The Climate, It Is A-Changing

James Gramann

8 Jan, 2023

Climate change is affecting America’s national parks. Vegetation, native fish and wildlife, glaciers and lakes, even archeological sites and historic buildings, are all impacted. And those impacts affect people.

Winter recreation seasons shorten, summer seasons lengthen, wildfire and smoke make vacation travel difficult or dangerous. Hot temperatures kill or injure unwary or poorly prepared hikers. Some impacts, such as sea level rise, shoreline erosion, and melting permafrost threaten coastal and Alaskan structures, both historic and prehistoric.

When I served In Washington, D.C., as the National Park Service’s visiting chief social scientist, I worked with university and consulting partners to conduct as many as 50 visitors surveys in parks each year. Those surveys had to be reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget, part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

Then, as now, parks were concerned about climate change. But the issue was highly politicized. My time in Washington partly overlapped with the administration of President George W. Bush, whose policies down-played human-caused impacts on climate.

As a result, parks and researchers were not allowed to ask visitors questions about climate issues, even as those issues affected the parks’ management, their budgets, their ecosystems, and public safety.

Did visitors think climate change was a threat? Did they believe that human actions contributed to it? What kinds of changes in climate did they see as most important? What did they want to know more about?

Answers to those questions would be usable knowledge that parks could employ to guide interpretive programs and develop risk management strategies to protect park visitors. But they were forbidden. Any survey that included such questions would be “disapproved” by the Office of Management and Budget and never make it into the field unless the questions were dropped.

But the times, they are a-changing. Public awareness of the threats posed by our changing climate and its impacts is spreading.

The poem below has a history that reflects the shift in attitudes and policies towards climate. I began drafting it in 1999 during a faculty development leave at the University of Idaho a few years before I went to Washington, D.C.

My leave occurred during the winter. Needless to say, winter in Idaho is a bit different from what I was used to in Texas, where snow in my part of the state was a novelty that occurred every few years or so.

In 1999, debates over climate change were just a whisper. So when I began work on this sonnet, it wasn’t in that context. Instead, I was enchanted by the Idaho snow and, as my leave progressed into spring, I felt saddened when it began to disappear—saddened by the slushy streets and melting drifts that turned a winter wonderland into a sloppy stew. The poem reflected that sadness.

Originally, I titled the poem Last Snow. It was meant to complement an earlier sonnet, First Snow, that also was based on my Idaho experience. But as the years went by, and Last Snow remained unpublished, I tweaked it.

I began my work with the National Park Service in 2002. People were talking more about climate change by then, but there were still many climate deniers, especially in certain political circles in Washington, D.C. But the topic was moving to the forefront of national and international discussion, often under the label “global warming.”

So it occurred to me that my poem, rather than being a eulogy for a dying season, could be a commentary on a warming planet—thus, a new title, Warming Trend.

And I made another key change. But before I discuss that, here is the poem in its present form:

Warming Trend

The end of snow—ethereal,
frail as the final conscious thoughts 
of evening, quickening the quiet step
away from winter’s neighborhood,

diminishing. The surreal 
snow, its remnants sick with careless gluts
of industry, ravaged while we slept,
unraveling winter’s labor. Could

its comfort linger, though this sad cascade
to spring trickles from a shattered
season, whispering “Let go”?

Drifts of incandescence dim, betrayed
beyond redemption, torn and tattered
as we bleed the end of snow.

James Gramann, unpublished

The second change I made occurs in the last line of the poem. Originally, it read “as they bleed the end of snow,” referring to the melting drifts. But the change to “as we bleed the end of snow” means something else entirely. It underscores the human role in climate change, a role that, in my poem, makes Earth’s climate bleed.

When I talk to others about poetry, I sometimes say poets sweat words. By this I mean that poetry values economy in wording, so that every word counts. Each word is painstakingly chosen for its meaning, its sound, and its rhythm. As a result, even the smallest word is vital. Warming Trend illustrates how changing just one of those small words can alter the entire meaning of a poem.

Flute Player

James Gramann

6 Jan, 2023

A dark side of American history, one that persisted for decades, was the effective exclusion or segregation of Black Americans at some national parks. This happened not only in the South during the Jim Crow era of legal segregation, but in parks such as Yellowstone. In the early 20th century, Yellowstone discouraged visits by tour groups of Black Americans, reasoning they would make White visitors and staff in the park’s hotels and dining areas uncomfortable. At Mammoth Cave National Park, Black visitors could go on cave tours, but not with White visitors. The two groups were always separated.

But the attempted exclusion of some groups from the idea of what a national park is, or how it should be used, lingers.

The National Mall is in the heart of Washington, D.C. and is part of the nation’s park system. It’s sometimes called “America’s front yard.” During my visits to the Mall, I sometimes would see a man playing a flute near the National Gallery of Art—not on the street side of that museum, but on the side facing the National Mall. So the flutist was performing in a national park.

That man was one of many street musicians one encounters in the nation’s capital. But I was drawn to him in particular because, for much of my youth from elementary school through college, I also played a flute. So I knew this performer was very good.

He also was Black. In a short conversation I once had with him, he complained that U.S. Park Police told him he couldn’t perform on the Mall and he should move on. In other words, his use of that urban national park for musical performances, accompanied by a box to collect voluntary donations, was inappropriate and might make visitors feel uncomfortable.

For those reasons, I decided to write a poem about him.

Flute Player is a word-substitution poem. Some poets dismiss word-substitution, but I consider it a good way to teach structure and grammar in poetry. The writer takes a poem composed by another poet and substitutes new words for the originals: noun for noun, verb for verb, adjective for adjective. The result is a new poem. The “art” of the poem—its idea, story, or description—is fresh. But the poem’s “craft”—the structure of its lines and stanzas, as well as its grammar—resembles the original. By convention, the original poet is credited in the new poem’s title.

Flute Player is based on a poem by the Yaqui poet Anita Endrezze. Her original work is called Song-Maker. It’s a poem I greatly admire. You can read it here.

I faced a challenge with Flute Player, one familiar to many authors who would write about a person of a different race or ethnic group. How could I, a White man with a Ph.D., compose a poem about what it’s like to be a Black street musician? By attempting it, I would open myself to charges of appropriating another’s culture or, worse, of creating an inaccurate portrayal.

So I began to think of the poem as a treatise on race relations. Being a social scientist, I know that writing about race relations requires, at the minimum, two sides to the story. After all, that’s what a relationship is.

In the United States, efforts to improve race relations require good-faith attempts to understand the perspectives of both the disenfranchised and the privileged. In Flute Player, the White narrator describes his struggles to achieve this understanding, portrayed in lines such as “My cap covers my ears/But I’m sure I’ve heard him.”

The poem then proceeds through a series of questions in which the narrator tries to place himself in the Black performer’s shoes. He finally acknowledges how difficult that is, even for one who wants to do it.

Several months after my poem was published, I received an email from Anita Endrezze.

A friend of hers had seen my poem and brought it to her attention. I couldn’t tell from her short email if she liked my work, but I responded by telling her how much I admired hers. Although her poem is unmetered free verse, I wrote that I especially liked the rhythm of her lines. Some of those conclude with unaccented syllables (trochaic endings). They produce a sense of falling away that reinforces the pathos of the story about a once-celebrated Native song-maker ravaged by alcohol:

But he's all hunched over
and everyone walks around him.
He must still have strong magic
to be so invisible. 

I told her that I worked very hard to keep that trochaic line rhythm in my poem.

So here is my word-substitution poem, my version of Anita Endrezze's Song-Maker.

Flute Player (After Anita Endrezze)

There is a Black man with a flute, playing
not far from the Metro's Smithsonian station.
He's performing for tourists with skins like snow
and ice and dollars that drizzle the sounds
of sleet. My cap covers my ears, 
but I'm sure I've heard him.

Didn't he play for names his children still fear
in their sleep?
Didn't dark men leave him with sad songs
like shadows on shade?
Didn't he shiver all night once, then play
as the sun only turned
black into white?
Didn't he play a song made for himself,
rare for its being one without key?

If I could catch his eye
I might see his mind, see
if he's dreaming it,
that freedom-soaring song.
But I'm still the White man,
and everything stands between us.
We must both tend the difference
to be so divisible.

Hasn't anyone told him,
every man is a song,
'though very few listen?

James Gramann, Red River Review, August 2004

Amazing Grace of the Badlands

James Gramann

4 Jan, 2023

Why, I wondered, did Badlands National Park choose to do a visitor survey during the Sturgis motorcycle rally? I never got an answer to that question, but, along with the corps of seasonal interpreters I supervised, we conducted almost 1,000 interviews. I had fun talking to the bikers, hundreds of whom took day trips through the park powered by amazingly loud internal combustion engines mounted in elaborate frames balanced on two wheels. But I was exhausted by the end of the survey and looked forward to the 3-day respite I’d scheduled after its completion.

Because of the Sturgis rally, all lodging in the nearby towns of Wall and Rapid City was sold out. So I had to drive to Pierre, over 100 miles away, for rest and recuperation. But that proved to be a blessing in disguise. During the survey, I had resolved to compose a poem about the stark beauty of the South Dakota badlands; and, because I love classic verseform, I wanted to write it in ballad stanzas, a form I had not used. In the long drive to and from Pierre, whizzing by endless acres of yellow sunflower fields, I worked out a large part of the poem in my head.

If you’re not familiar with the language of poetry, you might wonder what a ballad stanza is. One answer to that question is that it’s Amazing Grace. Let me explain.

Once, at a conference held by a writers’ organization that I was president of, a songwriter appeared as one of the main speakers. He said he wrote the lyrics for a song he was about to perform by following the rhythmic pattern of Amazing Grace. I had never heard that before—a musical artist borrowing the meter of one song to use as a guide for a new one; but I suppose it’s something lyricists sometimes do.

I don’t know if the songwriter was aware of it, but Amazing Grace is a classic example of the ballad stanza, an old and popular verseform in the English language that evolved from traditional folk songs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in ballad stanzas. Robert Service made a career of composing ballad stanzas, as in The Cremation of Sam McGee.

In the arcane terminology of accentuated poetry, a ballad stanza is two lines of iambic tetrameter alternating with two lines of iambic trimeter. An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one: la-LA. So we have four la-LAs alternating with three la-LAs:

la-LA, la-LA, la-LA, la-LA a-MAZ ing-GRACE how-SWEET the-SOUND
la-LA, la-LA, la-LA that-SAVED a-WRETCH like-ME,
la-LA, la-LA, la-LA, la-LA i-ONCE was-LOST, but-NOW i'm-FOUND,
la-LA, la-LA, la-LA was-BLIND but-NOW i-SEE.

The first stanza of Amazing Grace follows the ballad stanza's iambic pattern of accented and unaccented syllables to a T. But it's common to add or drop an unstressed syllable here and there without affecting the poem's governing meter. It's still a ballad stanza. In the next-to-last line of my poem, I actually drop all of the unaccented syllables, producing what one writer calls “defective” iambs. That line also includes a good example of internal consonant rhyme. Hear the "st" sound at the end of three successive words in the same line.

As in Amazing Grace, the first and third lines of a ballad stanza might be rhymed, but the second and fourth lines are always rhymed. In my Badlands poem, I dispensed with the first set of optional rhymes while keeping those for the second and fourth lines.

Today, rhyming is often looked down on by the editors of poetry journals, many of whom refuse to accept rhymed poems at all. So, as a publication strategy, I sometimes resort to subtle rhyming. For example, in my Badlands poem, which is comprised of seven ballad stanzas, I use one visual rhyme: “baked” and “naked.” I also use light rhymes, rhyming unstressed syllables at the end of words, as in “holocaustic” and “emphatic.” I don’t know if that actually fools rhyme-averse editors, but it’s fun to think it does.

I often employ enjambment. Rather than landing hard on the rhyming word at the end of a line, as in Amazing Grace, I carry the thought through to the next line without a pause, waving at the rhyming word as I pass. This has the marked effect of de-emphasizing even pure rhymes.

Because of subtle rhyme and enjambment, my poem doesn’t sound like a traditional ballad when read aloud. I prefer to think of it as a “modern ballad.”

In the poem as it appears here, I’ve separated each ballad stanza by a space so it’s easier to see the poem’s structure. I call that structure the poem’s “craft,” while the story told or the idea conveyed is the poem’s “art.” As in much formal poetry, I intended the art component of Badlands to have two meanings: a literal one and a subtext. What meanings do you see?

(Don’t overlook the Easter egg note at the bottom of the page.)

Badlands

The heat descending on the land
is pale and holocaustic.
It persecutes without regard,
plunging an emphatic

fist into the deepest pores
of being. Stunned, the baked
geology devolves from it,
crumbling to a naked

grey, the slow discordant swoon
of silent centuries
of earth surrendering to heat.
Listless leaves please

a grinning sun with ghastly shade,
and from its sinful stare,
from the throat of thermal greed
a life-engulfing flare

of wind that plunders grass, dishonors
roots—-Badlands wind,
a prowling beast. But when the heat
turns on itself, is pinned

in clouds of rage, how the land
exults! Rising from
the swoon, a song of storm and rout,
an anthem crashing drum

beats resurrecting rebel land
in rebel rain, a driving
thirst, lust, crest, shout!
Hear
     the land
              alive.

James Gramann, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Spring 2009

I’ve included an Easter egg in this poem, a tribute to that immortal giant of formal verse, Robert Frost. It’s a phrase I borrowed from near the end of one of his poems, which he also composed in ballad stanzas. You can find it here.

The Life List

James Gramann

3 Jan, 2023

In the waning days of 2022, Congress added another unit to America’s national park system. The authorization of New Philadelphia National Historic Site, an archeological site in western Illinois, brought the number of established park units to 424.

I suppose there was a time in my youth when I aspired to visit every park in the system. But at some point I realized that even if it could be done (and many claim to have accomplished it), it would be a temporary achievement. Even if I managed the impractical—to add National Park of American Samoa, for example—within a short time a new unit would be authorized and my bragging rights to the totality of the system would be shattered. Is such an achievement, one that is so frequently undone, worth it? The reality is Congress creates new national parks faster than I can get to them.

Yes, I maintain a life’s list, just as some people compile life lists of the birds they’ve seen or heard. In fact, it’s quite a detailed list of the 347 official units I’ve managed to get to, camp in, lodge in, or work in over 50 years of married life. It’s not just a simple park list, but one that includes return visits to the same park in subsequent years. So, currently, it’s 24 pages long.

My list is arranged by state and—because I’ve had opportunities to visit national parks in other countries—by nation. But the international parks don’t count in my U.S. total of 344.

Me at Yellowstone’s south entrance, January 2008.

A surprising number of units in the National Park System are located in multiple states. I record visits to the Montana portion of Yellowstone, as well as the Wyoming portion, but visits to the same park in two states in a single trip still count as just one visit. And for purposes of my life’s total, Yellowstone only counts once, even though I’ve visited or worked in it 16 times.

My list also records visits to sites that aren’t officially part of the National Park System but cooperate in some way with the National Park Service. They don’t add to my life’s sum, but I consider them worth listing, with [brackets] around them to indicate they’re not “real” national parks. Most of those are affiliated areas, such as Thomas Cole National Historic Site in New York, or national trails, such as the Oregon National Historic Trail or the Pony Express Trail. The Appalachian Trail is the only national trail that’s part of the national park system, and I can claim to have hiked the width of it in multiple states. But I only count it once in my life’s total.

My list includes the immediate family members who were with me on a visit; but with the kids now grown and launched, that’s usually just my wife and me. But I remain a proud papa when my daughter or son tells me they’ve visited another national park.

I still carry my park passport, a collection of booklets that goes back to 1986, and I still queue up at all the cancellation stations in a park to stamp my latest visit on its pages for use by some imagined scholar in the future who is researching obsessive-compulsive disorder. And if I buy a book in a park bookstore, I stamp that, too.

“Viewing” Buck Island Reef National Monument from St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.

Early on, I developed rules about what counted as a “visit.” It couldn’t be a drive by, which is possible with the many parks that are comprised of a single historic building. I have to spend meaningful time in the park—at the visitor center or on a trail or tour, etc. In a very few cases, I’m forced to bend that rule for logistical reasons beyond my control. But I note that on my list. So I only “viewed” Buck Island Reef National Monument from St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I was unable to arrange a boat to Buck Island during my limited time in the area, but I count it anyway. Deal with it.

I’m at that point in my life where I realize that the number of maybe-next-years is shrinking and that my park list is moving towards its inevitable conclusion. In fact, I already know what that final entry will be. So my list may never include New Philadelphia National Historic Site. But that doesn’t bother me. Instead, I can peruse those 24 pages and reflect on what I’ve done, and not on what I haven’t. I can recall those parks I visited as part of a treasured family experience, those where I did my thesis research, those I worked in as a lowly concession employee, those where I served as a Volunteer-In-Park, those where I resided as a visiting scholar, and those where, as the National Park Service’s visiting chief social scientist for eight years, I contributed in some small way to their management or planning.

It’s a list worth keeping and a life worth living.

My National Park Passport booklet with cancellation stamps and signed by NPS director Jonathan Jarvis.

Nature Inspires

James Gramann

30 Dec, 2022

For millennia, the natural world has given birth to art, music, and writing. This blog includes two short poems inspired by nature. The first, Had I the Wakeless Sleep, is the offspring of two visits I made to Olympic National Park in Washington that occurred decades apart: a memorable camping trip on a Pacific beach I took as a college student and a visitor survey I conducted in 2000. I’ll present the poem first, followed by a discussion.

Had I the Wakeless Sleep

Had I the wakeless sleep of slippered seas,
the midnight's scroll to dawn, an alder's breeze
whispering its stir to morning sky, 
and nothing less than these,
I would have mere hints of you--the ply
of sea between two waves, first glimmers shy
and velvet, blue soft-spoken in the leaves
as daylight flickers by.

James Gramann, unpublished

Although this poem is only eight lines long, I’m a slow worker, and it took me years to compose. I finally considered it complete when I made one last revision in the eighth line, substituting “flickers” for “passes.” To my mind, that word is more sympathetic to the play of light as a tree’s foliage dances in the breeze.

The phrase “an alder’s breeze” in the second line references a common broadleaf tree—the red alder—growing in Olympic National Park. We don’t see the breeze itself, but we know it’s there because it makes the leaves of the alder whisper.

I decided to keep the assonance of “leaves” in the seventh line, rather than use a pure rhyme, such as “trees.” Assonance—the technique of rhyming vowel sounds but not final consonant sounds—is a favorite tool of songwriters. By expanding the poem’s vocabulary, assonance gives poets more creative latitude to select a word that sounds like a rhyme, even if it’s not a pure one.

Finally, the title is a play on words describing a calm sea. The image is of a sea asleep, in other words “wakeless.” But it’s also a sea free of disruptive ships’ wakes that produce erosive waves onshore.

—

The second poem, Sonnet to Nature, is my poetic description of the carbon and hydrologic cycles. But because poems often have multiple meanings, it also can be read as a love poem.

I originally composed Sonnet to Nature in free verse, but as I became more comfortable with the use of meter, I recast it as a metered sonnet with subtle rhyme. The rhyme pattern is abcd abcd efg efg. The governing meter is iambic pentameter, although the rhymed eleventh and fourteenth lines are in hexameter (six, rather than five, iambs to each line).

You may look at the words “Then” and “evergreen” (the d rhymes) and complain that they don’t rhyme. But those words are what poets call consonant rhymes, rhyming the “n” at the end of the both words. True, “n” is a soft consonant and doesn’t make an ideal consonant rhyme. But it was good enough to be published!

Poetry, even unrhymed poetry, should celebrate the rhythm of sound. One of the things I especially like about this poem is the repeated appearance of the hard “c” or “k” consonant sound in the final six lines: converge, cloud, skies, cool, cultivate, come. It’s not alliteration in the formal sense of that word, but it’s a rhythm that adds to the emotional intensity of the work.

As with Had I the Wakeless Sleep, Sonnet to Nature took me years to complete. I only considered it done and publishable after the adjective “cloud-sweet” to describe a summer sky popped into my head.

Sonnet to Nature

To kindle and replenish you, to throw
myself as tinder on a shameless fire,
to burn and cry aloud to burn again
till all I am is twice-burnt ash. Then,
to mix these embers with the soil, and so
immerse in you forever, and from my pyre
to nourish grass and trees, and from my pain
to give you beauty, hold you evergreen.

And from my death sustain you, and from
the earth converge with cloud-sweet summer skies
to cool your poignant thirst. To cultivate the sun, 
to bring you harvest from its warmth. To come
to you in fire, to nurture you and rise
to reach the living air. To bloom with you as one.

James Gramann, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Spring 2009