Living for a couple of seasons in forested hills, our miniature “lake country” of North Georgia, is more than poetic. It is where we turn around on a trail when we hear the low growl of a mama bear, or marvel at the insane chorus of coyotes before dawn. It is where poetry happens, as it did for Wordsworth in his Lake Country.

I once asked a good published poet why she wasn’t writing poetry anymore. It takes too much time, she said. For her, it took about six months between even short poems, and she was too busy being a college dean.

I know what that means. But I have learned that other things are needed besides time to make poems: A little solitude and an interior life; a lot of reading and hearing of poems, and living close to nature and the seasons, away from town. Robert Graves said this about Robert Frost living for 10 years as a (not very successful) New England farmer: “The four natural objects proper to poems are, by common consent, the moon, water, hills and trees; with sun, beasts and flowers as useful subsidiaries.” He didn’t mean only as pretty objects in the poems, but also as the lived-in ecology of the writer.

One other thing is a frameable experience. This can be a burst of consciousness. Or it can be something as dramatic as Hurricane Helene’s devastation in parts of the Southeast last year.  Poems that writers made out of that are collected in a new anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer, who is holding a series of readings around Appalachia. Last night, one was at Blacksburg Books. Tonight, from 6-7 p.m., there’s one at Black Mountain Library. I am glad to see the names of so many poets who will be there (and sorry I won’t join them, though I have a poem in the book): Ginger Graziano, Clint Bowman, Andrew Mack, Gene Hyde, Paige Ghilchrist, Michael Conner, Nancy Martin-Young, Pat Riviere-Seel, Rob Masterson, Whitney Waters, Lee Stockdale, Patricia Crittendon, Laurie Wilcox-Meyer, Paul Kanowski, Jennie Boyd Bull, Amy Tilley, Barbara Conrad, Hilda Downer.

It feels like I’m not doing much here in the mountains. But I do see that I’m writing a poem now and then, more than I used to. Here’s one, from a canoe trip my brother Walter took me on, on the Chestatee River out of Dahlonega.

On the River

A six-legged creature dents a surface that holds,
Making six giant craters in the smooth river shoals.
Then sensing a shadow with globular eyes,
It leaps, to be killed by a dragon that flies.

A million years later, or was it just now,
Two brothers are paddling, one stern and one bow.
The stern one is younger but like his canoe
Knows currents of rivers unknown to his crew.

Connecticut’s head in Vermont, just last week,
Was still in his blood on this slow Georgia creek.
No traffic, small eddies, mud turtles, all sorts,
Guitar for a bow sprit, his dog between thwarts.

Rivers all join, but family trees split.
So a branch from New England became Uncle Whitt,
And great-uncle Roger, on the Chattahoochee,
With a place you could swim from a river-skewed tree.

These brothers, from babyhood dunkings, were keyed
To slack water swimming, a lacustrine breed.
The first time they swam from that man’s riverbank
Was as if from some mystical liquor they drank.

What’s this? Moving water! The soul set aflame!
Like St. Stephen, the young one was never the same.
Rapids that plunge and rocks backward churning,
Waves for their origin endlessly yearning.

The spirit was restless that took him to go
Eternally seaward, whether tandem, solo,
Westward or eastward – the call was the sea.
The push was for Selfhood, for Being to be.

“With a lover’s pain to attain the plain”
So sang from fourth grade in the older one’s brain.
A stronger current under surface of prose—
The memorized song of Lanier still flows.