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Lori Anderson Moseman

poetry books & visPo collabs
  • home
  • 2025. whittle gristle
  • 2022. Quietly Between
  • 2022. too many words
  • 2022. okay?
  • 2021. Darn
  • 2019. Y
  • 2018. Mar
  • 2017. Light Each Pause
  • 2016. Flash Mob
  • 2015. Full Quiver
  • 2014. Host
  • 2012. All Steel
  • 2012. Double | Vigil
  • 2012. Creation
  • 2010. Lintel | Gunwale
  • 2009. Temporary Bunk
  • 2003. Persona
  • 1992. Cultivating Excess
  • 1991. Walking The Dead
  • Publication Archive
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2010. The Forest Log

October 23, 2018

As a timber cruiser, I used to enter forests with an eye for the merchantable: along a compass line, I’d use a prism (tilted on a clinometer) to determine which trees to measure. Instruments dictated my vision. What if my goal is not to get an accurate estimate of timber yields but to see the forest through the tools of visionary poets?

In 2010, while on a writing residency at H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, I took poems from these poets into long term ecological research plots: Taigu Ryōkan, Ema Saiko, A.R. Ammons, Goran Sonnevi, Arthur Sze, Maria Melendez, Brinda Iijima and Michele Glazer. Within the log decomposition site, the Lookout Creek gravel bar, and the Blue River Face timber sale, I found eight reflection spots and went to work inspired by the above poets.

My practice sequence for each plot: 1) meander, 2) photograph, 3) pause, 4) recite, 5) imitate, 6) resist, 7) record, 8) erase, 9) research. You can see the results of my play/inquiry online at http://www.trickhouse.org/vol11/experiment/loriandersonmoseman/indexa.htm. 

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Gauging Stations | Poetry Primer

Of all the cylinders I admire, / it is trees that turn my head / at every gauging station / (old friends, Ryōkan would say, / “like greeting old friends”). // The hydrologist admires the hook / gauge: a still well / until its tip breaks water’s surface…/ there … now read the Vernier scale—/ a measure to bring us to zero, // to calibrate all other instruments. / Saikō might prefer the paper scroll / rolled gingerly / into its watertight cylinder. Or, the act / of tearing it // from the seismograph. / The actual inking—the needle / in fluctuation—would captivate Sonnevi / only when discharge exceeds the margins, / starts recording an inverse. // As if extreme events were a turning / back upon oneself. / Ammons would want/ the record only if he couldn’t watch/ the debris torrent rip / down the watershed: logging’s slash / recruiting snapped snags / cavorting with popped culverts. / A road destined to become a gravel bar /dumped by the main channel at a bend, / Iijima likes the mixing of weekly/ samples—three in the same jug — / and savors the later data breakdown: / a transcript divorced / from the topographical, the topical, // the visceral scramble up the tributary. / Melendez plays / with the spare PVC tubing, / bangs it so motion makes a tuba of it. / All hollows know how to sound out / the poem they got in them. // Perhaps Sze would stand beside me, / admire the trapezoidal flume, the hand / going to the V-notch—its formal / beauty foreshadowing its precision. / (Not just any surface reflects.) // My friend Glazer is always at the edge / of the sediment basin. / She neither leaps into it nor over it. / Somehow, she gets under it. / surface with enough silt / to ground our grief.

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ARCHIVE

Looking back over decades of writing and collaborating, poet Lori Anderson Moseman shares highlights.


Posts

1991  SEEDS

1995. The Little Magazine

1991, 1995. 13th MOON

2000. iEar Studio

2000. Portages

2001. Canoehead

2003. Writing on Air

2006. High Watermark Salo[o]n

2008. Meander Scar

2008. Witness Post

2010. The Forest Log

2012. Confluence

2013. The Volta

2014. Dusie, Ecopoethos Issue

2016. Forest Under Story

2018. Counter-Desecration

2019. Talon Review

2022. Report, Mangold Society

2022. Neighbors, #20

2023. Neighbors, #22

2023. Quietly Between

2024. Touch the Donkey

2024. Fathom