“my hedon eden”
ELENI SIKELIANOS / FROM THE CALIFORNIA POEM
ecopoetics volume 1, page 99
I’m stuck on writing about this excerpt.
It’s from a book-length poem. I feel like I should look at the whole book. It has pictures and graphs. I almost ordered it, but I held back for a minute which became an hour which became a day which became a week or more.
I’m stuck wondering about “The Montana Poem.” A much more elusive project.
Poets like to talk about “place.” Even I like to talk about “place.” I’m uneasy about this “place.” Thoreau’s “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” comes to mind. Beware of all thoughts that tell you everything would be better in a different place. A nicer, more wild, cleaner, more beautiful, less populated, higher elevation, lower cost-of-living place nearer to the mountains and the sea with more animals and fewer neighbors and less traffic.
On the other hand, Thoreau went to Walden Pond.
Flying into Montana and spending a week driving around it and then flying out – very disorienting. No more disorienting than living in California for two years. Or being becalmed in Connecticut for decades. Wanting to be somewhere else is a craving I’m trying to give up.
La Vida Loca-loca-loca-loca-local. My localifornia.