Student Favorites
Every year, students share excerpts from some of their favorite "wild writing" and explain what makes it resonant to them. We've compiled their submissions, which range widely from prose to poems to podcasts to visual art, spanning many languages and time periods.
Spring 2022:
Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
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MacFarlane, Robert. "The Understory." Emergence Magazine, June 26, 2019.
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Breakage by Mary Oliver
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.
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Cheshire, Gerard. "Nature Unfolds The Tropical Rainforest (Nature Unfolds)."
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Tui De Roy. "Galapagos: Preserving Darwin's Legacy."
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Kimmerer, Robin. "Epiphany in the Beans." Braiding Sweetgrass, pages121-127. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
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Excerpt from Foreward Estes, C. P. Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. Ballantine Books, 1995.
"We are filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of the Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed."
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Excerpt from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, pages 40-41:
"I felt myself floating between two worlds. There was the ocean, effectively infinite, falling away forever to the horizon. This morning it was placid, its grip on me loose and languorous. But I was lashed to its moods now. The attachment felt limitless, irresistible. I no longer thought of waves being carved in celestial workshops. I was getting more hardheaded. Now I knew they originated in distant storms, which moved, as it were, upon the face of the deep. But my utter absorption in surfing had no rational content. It simply compelled me; there was a deep mine of beauty and wonder in it. Beyond that, I could not have explained why I did it. I knew vaguely that it filled a psychic cavity of some kind—connected, perhaps, with leaving the church, or with, more likely, the slow drift away from my family—and that it had replaced many things that came before it. I was a sunburnt pagan now. I felt privy to mysteries. The other world was land: everything that was not surfing. Books, girls, school, my family, friends who did not surf. "Society," as I was learning to call it, and the exactions of Mr. Responsible. Hands folded under my chin as I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radi0 twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it chose."
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Translated Excerpt from Amina Saïd's anse du port de Durban:
silence of the trees in the eternal silence of the ocean
from which a new day is hoisted each morning
silence of the poet whos arm is slashed by a rusty blade
citizens drunk on beer as the curtain of night falls
each barricaded by their silence
because too many words remain unsayable
(...)
shacks on the outskirts of the village abandoned
women in flower dresses waiting for the improbable
curious little monkeys on the roadsides
petits singes curieux sur le bord des routes
a stop beneath the heady marula the liquor tree
all at once I speak of a voyage to the heart of another desert
Notes/Analysis:
What I found most interesting is that the author focuses on the silence of things that typically have their sounds described. The silence of trees, whose leaves are rustling in the wind. The silence of the ocean, whose waves are crashing on the shore. The silence of birds, whose songs can be heard as the sun rises. Writing about Tunisia, the inclusion of everyone drinking in silence is also a political statement, although it is brought up purely to add to the description of this port-town. This was a very interesting way to portray the wild - not only focusing on a pretty urban environment but focusing on the things that she specifically sees, not necessarily what everyone who visits this place sees. When I try and describe natural environments, I try to write about the things as they objectively look, whereas this poem brings the information to us through the poet's lens, not through our own, even if what is described may be "objectively inaccurate".
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Excerpt from Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. Print.
"Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.
"Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.
Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.
"It's winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands."
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Ecology by Jack Collom
Surrounded by bone, surrounded by cells,
by rings, by rings of hell, by hair, surrounded by
air-is-a-thing, surrounded by silhouette, by honey-wet bees, yet
by skeletons of trees, surrounded by actual, yes, for practical
purposes, people, surrounded by surreal
popcorn, surrounded by the reborn: Surrender in the center
to surroundings. O surrender forever, never
end her, let her blend around, surrender to the surroundings that
surround the tender endo-surrender, that
tumble through the tumbling to that blue that
curls around the crumbling, to that, the blue that
rumbles under the sun bounding the pearl that
we walk on, talk on; we can chalk that
up to experience, sensing the brown here that’s
blue now, a drop of water surrounding a cow that’s
black & white, the warbling Blackburnian twitter that’s
machining midnight orange in the light that’s
glittering in the light green visible wind. That’s
the ticket to the tunnel through the thicket that’s
a cricket’s funnel of music to correct & pick it out
from under the wing that whirls up over & out.
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The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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Valdez, Crystal K. “Kalikasan at Pag-Ibig.” Youtube.
Original Piece (in Tagalog)
Ihip ng hangin sa akin dumarampi
Huni ng ibon na parang ako
ay inaawitan may kapayapaan
Sa bughaw na kalangitan ako'y nakatingin
Tanging dalangin wag sanang maglaho
ang lahat ng ito
O kay sarap pagmasdan mga puno't mga halaman
Mga bulaklak at makulay na kapaligiran
Ating pagmasdan taglay nitong kagandahan
Ating pag-ingatan ang regalo
ng Diyos sa ati'y iniwan
Kalikasan, kayamanan
Wag hayaang masira na lang
Kalikasan pangalagaan
Mananatili kung may pag-ibig
O kay bigat sa dibdib tao ay nagpabaya
Ang ganda nitong mundo
unti unting nabubura, nawawala
English Translation of the Piece
The wind lightly blows on me
A bird who chirps like me
Is singing with peace
I was looking at the blue sky
Just praying that all of this doesn’t disappear
It is so nice to look at the trees and plants
Flowers and colorful atmosphere
Let us behold this beauty
Let us take care of the gift
That God gave us
Nature, Earth’s Richness/Abundance
Don’t let it be destroyed
Care for nature
Nature will stay if there is love
The weight on people’s chest is neglected
The beauty of this world is
gradually being erased, disappearing
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After the Adventure by Morgan Hite.
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Prum, Richard. The Evolution of Beauty, 2018.
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Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
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Excerpt from: Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush, "Part 2: Rhizomes" in the chapter called "Diving Rod."
Spring 2021:
Two poems from Paola Corso's book Death by Renaissance : Poems and Photos. “Proximity” and “Secrets.”
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Excerpt from: Abram, David. Becoming Animal (page 7). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Yet few are as deep-rooted and damaging as the habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space—whether as a sinful plane, riddled with temptation, needing to be transcended and left behind; or a menacing region needing to be beaten and bent to our will; or simply a vaguely disturbing dimension to be avoided, superseded, and explained away.
Corporeal life is indeed difficult. To identify with the sheer physicality of one’s flesh may well seem lunatic. The body is an imperfect and breakable entity vulnerable to a thousand and one insults—to scars and the scorn of others, to disease, decay, and death. And the material world that our body inhabits is hardly a gentle place. The shuddering beauty of this biosphere is bristling with thorns: generosity and abundance often seem scant ingredients compared with the prevalence of predation, sudden pain, and racking loss. Carnally embedded in the depths of this cacophonous profusion of forms, we commonly can’t even predict just what’s lurking behind the near boulder, let alone get enough distance to fathom and figure out all the workings of this world. We simply can’t get it under our control. We’ve lost hearing in one ear; the other rings like a fallen spoon. Our spouse falls in love with someone else, while our young child comes down with a bone-rattling fever that no doctor seems able to diagnose. There are things out and about that can eat us, and ultimately will. Small wonder, then, that we prefer to abstract ourselves whenever we can, imagining ourselves into theoretical spaces less fraught with insecurity, conjuring dimensions more amenable to calculation and control. We slip blissfully into machine-mediated scapes, offering ourselves up to any technology that promises to enhance the humdrum capacities of our given flesh. And sure, now and then we’ll engage this earthen world as well, as long we know that it’s not ultimate, as long as we’re convinced that we’re not stuck here. Even among ecologists and environmental activists, there’s a tacit sense that we’d better not let our awareness come too close to our creaturely sensations, that we’d best keep our arguments girded with statistics and our thoughts buttressed with abstractions, lest we succumb to an overwhelming grief—a heartache born of our organism’s instinctive empathy with the living land and its cascading losses. Lest we be bowled over and broken by our dismay at the relentless devastation of the biosphere. Thus do we shelter ourselves from the harrowing vulnerability of bodied existence. But by the same gesture we also insulate ourselves from the deepest wellsprings of joy.
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Zitkala-Sa. "Why I am a Pagan." Atlantic Monthly, 90, 801 - 803, 1902.
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An excerpt from Yport, a chapter in Lauren Groff's book "Florida"
“And this moment will be the one to stay with her forever: She’s crouching beside her smallest son in the exposed seabed. The tide pool a miniature ocean. A snail retreats his horns when they tickle him with a feather, a red anemone pulses as the tide pulls the water away, algae with green hairs feel like satin on their fingertips.
The little boy is still, sun on his brown body. The older boy is picking across the rocks, toward the cliffs. He is the size of her palm. Soon she’ll call him back. Not yet.
The little one and she watch ghostly things with silver backbones nibbling at their ankles. Shrimp or fish, she doesn’t know. She knows so little about this astonishing world.
If a meteor crashed down right now, would we die? the little boy says.
Depends on the meteor, I guess, she says.
Huge.
Then probably, she says very slowly.
He sucks his lips in. Like the dinosaurs, he says.
The older boy is now the size of a thumb. He has gone too far for her to save him in a calamity. Rogue wave, kidnapper. But the mother doesn’t call for him. There is something so resolute in the set of his shoulders. He isn’t going anywhere, just away. She understands.
When she looks back at her younger son, he is holding a rock over his head. He is aiming at the snail. Boom, he whispers, but he keeps his arm in the air. And he holds his fingers closed."
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The Overstory by Richard Powers
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Gerhard Richter - Seascape,1998.
"Nature doesn't care very much about us... In fact, nature is quite cruel in our regard or, at least, not cruel, at least uh... destructive. Cruelty assumes an intention which nature does not have. But, in any case, nature is indifferent to us. But we can look at nature without being indifferent to it. Not that we can find our own emotional symbols in nature and believe in them the way the romantics did, but we can see nature for what it is. Gerhard Richter thinks of the beautiful as that which is uninjured, and so those landscapes or seascapes where there's almost nothing but light and primary form are the most beautiful in his work."
This short excerpt introduces Richter's painting, which was previously in exhibition at the SFMOMA, and serves as an audio guide as well. The text offers an alternative natural perspective. As I understand it, this is Richter telling us that nature is only coincidentally beautiful, nothing within it is for us or to us. Tornadoes are just as beautiful whether they're off in the distance or destroying our hometown - both storms are beautiful, and neither is malicious.
The relationship between Richter, the painting, and the viewer is one where we are inducted into an alternative natural perspective just before admiring the seascape. Consequently, the reader is forced to grapple with this new framework for understanding the environment and has to decide for themselves what it means to see nature for what it is. This relationship is essential to the structure and voice of the piece because it allows the painting to take on a different color. More than just a seascape, the shoreline may be considered even more beautiful because it doesn't try to be appealing to us, it simply is.
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Grant Richard. "Do Trees Talk to Each Other?" Smithsonian Magazine. March 2018.
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Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.
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Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
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Horizon, by Barry Lopez, Penguin Random House, London, UK, 2019, pages 54–55.
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Hass, R. "On the Coast Near Sausalito". Field Guide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Haikus written by Kobayashi Issa and translated by Robert Hass
Blossoms at night,
like people
moved by music
The world of dew is, yes,
a world of dew,
but even so
In these latter-day,
degenerate times,
cherry-blossoms everywhere!
Hass, R., Matsuo, B., Yosa, B., & Kobayashi, I. The essential haiku: versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1994.
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Broomé, Agnes. The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson, HarperCollins USA, 2020. Excerpt from Chapter 2.
My father taught me to fish for eel in the stream bordering the fields of his childhood home. We drove down at dusk in August, taking a left off the main road to cross the stream and turning onto a small road that was little more than a tractor path in the dirt winding down a steep slope and then moving parallel with the water. On our left were the fields, the golden wheat brushing against the side of our car; on our right, the quietly hissing grass. Beyond it, the water, around twenty feet wide, a tranquil stream meandering through the greenery like a silver chain glinting in the last slanted rays of the setting sun. We drove slowly along the rapids, where the stream rushed in a startled fashion between the rocks and past the twisted old willow tree. I was seven years old and had already gone down this same road many times before. When the tracks ended in a wall of impenetrable vegetation, Dad turned off the engine and everything went dark and still, aside from the murmur of the stream. We were both wearing wellies and greasy vinyl waders, mine yellow and his orange, and we took two black buckets full of fishing gear, a flashlight, and a jar of worms from the trunk and set off. Along the bank of the stream, the grass was wet and impenetrable and taller than me. Dad took the lead, forging a path; the vegetation closed like an arch above me as I followed. Bats flitted back and forth above the stream, silent, like black punctuation marks against the sky. After forty yards, Dad stopped and looked around. “This’ll do,” he said. The bank was steep and muddy. If you missed your step, you ran the risk of falling over and sliding straight into the water. Twilight was already falling. Dad held the grass back with one hand and carefully walked down on a diagonal, then turned around and held his other hand out to me. I took it and followed with the same practiced caution. Down by the water’s edge, we trampled out a small ledge and set down our buckets. I imitated Dad, who was mutely inspecting the water, following his eyes, imagining I saw what he saw. There was, of course, no way of knowing whether this was a good spot. The water was dark, and here and there stands of reeds stuck out of it, waving menacingly, but everything below the surface was hidden from us. We had no way of knowing, but we chose to have faith as from time to time a person must. Fishing is often about exactly that. “Yes, this’ll do,” Dad repeated, turning to me; I pulled a spiller from the bucket and handed it to him. He pushed the stake into the ground and quickly gathered up the line, picked up the hook, and gingerly pulled a fat worm out of the jar. He bit his lip and studied the worm in the flashlight; after putting it on the hook, he held it up to his face and pretended to spit on it for luck, always twice, before throwing it into the water with a sweeping motion. He bent down and touched the line, making sure it was taut and hadn’t traveled too far.
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Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Summer Haibun." Academy of American Poets, August 7, 2017.
To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air
the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light
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Thinking Like a Mountain Essay by Aldo Leopold
"When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."
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Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver."
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Santos Perez, Craig. "Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015." Poetry Foundation.
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“Special Episode: An Obituary for the Land” - Hosted and Produced by Biance Glaever, edited by Dave Shaw.