Author: Narya Rose Deckard
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From Johnson to Leopold: Dull Certainty to Humble Wonder
This semester my writing students and I have been exploring in a class I’ve called “Representations of Nature.” Part of our task has been to study how writers past and present have represented their relationship with or cultural perspective of nature via essays, poetry, almanacs, and fiction. Along the way we have our own weekly Read more
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We Still Read (Medieval Poetry): Gawain’s Failure as Success
Last year I assigned my college composition class to read the medieval Romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (“GGK”). I had spent time studying it over the past year, and, with the help of the book Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I couched the reading of it within the Read more
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Dogmagic Poetry: Hiking Sketches, August 2024
Feeling washed out as the footbridge across Hoyle Creek Tributary. Its sand banks are slippery and soft, so the dog and I inch down to cross the slow flow that had just recently flooded. Mushrooms dot the forest floor from recent rain, all colors of them: white, orange, rust, yellow, red. The white ones are Read more
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Night Locks the Birds in the Sky: Review of Bird Ornaments
How many ways can we come to know the body through metaphor? In Angel T. Dionne’s book of poems Bird Ornaments, it can be and become so many things: a “dimensional graph/of genetic variations,” string beans for arms, caterpillars for eyebrows, teeth become adversaries. And usually when we think of metaphors, we imagine them opening Read more
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Let’s Behead Ourselves: Living As Symbols, Not Images
As I spend time thinking about language and its imperfections, how it only reveals slivers of truths, not a whole truth, I discover how easily we deceive ourselves into believing we could possibly ever know something wholly. Take self-identity for an example. We define ourselves by our jobs, at least in the U.S., in such Read more
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Write Like a Knight; Irony in Creating Without Control
John O’Donohue says near the end of chapter 2 in Eternal Echoes that “It is vital that one’s spiritual quest be accompanied by a sense of irony” because it “ensures humility” (129). With dramatic irony, the audience knows more than the main character does; irony in this instance is not recognizing your own situation and/or Read more
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The Bridge of Bear Mother: Ancient Slumber and Quickening
St. Brigid, Imbolc, and the 5 of Cups The bridge draws my eye first along its breadth, the bridge to which the figure in the image looks, the thing that connects one bank to another. What draws us together in this way? St. Brigid, her quickening breath that had slowed for winter slumber, warm and Read more
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From Dormant Roots to Dragonfire: Writing the Self
One of the most important experiences I had in my MFA was writing a poem. Here’s what happened:My teacher told us to go outside sometime that week and read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” She said this poem was meant to be read aloud…. loudly.Yell it.Yell the poem as loud as you Read more
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Resting but Ready
Hibernation is always on my mind, particularly in the season when it’s at least somewhat socially acceptable. This week I’m thinking about hibernation in terms of the Tarot card Strength, which has an image of a woman holding the mouth of a lion. Whether she’s shutting it or keeping it open, I’m not sure. Strength Read more
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Wisdom from Riddles
Bard by Morgan Llewelyn has a great passage about a society too focused on the material world: The speaker describes two roads to take: “One would develop the forces locked within our minds; the other direction led to the constant refinement of tools and weapons, increasing reliance on matter rather than spirit. In choose the Read more