Southern Ecophony readings excerpts

Prose and poetry excerpts for Southern Ecophony:

Mary Oliver: THE SEA

Stroke by

stroke my

body remembers that life and cries for

the lost parts of itself—-

fins, gills

opening like flowers into

the flesh—-my legs

want to lock and become

one muscle, I swear I know

just what the blue-gray scales

shingling

the rest of me would

feel like!

paradise! Sprawled

in that motherlap,

in that dreamhouse

of salt and exercise,

what a spillage

of nostalgia pleads

from the very bones! how

they long to give up the long trek

inland, the brittle

beauty of understanding,

and dive,

and simply

become again a flaming body

of blind feeling

sleeking along

in the luminous roughage of the sea’s body,

vanished

like victory inside that

insucking genesis, that

roaring flamboyance, that

perfect

beginning and

conclusion of our own.

Rachel Carson, ‘Edge of the Sea’ excerpt: “The Edge of the Sea was a book Carson had always wanted to write. Her idea for it began while she still worked at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She thought of it as a "field guide," and Houghton Mifflin editor-in-chief Paul Brooks had a similar idea in mind when the two first met after Carson achieved literary fame with The Sea Around Us. But as Carson visited each coastal area and began writing, the book became much more than any typical "guide book." It has all the hallmarks we now associate with Rachel Carson’s prose. Once again a scientifically accurate exploration of the ecology of Atlantic seashore, but also a hauntingly beautiful account of what one can find at the edge of the sea. She explores a tide pool, and an inaccessible cave, and watches a lone crab on the shore at midnight. Each is a memorable encounter.”

Jules Verne, ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ excerpt:

John Steinbeck, ‘The Log from The Sea of Cortez’: