since the weather left us questioning how we could enjoyably spend our morning on friday, my traveling poetry class first met at steel city coffee house in phoenixville, chester county, and later shifted into river-hunting in mont clare, montgomery near lock 60.
more truly than even in the past, for being a traveling poetry class, we were walking poetry and explored expanses which two of us hadn't seen before. and notable scenes below are sam traten holding a shore-found bobber in honor of his neologism of bobber-fling, along with him sniffing a nearby electric pole to determine if it was made of red cedar wood or not.
from before we were so footfall-oriented, i shared a poem which i wrote about barbara tucker, in the class, after reading her latest river poem. below is a poem.
*
barbara tucker takes to water
when she writes whims of poetry
you write like water, like the river,
barbara. it is something beautiful
to notice, to take in, whatever waves
are when they're less broad, moving
their route southeast but free of salt
like what sloshes around in the sea.
your language pours outward with
this natural flow so fitting that it is
a little hard to fathom—graceful
and deep like the caverns and all
complexity in your heart. it doesn’t
surprise me that you live less than
six miles from a river, the schuylkill,
and that its name means hidden river
in dutch from the explorers who
aimed ships here around 400 years
ago (its previous name from the native
americans was turtle river, or tool-pay
hanna and also turtle place or tool-pay
hok ung). none of this surprises me, but
the better water in your inching words
always tugs behind my ribcage ever
so slightly in a way which teaches me
that i love land, wet sections around
it, and students who embrace this all.
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