Diane Jarvenpa and Thomas R. Smith, both self-admitted introverts, launch their new writing based on nature this week. Their programs are free and open to the public.
Jarvenpa celebrates publication of her poetry collection “Shy Lands” at 2 p.m. April 23 at the Danish American Center, 3030 River Pkwy., Mpls., a venue that aligns with her Finnish heritage.
She is the author of six books of poetry, including “The Tender Wild Things,” recipient of the Midwest Independent Publishers Association award, and has worked for 30 years with a wide range of poets, writers, students, musicians and artists, as well as teaching with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.
Jarvenpa is also a prominent singer, songwriter, guitarist and kantele player who performs folk and world music around the world as Diane Jarvi.
In “Shy Lands” (Blue Light Press), Jarvenpa counters feelings of hopelessness many of us have about what humans have done to the Earth by looking at and listening to its wonders. Freya Manfred, whose poetry often has nature themes, writes: “Her poems remind us that we can find solace and belonging in that ‘light’ and ‘articulate wonder’ which can ‘fit so completely into the grooves of all our shadows.’ ”
Tim Nolan, poet and host of the monthly Readings by Writers series, puts it this way: “While Diane Jarvenpa is a self-described shy person from a shy family in a shy land, she is a fierce poet. ‘Shy Lands’ describes an imaginatively animated world, all the elements of nature which the poet has observed, consumed, and returned to the reader in another form through some exercise of magical alchemy. The country (she) inhabits, the country we all inhabit, is ravaged and threatened, but still, with her power to convert the observed in a ‘cold wild song,’ she finds for all of us some kind of inspired redemption.”
Thomas Smith, who lives in River Falls. Wis., launches “Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival” at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 30, at Judson Memorial Baptist Church, 4101 Harriet Ave., Mpls.
“Poetry on the Side of Nature” (Red Dragonfly Press) is described by Smith as “a passionate book-length essay that includes 30 older and contemporary poems in making a case for the Western nature poem as resistance against environmental destruction.” Some of it incorporates lectures he has given at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
Smith looks at well-known poets as well as those we might not have read, such as early 20th-century French poet Francis Ponge. His prose poetry was devoted to observations of physical subjects such as the oyster and Smith tells us why Ponge’s poem about the mollusk is so important.
Poet and essayist Kim Stafford told Smith: “Your wide-ranging consideration of voices, times and places where these voices spoke, and issues central to our predicament all speak to our place in the ecosystem, a place so many of our actions deny.”
Smith, who has published 20 books, is a teacher and essayist who has an international reputation. For 30 years he was Robert Bly’s personal assistant and edited the book “Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer.”
