​without poetry, what?
​

"Why poetry? Poetry because my head fills up and I have to make poems or I will shatter. Poetry because prose confuses me with its cargo, its burden of words. Poetry because poetry susurrates and moans and sighs and whispers and sings over my shoulder. Poetry because it is in every corner, around every dogleg turn, because it is dilemma and euphoria. Poetry because without poetry, what?"

- Wendy Taylor Carlisle: http://www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com/

Finding Your Inner Ozark​

with help from Wendy Taylor Carlisle

​"The Ozarks, also known as the Ozark Mountains or Ozark Plateau, is a physiographic region in the U.S. states of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and extreme southeastern Kansas. The Ozarks cover a significant portion of northern Arkansas and most of the southern half of Missouri, extending from Interstate 40 in Arkansas to Interstate 70 in central Missouri." 

​In addition, so I suggest, the Ozark Plateau is a psychological and spiritual region, a mindset or attitude, that builds upon a sense of place, and that finds its spirit in attention to the particular, best described in poetry and image, not dry prose.  The word plateau can suggest something fixed in place, but your inner Ozark is not at all fixed,  It always moving, even it it seems to be standing in place.  It loves stories, honesty, abundance, colors, trees, possums, courage, rivers, and craziness.
​
Wendy Taylor Carlisle is an Ozark poet living outside Eureka Springs, Arkansas.  Her poems illustrate what we in the Open Horizons world call a spirituality of attention.  Attention to physical worlds, emotional worlds, interpersonal worlds, natural worlds, tragic worlds, hard worlds, funny worlds, biting worlds, confusing worlds and, sometimes, loving worlds.  Collectively we might call them Ozark worlds.  These worlds include the poet who is within not apart from them.  Deep down, we are all poets.  We all live in our Ozarks.

Her medium is words and images.  In the spirit of Whitehead’s ontological principle, she focuses her attention on the concrete and particular.  Although one person describes as a metaphysical poet for the 21st century, because she yokes together disparate elements as did the metaphysical poets of the 17th century, hers is a metaphysics of the unique and noticeable.  Why poetry?  Because, as she puts it, prose can get bogged down in a cargo of words and, along the way, lose the particular, where life happens. 

​Process theologians and philosophers, influenced by Whitehead, would do well to learn from her, not by extracting general principles from her poems, as I’ve just done, but rather by resting in the poems themselves: in the images they convey, the stories they tell, the confusions they evoke, and the passion for meaning that underlies them all.  The meaning sought is not necessarily in the timeless and eternal.  It is in the flow of experience itself, moment by moment.  Where life happens.

​-- Jay McDaniel

Going Home: Photo by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Photo from Wendy Taylor Carlisle Website

Wendy Taylor Carlisle:
​Artist Statement

​I live in the woods, on the backside of a mountain, down a dirt road. There is a cat. The cat is not a mouser. There are mice. I will probably have to get a mouser. I have dogs. The dogs keep the deer out of the tulips. They have personality, like all dogs. They get along with the cat. But warily.
 
I love the silence of the country which is not silence at all but the sound of leaves, of branches breaking, of critters’ grunts and yips, trills and whistles. In the morning, the sun washes up the hollow and the horizon blues up and lights the scraggly oaks blundering into daylight. At sunset, the heat goes out of the mountains in a hurry and the fireflies—what there are left of them—rise up out past the gravel pile where the forest begins in a tangle of kudzu, brush and third-growth trees where humans are scarce.
 
I am just a hiccup in the trees, an interruption to the fox and possum, deer and raccoon. I squat out south of town, near where a committee of vultures rests, hidden, waiting to do the city’s clean up. Rumors blow into the leaves here and the news gets around, therefore, I know some things, but also I don’t know some things. Whatever happens, I have a strange turn of mind. I have written more political poems since the fall of 2016 than in the previous three decades. Bless us all as we hang on in the semi-quiet woods.

-- Wendy Taylor Carlisle 

Wendy Taylor Carlisle Website

AMBER GOT HER GIRLS BACK, AND NOW THEY LIVE IN THE ABANDONED RESTAURANT
Poem by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
​
​Amber is watching her girls play in that forsaken greasy spoon. She has her hand on her neck, stroking the place where Craig’s fingers pressed down. The forest green sham wood paneling backgrounds the two toddlers who are oblivious, of course, jumping on their makeshift bed, a mattress propped between two booth seats. The bed’s yellow stuffing is exposed like cut fat in a surgery. The two, who don't notice their run down surroundings, are writing their own stories even at the second of this photograph—the pink shirt with the red heart is the baby’s favorite. She’ll remember it beating. Her sister will pass down worn jeans and the brown brogans to her. I always get the hand-me-downs, the baby will mew and she will always be the baby even after Amber presents her with a younger brother. They don’t know it now, capering on the dilapidated booth-bed but both girls will, in times of stress, adopt the same dreamy look their mother wears and go searching for their version of those wicked fingers and that green paneling which will turn out to be the wild woods of their grown-up adventure. 
​

Photo from Wendy Taylor Carlisle Website

First stanza of "Berryman"
by M.S Merwin

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

Photo from Wendy Taylor Carlisle website

---

READING BERRYMAN TO THE DOG
Poem by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
​
People say dogs have souls. I say they’re bloodthirsty
as generals. The new Rottweiler, one hundred pounds plus,
treasures dried pig ears, hoards them like a recruit.

After dinner, I can hear him in the garage, shattering them,
chewing. The dog flew in on American Air with my sweaty
shirt in his crate for the scent. Still, we were strangers when 

the front-end loader set him down on the tarmac, strangers
when I first had to touch him and the day went slick in my hand.
I grubbed in my pocket for a Ken'l Bone, crooned a safe-dog song.

Years after Tet, I loved tall Marine who seldom spoke about
the war. In Asia, he had friends and enemies he couldn't tell apart.
In my bed, he dreamed of napalm and demolished night. 

Not at home yet, the new dog noses the furniture.  Unsettled
as a visitor at morning mass, he measures the cat’s intent
with a long stare.  In the manual it says, his breed is 

fond of small animals. They will, however, kill rabbits.
After a decade gone, the soldier phoned.  His voice made a fist
sound in my ear.  The receiver twisted in my palm. I listened 

to the familiar words; I didn’t hang up. Since then, he calls
sometimes.  Sometimes I answer. If I happen to cry, the dog
stands close and waits for the all-clear sign. If he whines,

I ache for him, take him out to the porch, let him
drop his sad head on my foot and read to him from Berryman–
the Opus Dei, the prayers—until he can finally sleep.

START A JOURNAL
Poem by Wendy Taylor Carlisle​
​
Begin with evening on the bayou,
Black Jack in a Ball jar, borrowed Marlboro's.
Describe the sound of the Atchafalaya,
the yelp of hounds back in the swamp.
Add bits of conversation, opinions
on liars and politicians. Complain
about Wall Street and the state of the art.
Tell it all.  Be brazen.  How Mother calls
on Sunday and you hate it.  Share that part.
Put a date on it—summer. Spill
gin and tonic on the cover. Do this
quick, before the light goes
before the view narrows down
to the creek bed, the water running away.

Acornwhistle,
Pushcart Nomination, 1998

*The Atchafalaya is a Louisiana swamp.