in Camus' sense of essays as "attempts") which follow the poems more as reverie than explanation. There are nine series of poems that range from myth, text layered with tree rings, core samples taken from rough drafts, to the literacy of trees (I am convinced trees have their own culture and language quite outside our purposes for them).
As indicated, each series of poems in Live Trees is followed by working notes.
Young stag's head half-eaten, the horns still beautiful
Becoming alive again -- earth siphoned into green,
A picture of dolphins leaping says one thing to the ears
She gathers white lilies as though
and it's true
the world is held
next to a fire, wicker basket
as a honed knife and eyes open to a radiant day --
crushed sage, slow clouds, sycamore leaves waiting all year
to become dry and float away like flame streaming
from a broken open lantern
so much lost by speaking and so much by
not speaking. Words, our leaves, rustle
in the underbrush quick as the tiny, unassimilated
sounds of yellow warblers
and another to the eyes: like reading by starlight --
pale blue shine, edges blurring, clarity rising
out of the invisible like steam off a morning lake
holding the entire world in her arms
woven grass mat and the outspread
skin of large, unfurled leaves
the pigeon's eyelid, grey and wrinkled
each creature can see us
this instant -- to be flooded by sun
as pelicans and gulls plunge
and all morning the sky fills with the sound of wings
hummingbird startled vertical
rising and falling -- waterfall in air
small green leaf poised
as an elephant's, slants closed slowly
true as philosophy
into transparent waves where sea lions leap
flapping their fins like crows
covered in mist from immense waves
the insistence of each wave flaring
to unravel the self and lie down
open the mouth
the sound moving out is
another wave
white comets
as water
alongside the spoken there's always
something unspoken flowering
silently
we can walk forever and still not reach edge
generous without thinking, the way blue oak leaves spill their wilderness
breathing forest full of life as a town square filled with crowds
each day passing on the street or quiet on a hillside, this one on fire
circled by fragrant manzanita, arms outstretched
something in our veins
this resinous and green
the clear light of the North Star -- votive, luminary, messenger
and the way cypress woods enclose us in salt air and silence
gathered with burning candles -- a kindling of souls
this one floating sideways, this one still as a madrone
Bringing to mind Pound's reading of Confucius --- "respect for the kind of intelligence that enables grass seed to grow grass and the cherry stone to make cherries." In these Central Coast woods, intelligence runs deep in closed cone forests of the ancient Monterey cypress and pine whose cones require intense heat or fire to sear open their seeds. Intelligence is generally assumed to be the property of humans alone. Perhaps this is one of our most unperceptive ideas, confirming only our blindness. There are many senses alive and awake in groves of oaks or redwoods and so many senses of sense. That things touch us as much as we touch them and see us in our own vision.
It's impossible to be separate, except in thinking.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway2001. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Meredith Stricker.
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