Lo Que Pasa, the employee e-magazine of the University of Arizona, has a lovely profile of me over at http://lqp.arizona.edu/node/2875 that just posted today. The profile also includes a slideshow of some of my photos as I read the poem “In May I Consider My Websites.” Check that out at http://uanews.org/node/33141.
Enjoy!
In July I had the honor and good fortune of accompanying 11 other writers, and about 100 scientists, to the Mount St. Helens Science Pulse, sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project, to study and discuss the post-eruption landscape 30 years after its last major eruption. I’ve got some writing deliverables still due — including my editorial in the forthcoming issue of Terrain.org — but part of my proposal was also photography, and I left the mountain with more than 1,600 photos.
I’ve winnowed those photos down to two gallery sets, including some highlights below. View either the limited gallery of 72 photos, or the full gallery of 347 photos. I recommend the latter if you have time because there are a couple aerial shots plus a lot more wildlife, people, and volcano photos. Both sets have captions. In either case, enjoy!
Fantastic lupine bloom on the Pumice Plain at the north face of Mount St. Helens.
Scorched conifer in the blast zone, with the Lady, as Mount St. Helens is called, behind.
Meta Lake has completely recovered, though you can see the “blowdown” area on the mountain behind this small lake. Even in the blowdown, though, renewal is vibrant.
Spirit Lake, some 80 feet higher after the eruption, is also now home to a vast mat of trees blown into the lake during the Mary 18, 1980 eruption.
Early morning Mount St. Helens viewed from Windy Point.
Great swaths of lupine, Indian paintbrush, and other wildflowers greeted us on the Pumice Plain, in the pyroclastic (super hot flow of pumice, ash, magma, and gas) flow area.
Loowit Falls, at the edge of the Pumice Plain and north side of Mount St. Helens. Loowit is a native name for the mountain. What looks like steam or smoke here is actually ashen dust from rockfall. The ground is still very unstable on the mountain.
Afternoon clouds form along the eastern crater peak.
In the scorch zone, silver fir and other conifers are growing back more robustly than originally expected. Within the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, nature is left to take its course.
A curling fern is just one of many detailed photos of plants, moss, lichen, and wildflowers I was happy to take.
Indian paintbrush blooming along the Harmony trail down to Spirit Lake, with Mount St. Helens in the background.
The log mat at Spirit Lake: massive, bewildering, breathtaking.
Writer John Daniel contemplates the lake atop a floating log.
Writers were encouraged to participate in the scientific studies. Here, botanist Mark Swanson details the process for inventorying plants in the blowdown/scorch zone outside Meta Lake.
Back on the Pumice Plain, a horned lark carries a grasshopper for his nestlings. We inventoried bird nests in the region on our last afternoon.
Flowering grasses on the Pumice Plain, with a large dust plume beside Loowit Falls.
Not quite erupting: ash and steam (and/or smoke?) escapes from the lava dome within the crater of Mount St. Helens. The volcano is the Cascades’ most active, erupting on average every 150 years.
The writers and guides of the 2010 Mount St. Helens Science Pulse: (back row, l to r) Simmons Buntin, Derek Sheffield, USFS research geologist Fred Swanson, Spring Creek Project director Charles Goodrich, Bill Johnson, (middle row, l to r) Tony Vogt, Christine Colasurdo, SueEllen Campbell, Cheryl Fish, Elizabeth Dodd, John Calderazzo, (front row, l to r) Jolie Kaytes, and Tung-Hui Hu. Not pictured: John Daniel.
View these photos and plenty more at:
- Limited Gallery (72 photos): http://www.simmonsbuntin.com/images/gallery/2010/mtsainthelens_small/
- Full Gallery (347 photos): http://www.simmonsbuntin.com/images/gallery/2010/mtsainthelens_large/
Are you willing to pay to submit your poetry online? C. Dale Young wants to know:
Over Father’s Day weekend I camped at the 9,000-foot Hospital Flats campground atop Mt. Graham in eastern Arizona with my younger daughter. I took the photos in color, but as I began to optimize them for their galleries, I realized they are just as intriguing in black-and-white. So I’ve created two galleries, one each in color and black-and-white, with some comparisons below:
Claret cup cactus (I think). The brilliance of the red flowers is lost in black-and-white, and yet the flowers have an interesting grayscale color nonetheless.
Orange wildflower that is striking in both color and black-and-white.
My younger daughter at Riggs Lake.
Perhaps the site of a forest fire? At about 9,000 feet elevation, looking down to the desert floor at about 2,800 feet.
I really like this photo both in color and black-and-white.
Another favorite in both color and black-and-white.
Our tent at the Hospital Flats campground, next to a small creek. When we arrived, a handful of older Asian women were picking wild spinach from the creekside.
About to hike a short ridge trail.
I especially like the black-and-white version of this photo, which reminds me of the early photographs from the American west. Such detail and mood in the grayscale, it seems.
New Mexico thistle bud. The deep pink of course isn’t visible on the grayscale, so in the lower image the thistles radiate out in a call for attention.
Another thistle shot. Though the focus doesn’t change here, the overall tone does.
Check out the full galleries at:
Summer Saturday evenings are back on at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. This weekend my daughters and I made the trip over, and though it was a bit chilly (relatively speaking), we still got to shine some scorpions and see lots of other critters and plants.
Here are a sampling of colorful evening abstracts from the visit. Be sure to view the full gallery of 36 photos, as well.
Just past sunset at Gates Pass in the Tucson Mountains.
My daughters, who always enjoy stalking the grounds of the Desert Museum in search of scorpions and more.
Crystals in the mineral cave at the Desert Museum.
Yucca and Venus.
Green-lit vine cactus with a restaurant in the background.
Torch cactus bud just about ready to bloom.
Aloe bloomstalk with flower and bud.
Top view of prickly pear pad.
Rattlesnake in the blue light of the museum’s night-lit reptile room.
Check out all of the photos in the gallery at www.simmonsbuntin.com/images/gallery/2010/abstract_evening_dm.
It’s never too early to get the word out:
Birds and Poems: A Poetry Workshop
with Simmons Buntin and Eric Magrane
Mondays, February 28 through April 4, 2011, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. — except no class meeting on March 14
plus a field trip on Saturday, April 2, 7:00 am to 11:00 a.m.
Tuition: $150 + $10 materials/field trip fee
The University of Arizona Poetry Center
Both birding and poetry are great practice in patience and close sensory attention. Trying to spot a warbler flitting along leafy branches is a lot like trying to find the right word, shape, or space for a poem. Some poems are like the cactus wren, building a nest among the sharp spines of the cholla; some poems are little balls of energy zipping along like the broad-billed hummingbird; some poems are blown off course during migration and show up where you least expect.
In this class we’ll explore the intersections of the poetic and avian worlds. We’ll dedicate half of our time to reading and discussing poems of and about birds, drawing on the long history of birds in poetry as well as contemporary work, and we’ll spend the rest of our time on poetry-writing exercises and workshopping of student poems. One class will be held in the field on a birding trip. This class is open to poets and birders of all skill levels.
~~~
Simmons B. Buntin is the author of two collections of poems: Bloom (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming late 2010) and Riverfall (Salmon Poetry, 2005). He is also the editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, an award-winning online journal publishing since 1998. His favorite bird is the great blue heron, or an indigo bunting, or the roadrunner, or the rose-breasted grosbeak, or….
Eric Magrane’s poetry has most recently appeared in Tygerburning, Back Room Live, Plume Zine, and EOAGH. He is also the editor of Spiral Orb, an experiment in permaculture poetics. A naturalist and birder, in his day job he is a Senior Hiking Guide and Staff Naturalist for Canyon Ranch.
It’s time to clear things out a bit, which means free books and journals for local folks (or others if you pay for postage). I’ll keep these up here through June 4th. After that, I’ll take them to Bookmans or donate them. If you’d like one or several — they go to the first requester — please contact me at contact@simmonsbuntin.com. I’ll remove them from this list as they are claimed.
I should note, too, that most are in good to new condition, though some of the older books, especially, can be pretty worn. All are readable, certainly.
Updated August 27, 2010
Books
A mix of creative nonfiction, poetry, environmental narratives, and urban planning texts
- Adam Gopnik, editor, The Best American Essays 2008
- Al Gore, The Assault on Reason, 2007
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992
- Alice Hubbard and Clay Fong, Community Energy Workbook: A guide to Building a Sustainable Economy, 1995
- Anca Vlasopolos, The New Bedford Samurai, 2007
- Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World, poems, 2007
- Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, 1999
- Anthony Downs, New Visions for a Metropolitan America, 1994
- Barbara Hurd, Entering the Stone, 2003
- Bernd Heinrich, Ravens in Winter, 1989
- Brenda Iijima, editor, eco language reader, 2010
- Builders Square Plant Guide, undated
- Calvin Luther Martin, The Way of the Human Being, 1999
- Carrie Hunter, Document(ary), poetry chapbook, 2005
- Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market 1992
- Daniel J. Wallace, M.D., The Lupus Book: A Guide for Patients and Their Families, 1995
- D. Linda Kone, Land Development, 1994
- Daniel R. Mandelker, Roger A. Cunningham and John M. Payne, Planning and Control of Land Development: Cases and Materials, 1995 (textbook)
- David D. Kemp, Global Environmental Issues: A Climatological Approach, 1990
- David Rusk, Cities without Suburbs, 1995
- David Updike, Out on the Marsh, stories, 1988
- Eric Paul Shaffer, Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen, poems, 2001
- Eugene Ionesco (tr. Derek Prouse), Rhinoceros, 1960
- Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn, 1984
- H.D., Tribute to Freud, 1956/1974
- H.V. Savitch and Ronald K. Vogel, editors, Regional Politics: America in a Post-City Age, 1996
- Handbook of Tropical Aquarium Fishes, 1983
- Hank Lazer, What is a Poet?, 1987
- J. Kelley Sowards, editor, Makers of the Western Tradition: Portraits from History, Vol. 2, 1987
- Joanne Kyger, Lo & Behold: Household and Threshold on California’s North Coast, poems, Winter 2009 (Voices from the American Land Series)
- Joel S. Hirschhorn, Sprawl Kills, 2005 (advanced review copy)
- John Berger, Photocopies, 1996
- John Elsberg, Sailor (The Father Poems), 1999
- John Friedmann, Planning in the Public Realm: From Knowledge to Action, 1997
- John Jerome, Stone Work, 1989
- Larry O. Dean, I Am Spam (Poems), chapbook, 2004
- Mark B. Lapping, Thomas L. Daniels and John W. Keller, Rural Planning and Development in the United States, 1989 (textbook)
- Mark Tredinnick, The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral, 2009
- Martin Cadwallader, Urban Geography: An Analytical Approach, 1996 (textbook)
- Michael Finkel, True Story, 2005
- Michael Rothenberg, Punk Rockwell, 2000
- Miller Williams, editor, Contemporary Poetry in America, 1973 (large format)
- Norman J. Vig and Michael K. Kraft, Environmental Policy in the 1990s, 1997
- Philip Langdon, A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb, 1994
- Reader’s Digest: Curious Creatures, 1981
- Ralph Hammond, Alabama Poets: A Contemporary Anthology, 1990
- Richard Hamblyn and Martin John Callanan, Data Soliloquies, 2009
- Rob Read, O Spam Poams, 2005
- Robert H. Armstrong, A Guide to the Birds of Alaska, 1980
- Robert Wallace, Writing Poems, 1987
- Rosaleen Love, Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef, 2001
- Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson, Who Turned Out the Lights? Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis, 2009
- Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis, editors, Christmas Ghosts: An Anthology, 1978
- Stephanie Cohen and Jennifer Benner, The Nonstop GArden: A Step-by-Step Guide to Smart Plant Choices and Four-Season Designs, 2010
- Stephen H. Lekson and J. McKim Malville (essays) and John L. Ninnemann (photos), Canyon Spirits: Beauty and Power in the Ancestral Puebloan World, 2005 (large format)
- Sue Hubbell: Waiting for Aphrodite: Journeys into the Time before Bones, 1999
- Victor Gischler, Gun Monkeys, 2001
- Walker Wells, editor, Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, 2007
- William Grimes, My Fine Feathered Friend, 2002
- Winifred Gallagher, The Power of Place, 1993
Journals
Primarily literary journals
- Alimentum – 2006
- American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Spring 207
- Arkansas Review – December 2007
- The Aurorean – Spring/Summer 2010 (includes 1 poem by me)
- BOGG – 2000, 2001
- Booth – Spring 2010
- Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society: Special Issue – The City: Lost and Found (edited by James Howard Kunstler), 2 x August 2000 (includes 1 essay by me)
- Camas: The Journal of the West – Fall 2005, Summer 2010
- The Chattahochee Review – Fall/Winter 2005
- Copper Nickel – 2005, 2006, 2007, October 2008, September 2009, January 2010
- CutThroat, Spring 2009
- Ecopoetics – 2006-2009 (one issue)
- Ecotone – Fall/Winter 2006
- The Evansville Review – 2005
- The Florida Review – Fall 2006, Spring 2008
- Freshwater – 2001 (includes 1 poem by me)
- Folio – Winter 2010
- Forklift, Ohio – Summer 2007
- The Fourth River – Autumn 2009
- Gulfstream – 2005
- ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment – Summer 2000, Winter 2008, Summer 2008, Winter 2009, Spring 2009, Summer 2009, Autumn 2009, Winter 2010, Spring 2010
- Isotope – Fall/Winter 2003, Fall/Winter 2005, Spring/Summer 2006, Spring/Summer 2007, 4 x Spring/Summer 2008 (includes 2 poems by me), Fall/Winter 2008
- The Manhattan Review – Fall/Winter 2009-2010
- Mid-American Review – 2007 (includes 2007 Creative Nonfiction Award winner by me, “The Sum of All Species”), 2008, 2009, 2010
- New Mexico Humanities Review – 1993
- Orion Magazine – Jan/Feb 2006, Mar/Apr 2006, May/Jun 2006, Nov/Dec 2007, Mar/Apr 2008, May/Jun 2008, Jul/Aug 2008, Sep/Oct 2008, Nov/Dec 2008, Jul/Aug 2009
- Poetry Northwest – Spring 1992
- Prairie Schooner – Spring 2010
- A Public Space – 2007 (4), 2008 (5 and 6)
- Red Ink – Spring 2007
- Rosebud – 2001
- Santa Clara Review – Fall/Winter 2008
- Salamander – Summer 2010 (includes one poem by me)
- Shenandoah – Spring/Summer 2006 (includes review of my book Riverfall)
- Sonora Review – Early 2004, Mid 2004
- South Dakota Reivew – Fall 2007, Winter 2007, Spring 2008, Summer 2008
- The Southeast Review – 2009
- Walking Rain Review – 2004, 2005, 2006
- Water~Stone Review – Fall 1999, Fall 2003, Fall 2009
- Weber: The Contemporary West – Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Winter 2008
- Weber Studies – 2007 (includes my essay “Calendars of Sun and Moon”)
- Western American Literature – Summer 2010
- Words and Pictures Magazine – 2005, 2006
CDs
- Michale Johnathon – Walden: The Earth Song Collection
- Steven Feld – The Time of the Bells, 3 (Musical Bells of Accra, Ghana)
- Steven Feld – The Time of the Bells, 4 (Soundscape Compositions)
- Steven Feld – Suikinkutsu, A Japanese Underground Water Zither
Thanks!
On Sunday we took a drive into the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson under the auspices of a daylong Girl Scout retreat. That was all good and fun, but the trip also presented the opportunity to photograph Rose Canyon Lake and some amazing desert wildflowers we saw on the way up.
Here are a few photos (now larger previews thanks to the new blog format!), and the full gallery of 30 images can be accessed here. Enjoy:
Rose Canyon Lake, nestled near the summit of the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Pine and cloud reflection on the lake.
Spiring rock formations along the Catalina Highway.
At the base of the Catalinas, the desert overflowed with wildflowers, especially the yellow-blooming brittlebush.
A hillside of saguaro and brittlebush.
Nobby-topped saguaro with a ridge full of wildflowers behind.
Just another stunning wildflower season in the Sonoran desert!
And view all the photos at www.simmonsbuntin.com/images/gallery/2010/lake_wildflowers.
On Saturday my younger daughter and I drove 60 miles west to Kitt Peak National Observatory, located on the Tohono O’odham reservation. Ostensibly I was looking for wildflowers — ’tis the season and all — but mostly I wanted to hang out with my excellent little traveling companion and goggle at the big telescopes atop the 7,000-foot mountain (there are 26 telescopes in all). Here are a handful of photos, and all 57 larger photos are over in the main gallery:
Wildflower-dotted picnic area alongside Arizona Highway 86, with Kitt Peak in the distance.
The road up to Kitt Peak, where swaths of Mexican goldpoppies ribboned the ridges.
View of many of the telescopes on Kitt Peak, from the 4-meter Mayall observatory on the left to the (barely visible) McMath-Pierce national solar observatory on the right.
One of the ten worldwide radio-telescope antennas of the Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) with the 4-meter Mayall telescope in the distance.
My traveling partner.
Dad and daughter in the gallery below the national solar observatory.
View of the telescopes atop Kitt Peak.
View of my younger daughter and the telescopes atop Kitt Peak.
The SARA .9-meter telescope dome.
Peek-a-boo: my younger daughter, a star in her own right.
On Friday I skipped work to take my daughters hiking with a group of neighbors up the Babad Do’ag Trail, which starts at the first pullout on Catalina Highway once the road starts climbing the Santa Catalinas. It was a beautiful, wildflower-filled day, and the 4-mile roundtrip trail was just right. Here are a few photos, and check out all 94 larger photos over in the gallery.
Starting out on the Babad Do’ag Trail, the Tohono O’odham name for Frog Mountain, what we call Mt. Lemmon.
Right away we saw a lot of wildflowers, including these bladderpods.
Higher up, we came across wide swaths of Mexican goldpoppies.
And then we saw such beauties as these covena…
And desert chicory.
The view from the top of the trail: looking east/southeast toward the snow-capped Rincon Mountains.
Friend and neighbor Ingrid Anderson put the hike together. Thanks Ingrid!
My younger daughter was my hiking partner as my older daughter leaped ahead with her friends.
Hiking back down the trail in the lush Sonoran desert. Though the rains and so the blooms have been about a month late this year, neither disappointed!
Check out the full gallery here: http://www.simmonsbuntin.com/images/gallery/2010/apr_hike/
Simmons B. Buntin
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