Wild about Antarctica!

Today I'm celebrating with dear friend, Irene Latham, on her ten year anniversary in the blogosphere. Irene has inspired me, challenged me, and entertained me for many of these ten years at Live Your Poem, where she does exactly that!

Many of us in the Kidslitosphere begin January with "One Little Word" for the year. I'm not sure, but this may have been Irene's invention, too. Irene's word for 2015 is WILD. You can see her post here, along with a pretty wild picture of the wild little girl she was. It's only appropriate that she has invited those of us who know and love her to be wild with her today. 

Here is my take on the topic. I'm still stuck in Antarctica, definitely a wild place. Cape Denison, the home base of Australian explorer Douglas Mawson, is the windiest place on earth. Katabatic winds blow down the surface of the Antarctic ice cap, pulled by gravity, gathering snow, until they reach hurricane speeds. These rivers of icy wind can blow for days. Explorers of old and research scientists of today can only sit and wait for the winds to cease. 

The poem below is a mask, or persona poem, written in the voice of the wind. Stop by Irene's blog where she is rounding up all of today's wild celebration posts. Happy Anniversary, Irene!

Katabatic winds at Cape Denison, Antartica. Photograph by Frank Hurley, 1912

Wind Warning

Set no foot here
or suffer violence.
This shore belongs to me.

A blizzard of rage,unbridled,
I plunge down ice. I plow
the snow, slam walls of white

against your face—a maelstrom,
uncontrolled. My raging
blast demands retreat.

A knife of driven air,
my wild banshee scream
prophesies despair.

© Doraine Bennett 2015

In the Kingdom of Ice--Reprise

Reprise, because I talked about this book in my last post. But at that point, I had just picked up the book. Now that the reading is done, I must tell you about this adventure.

USS Jeanette in Le Havre, France

I began slowly, reading in my free moments, relishing the deftness of Hampton Sides as he introduced the remarkable characters behind the USS Jeanette expedition to the Arctic Circle. George Washington DeLong, our captain, and his wife Emma; James Gordon Bennett, Jr., owner of the New York Herald and financier of the expedition; John Muir, environmentalist; August Petermann, noted German mapmaker and geographer.

He sets us firmly in the culture of a nation only a decade out of the Civil War, bursting with new technology, giant steam engines, prototypes of Edison's arc lamps and Bell's telephone, delighted with new tastes like Heinz ketchup and the strange new fruit called a banana, filled with a generation of young men men longing to prove themselves like their fathers and brothers had in the war.

By the end of the first section, we have a clear understanding of the current knowledge, or lack thereof, concerning the north pole and the arctic sea. From the mind-boggling assumptions of Symmes Hole to the concept of a warm, open polar sea.

By the time the expedition begins, as a reader, I am fully invested in the cast of characters, and even though I know something of the outcome, I'm committed for the ride.

Then I began finding time to read that wasn't free. I read over meals, between yoga classes, carried the book with me in the car when I left the house in hopes of catching a few moments to follow this incredible sea journey. It's a remarkable telling. Without ever dipping into subjectivity, Sides manages to make me feel like I'm in the heads of these characters. And I read desperately to understand the end, the struggle for survival, the international search and rescue of the men who survived.

One of the blurbs on the back of the book from Ian Frazier says: Read this book in two ways--fast, for the hair-raising excitement of what happens to the brave men of the Jeanette, and then slowly, to take in the clarity of the writing and the unshowy elegance of the structure. He's right! I was aware of the structure throughout, aware of the finesse and elegance of this telling, but I was reading fast. Now it's time to go back and look a little more closely at the technique.

A beautiful book, beautifully written. Read it.

Drawing of the Jeannette cairn in Siberia

In the Kingdom of Ice

I picked up a copy of Booktalk in the library this week and found the blurb for Hampton Sides' new book, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette. And, hooray, my library had a copy in, so I grabbed it off the shelf and tucked it under my arm, slightly surprised that everyone else in the library that day weren't flocking to read another gruesome story of icy death. I can't wait to sit down and read.




The front pages of the book include this poem, "The Sinking of the Jeannette" by Joachim Ringelnatz.

In the kingdom of ice, far from the world,
    lamentations rise from the ship,
As she battles the slabs and the growling swirls,
    and writhes in their throttling grip.
The crusted floes crack in fits and in sprees,
    and in fury flog her planked hide,
Spent sailors fall upon supplicant knees,
    yearning for kith and hearthside.
The hungry ice clutches more tightly,
    to check the flight of its prey,
The captain's command rings forthrightly,
    "All hands quit while ye may!"
See how the rough men pine and weep,
    as she falters and slips,
High in the masts, the haunted winds whine,
    a dirge to the truest of ships
That bore them so long, yet now in the murk,
    the proud boat twists to her bed,
And when the day hath ended its work,
    Northern Lights paint her grave purple-red.

Ringelnatz was the pen name for German writer, Hans Böttiche.

Here is a humorous poem written by Ringelnatz in German.


Die Ameisen

In Hamburg lebten zwei Ameisen
die wollten nach Australien reisen.
Bei Altona auf der Chaussee
Da taten ihnen die Beine weh.
Und da verzichteten sie weise
Dann auf den letzten Teil der Reise.


Translated as a limerick:

The Ants

There once were two ants in Westphalia
Who wanted to go to Australia.
But cursing their feet
In a Belgian street
They gave up the trip as a failya.

This one reminds me of "The Ant Explorer," posted here. 

Explore more Poetry Friday with Diane at Random Noodling.

The Ship Speaks

It felt good to come back to poetry this week, to pull a project off the back burner and fire it up with a little creative energy.

The Fram under sail, picture courtesy NOAA  in: "The South Pole," by Roald Amundsen. 

From the Fram's Standpoint

I am not handsome.
My bow is blunt,
my stern the same.
I do not move
with speed or grace,
but I am crafty.
My round hull slips
the grip of frozen waves,
evades the ice
like a cherry seed
when squeezed
between thumb and finger
pops into the air.
I rise above the ice.

They think they have
reason to boast--
Fridtjof Nansen,
Roadl Amundsen--
Norwegian names
laying claim
to farthest, fastest,
but most credit
comes to me.

Without me
they would be
crushed,
waiting for hull
to crack,
for polar water
to swallow them whole
like whaling ships
more comely than me,
but without
my cunning ways.

© 2014 Doraine Bennett

Laura Purdie Salas hosts Poetry Friday today at Writing the World for Kids.

Poetry Friday: A Few Explorer Poems

Iceberg off Snow Hill Island. Photo by Frank Krahmer/Corbis.

I've been working on a collection of explorer poems for some time now. This week I re-read Elizabeth Bradfield's marvelous collection, Approaching Ice. It's a beautiful book about explorers throughout history who have ventured toward polar ice. Here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite for more.

from "Polar Explorer Ernest Shackleton (1922)"

     We all have unexplained rhythms

and echoes inside the still-mysterious landscape 

of our chests. The heart's slight variations of tick and tock.

That smooth ticking of reels, regular

     and anticipated, unlike

the unrhythms slap of halyards or

of the snap of a hull's planks and ribs

                                within a clench of ice.

from "Why They Went"

Frost bitten. Snow blind. Hungry. Craving

fresh pie and hot toddies, a whole roasted

unflippered thing to carve. Craving a bed

that had, an hour before entering,

been warmed with a stone from the hearth.

from "Bowditch as First Discovery, First Exloration"

I turned always to the star charts:

White scatter on a dark blue circle.

Transparent sheets to story

the scatter with lines. 

Check in with Jone at Check it Out for more Poetry Friday and enjoy.

I Conquered the North Pole

No fingers or toes lost to frostbite. My ears and nose are still intact. I've eaten no pemmican, suffered no scurvy.

I finally managed to write my script on the Peary/Cook controversy. I really enjoy research, sometimes too much. This was one of those times. I got caught up in the details of the story so much I lost perspective. I got emotionally involved. I didn't like the ruthless, egocentric Peary I found in the pages of his biographies. I didn't want to believe Matthew Cook was truly a con man. But facts are facts. So many facts. I couldn't figure out how to condense this story to a scene.

Right. One scene.

It's a little like writing a 30-second trailer for a 90-minute film, without leaving out the climax and the conclusion.

That's the heart of readers theater. Or readers' theater. Or reader's theater. Or any of those choices, plus the British spelling, theatre. Take your pick. It makes trying to find information on the internet absolutely maddening!

Anyway, I'm closing in on completion of this project. I'm already feeling my thoughts wandering toward the next one, which is actually the last project I put on hold in order to write this one. I'd like to think this mind flitting is like a hummingbird, moving delicately between hibiscus nectar to sweet clematis. Unfortunately it feels more like the Keystone Cops blundering from one half-open door to the next until the culprit of a thought disappears into thin air. I know lots of writers who work on multiple projects at the same time, but I haven't figured out how to do it very well myself.

I'm trying to stay focused.

Another Polar Poem

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the Peary/Cook controversy. At some point research must stop and I must find a way to present this to middle-grade readers. The fact that it's still disputed a hundred years later makes me ask myself: What in the world am I thinking? I need more than a pick ax and a sextant to find my way through the morass! There is still a Peary camp. There's still a Cook camp. And they are still as diametrically opposed to one another as contemporary partisan politics. So, I'm taking a break from them and reading about S. A. Andrée, who tried to float over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. He didn't make it either.

Polar Explorer Salomon August Andrée (1897)
by Elizabeth Bradfield

O, terrible—silence over ice—
no panting dogs, no hissing runners,
no footfall to break it. Just the crack
and groan of its own awful straining
rising up.

You warm your hands at the flame
that lifts you. The balloon's silk
is a second sun, unsetting. You're always in its noon,
directly underneath its rippling light.

There's a red smear on one floe, white
bear loping away from the seal's meat.
There's a quick spout in a lead,
the whale's back there, gone.

When blizzards, no ground to fix
your boots to, just directionless swirl
and the compass' doubtful arrow.

Who else has breathed air this clear, crystals of it
hardening briefly in your lungs? Who else has so brightly
risen above the dangerous landscape?

And when you find that you are losing height,
when the earth calls you down to its own slogging,
when it's been decided that you've traveled long enough
as ghosts, silent and apart, you know
some disaster of hunger and cold awaits
—your bones' location to be a mystery for thirty years—
you know your limbs may no longer have the knack
of pulling, of recovery, of resistance, and you're glad anyway
to be mortal again, and stumbling.