Responses to Todd Davis Writing About Bears

I like nature poetry a lot, probably because I like nature a lot. It's almost like another world to me. Todd Davis has a couple of poems about bears that I really enjoy. In Seeing Things he writes about a bear who hangs out behind his house eating fish out of his neighbors pond. Him and his neighbor agree not to tell anyone about the bear. It's almost like they want to be friends with the bear, like they have a connection. Now through this poem I also have an imaginary connection with this bear.

Todd wrote another poem about bears called sleep. In this poem the bears feast on back berries and then succumb to what he calls the drug of sleep.

"How better to drift 

toward another world but with leaves   

falling, their warmth draping us,   

our stomachs full and fat with summer?"

Reading this one I find myself wishing I could hibernate all winder, like a bear. It would be nice to fill up on blackberries and then hole up in a warm cave, just waiting for spring, enjoying the drug of sleep. This is a great fall poem.

There is one more poem about bears called The Poet Stumbles upon a Buddha in Gamelands 158 Above Tipton, Pennsylvania. This poem creates the image of a bear using his butt to push a thorny plant called the devil's walking stick out of the way so the bear and feast on the berries. I feel as though Todd is passing this bears satisfaction and care free attitude on for the rest of us to enjoy. 

My response to Di Brandt

One poem I found meaningful started with the line "death is a good argument"

I think this poem is rather beautiful in a strange way. It's ironic because our society views death in a negative way. Instead Brandt says it's

better than fathers,
better than God.
lighting us together into the night.
better than the entire library of Western thought,
better than promises, flowers, panting, gold.

i long again for the old pain,

Pain is good because it creates balance in our lives. When our body hurts, we are inevitably forced to acknowledge this pain, and try to fix it. Eventually, we feel better again, so in awareness of this cycle, we can find joy in our pain.


I thought this fit well after the poem that preceded it, starting with the line "poem for a guy who's thought about feminism"

The last lines of this poem state

there's holocaust
between us,

& I'm tired of dying.

This poem to me uses feminism as a metaphor for the struggle between all human beings to gain power or control. She says

the poem is bigger
than i am. the poem
is hungry, & insists
on its own truth.

This to me symbolizes the idea described in a book like Lord of the Flies where a group of civilized kids are stranded on a island, and eventually for a primal society killing an outcast of the group. The idea that deep down, no matter how hard we try, humans can not move past selfish survival instinct. As Di says because we're too tired of death. Too tired of pain.

It's comforting to me that this poem is followed by "death is a good argument", because it implies that Di has to some extent made peace with this issue.

A Mennonite Poem

Mary Makes the Best Cinnamon Rolls


pacifisticuffs and dirt claud wars
at the MCC relief sale
we play football on the lawn after church
while our parents chat about whatever
youth group trips to native reservations
or major cities
to play cards with hobos and paint houses
and make lots of inside jokes

christmas plays based on the breakfast club
or james bond or dragnet
followed by paper bags
stuffed with oranges peanuts and candy
and a table with more cookies
or trunk-er-treating
outside a barn
after a hayride
and hot apple cider

we talk about the other kids at school
who lost their virginity in 3rd grade
on some bridge
and the pregnant girls in our eighth grade class
my youth pastors wife has a kid in her 2nd grade class
who likes to throw chairs
we all thank god that our parents give us enough attention

we go up to camp in the mountains
where we see all the friends that we made from last year
and hike and sing songs
climb rocks and race kayaks
or play broomball if the lake is frozen
Mary makes the best cinnamon rolls
sometimes we hold hands with girls from kansas

The Art of Sylvia Gross Bubalo

One of the first paintings that caught my attention was The Judgment of Six. This piece uses words paired with a drawing to openly criticize the harsh judgmental tendency's of the Mennonite faith. I like this piece but I think words are a bit direct. One important aspect of visual art as a form of communication is the amount of decoding and inference a viewer must use. This process allows the viewer to slowly and organically absorb and digest an idea. If the viewer had decoded this idea visually it would have come over time and been easier to digest but words make the message clear and direct, targeting a more specific group. I think the message is important none the less.

The cover work Where Two Or Three Are Gathered displays a similar view to The Judgment of Six but in a much less aggressive way. In this picture a large figure is holding the people in its arms. The figure has a sun on his head, but is also stepping on two suns. There is also a dove sitting on the heel. At first I though the large figure was God, but the dove seems like a more typical symbol of God, so maybe the large figure represents the structure of society. The figure stepping on the suns displays a similar idea to The Judgment of Six. Not in the same directly situational way, but the figure is defiantly using something other then the ground to hold itself up. This is a view I have come to take after looking at the painting multiple times over a few days. Because of this long period of digestion, this criticism is much easier to accept. In this piece Sylvia also shows this criticism as only part of the larger picture, which is think is a more fair representation.

I also enjoyed the Fear Not! painting quite a bit. This painting somewhat reminds me of a Cheyenne Indian design I saw last spring. In this design the middle is black followed by red, yellow, light blue, dark blue expanding out.  The design represents the expansion of the universe, and depicts evil standing between humans and god in a way that reminds me of this one.

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