{"id":101733,"date":"2026-02-15T02:02:27","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T09:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=101733"},"modified":"2026-02-13T16:17:50","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T23:17:50","slug":"living-deliberately-in-borrowed-words-lance-newmans-poetic-reassembly-of-walden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/living-deliberately-in-borrowed-words-lance-newmans-poetic-reassembly-of-walden\/","title":{"rendered":"Living Deliberately in Borrowed Words: Lance Newman\u2019s Poetic Reassembly of Walden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Lance Newman is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Westminster University in Salt Lake City. His best-known work is an edited collection, Grand Canyon Reader<\/em> (University of California Press, 2011), and he has published an extensive list of scholarly books and articles, many of them about New England transcendentalists. Somewhat unusually for an academic administrator, he is also a poet. Knowing this pedigree is helpful in interpreting Proverbs of Earth<\/em>, which is Newman\u2019s first full-length book of poetry.<\/h4>\n

In Concision Poetry Journal,\u00a0<\/i>Newman describes this collection as \u201ca manuscript of very short poems made from words that occur in Henry Thoreau\u2019s Walden.<\/i>\u201d On his website, he says, \u201cI usually work with found language and assemble it in traditional and invented forms.\u201d It\u2019s too bad that this background is not explained in the published book, since it clarifies how the poems arose, and makes them more interesting to read.<\/h4>\n

Because Thoreau lived in the 1860s, the language of Newman\u2019s poems is noticeably old fashioned. One proverb begins:\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

Sometimes I peck at a poem
like a telegraph tapping
cash into the distance.<\/i><\/h4>\n

These days, people hardly use telegraphs, but we are nonetheless amused by Thoreau\u2019s observation, \u201cWe are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.\u201d What would Thoreau think of the idea that sending a poem is like sending money? He might approve, since he also wrote, \u201cthe cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.\u201d He did, after all, spend his own time writing poetry.<\/h4>\n

This is the trick that makes Newman\u2019s poems work. By using Thoreau\u2019s words to construct new poems, the proverbs remind the reader of \u201cWalden\u201d without directly quoting \u201cWalden,\u201d and thereby open space to conjure new meanings and connections. The process of reconfiguring archaic words connects the past to an immediate present. In this sense, Newman\u2019s work does not quite stand alone because it assumes familiarity with Thoreau\u2019s ideas as a starting point. At the same time, a proverb is specifically a short, pithy statement to convey advice and wisdom, and some of this wisdom derives from a process that pays deep respect to the original. These poems are at heart about the life-changing influence of reading and absorbing Thoreau\u2019s words.<\/h4>\n

Newman\u2019s own voice occasionally comes through in lines such as these,<\/h4>\n


I crave the rattle of sun
lighting a rift in the wall.
Can I grasp a universe
that\u2019s true to ringing hills?<\/i><\/h4>\n


That sounds a lot like a Grand Canyon river guide. However, throughout this work the first person \u201cI\u201d seems not meant to be the poet or Thoreau, but embraces the reader. These bite-sized poems aren\u2019t as strongly opinionated as Thoreau’s writing, but they are a lovely and thoughtful homage to his worldview. In their own way, they have something to say about how to live deliberately.<\/h4>\n


\nProverbs of Earth<\/em>
\nLance Newman
\nSpuyten Duyvil Publishing<\/a>
\n2025
\n80 pp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lance Newman is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Westminster University in Salt Lake City. His best-known work is an edited collection, Grand Canyon Reader (University of California Press, 2011), and he has published an extensive list of scholarly books and articles, many of them about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1518,"featured_media":101740,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/proverbsofearth.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 23:18:52","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101733"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101741,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101733\/revisions\/101741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}