Sherry Chandler

From Charles O. Hartman. Free Verse. An Essay in Prosody (Northwestern Univ Press, 1980):

Where does the poet discover his form? Despite the rhetoric of spontaneity in some free verse, all forms are to some degree received. Invention—the poet’s side of discover—means finding, not creating out of nothing. Still, one can distinguish forms whose invention emphasizes their resemblance to past poetry, and forms which are presented as arising out of a context of speech. …The theory of organic or discovered form implies an impulse toward individualism or personal authenticity. But in moving from Coleridge through Whitman and Williams, one sees the realm of discovery expanding to include not only the content of a specific poem (”the properties of the material”) and the poet’s individual imagination, but the whole culture that supplies his language. The differences between English and American idioms begin to be noticed and insisted on at about the same time free verse comes into prominence.

Here awhile back, I was sitting in my dentist’s office looking for something to read besides out-of-date issues of Good Housekeeping when I came upon a copy of an Audubon magazine. Pretty pictures, thought I, and picked it up.

That’s when I discovered Audobon’s list of Birds in Decline. Turns out our little population of bobwhite quail, the ones I photographed in the yard at Thanksgiving, are not just local color. They have the status of refugees, their population in the U.S. down 82% in the last 40 years. Our own little covey has been here for years and is perhaps the best justification I know for refusing to clean up our fencerows.

We have not been so lucky with meadowlarks, population down 72%. When we first moved to the farm, 25 years ago, we had meadowlarks in abundance. Now we rarely hear one singing.

Even grackles, who used to be a real nuisance roosting in our trees at dusk, are conspicuously absent here nowadays. Their population is down 61%.

The whippoorwills that used to sing on my mother’s doorstep are gone now.

There are too many of us and too many of us think we have to take up a lot of space, that somehow because we can appreciate a view, we deserve to have a hummer of a house. Yesterday we drove from our house to my mother’s house, across three counties, over back country roads and found ourselves depressed at the amount of farmland being sacrificed to housing developments.

On a more cheerful note, thanks to Donna Rhae Marder, I can share with you a link to this eaglecam provided by Audobon Florida. We have had some success bringing species back. I watched for a while yesterday but saw only the chicks. I think I’ll go back now and see whether the grownups have come home.