In Geological Time -- Artifact Eleven now available on Amazon

In Basin and Range, John McPhee explains that, for the most part, we're capable of living with five generations in our minds--our own, two before us and two in the future.  Meanwhile, the Earth is telling us a story in hundreds of millions of years.  "Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time.  Any number above a couple thousand years--fifty thousand, fifty million--will... awe the imagination to the point of paralysis."

Applying the Bible story of creation's seven days to the geological evidence of 4.5 billion years, McPhee concludes that Jesus appeared at one fourth of a second before midnight on Saturday, the seventh day.  McPhee quotes David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club: "at one fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began.  We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing in that one fortieth of  second can go on indefinitely.  They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad."

Geological time was foreign to me before I lived in Nevada.  Seeing routine evidence of hundreds of millions of years in the landscape--in upturned geological strata, for instance, such as those in the photo here--can change your perspective in a number of ways.  Because I write poetry, one thing that changed, for me, was my sense of what a poem could be.  A poem might not need to confine itself to one feeling, one experience, or one complex of tone or emotion.  A poem could be an "assemblage," like the fossil assemblages discovered in subsequent layers of geological strata.  "Imagine an E. L. Doctorow novel in which Alfred Tennyson, William Tweed, Abner Doubleday, Jim Bridger, and Martha Jane Canary sit down to a dinner cooked by Rutherford B. Hayes.  Geologists would call that a fossil assemblage."

I wanted to write poems like that, and for me a process emerged: imagine combining Sessions Wheeler's history of the Black Rock Desert with the petroglyphs Alvin McLain catalogued and the decaying foundations of chinese fish houses along the shore of vanished Lake Winnemucca and the personal journals I took on a trip from Twin Falls to Las Vegas.  That's how "Natural History" was "written," one of the assemblages in Artifact Eleven that was published in The Offending Adam and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  Each of the poems in Artifact Eleven has a different combinatory story.  As a whole, I believe the book makes a unique combination to the poetry of Nevada and the inter-mountain West.

The book is published by the Black Rock Press, and available on their website, here.  You can also order a copy on amazon.com here.

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