{"id":33483,"date":"2016-05-01T08:13:23","date_gmt":"2016-05-01T14:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=33483"},"modified":"2018-09-06T02:11:30","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T08:11:30","slug":"sunday-blog-read-amy-brunvand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sunday-blog-read-amy-brunvand\/","title":{"rendered":"READ LOCAL First: Amy Brunvand"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Amy<\/a>SUNDAY BLOG READ\u00a0<\/strong>is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah\u2019s literary writers. Each month, 15 Bytes offers works-in-progress and \/ or recently published work by some of the state\u2019s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction and memoir. Today we are featuring Salt Lake City-based poet Amy Brunvand<\/strong>\u00a0who here provides four poems, two published, and two works-in-progress,<\/p>\n

“[K]nowing too much about climate change, endangered species and the obscure workings of the Utah Legislature,” she says, “can be disheartening. A few years back all that clutter in my head started flowing back out as poetry, often in the form of rhyming Shakespearean sonnets.” Amy is currently working on what she calls an “ecopoetic artistic vision” which she describes in her essay, \u201cGreen Jell-O for the Genius Loci: or How to Save the Earth with Poetry,” published last year in Western Weird<\/em>, Manifest West<\/em> #4, and, last month, reprinted in Catalyst<\/a>\u00a0magazine where she has been writing a monthly column since 2001\u00a0. Lately Canyon Country Zephyr<\/em> has been printing her poems, she continues, “due to Edward Abbey\u2019s suggestion that the environmental movement needs more poets, fewer lawyers<\/a>.” She is compiling these poems into a collection with the working title, Utah Reclamation Project<\/em> which she “stole” from Robert Smithson. “At this point,” she says, “the book is purely aspirational, but here [below] are some poems about Utah state symbols that would be in it if it did exist.”<\/p>\n

So . . . curl up with your favorite cup of Joe, and enjoy the work of Amy Brunvand!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Beehive State<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deseret<\/em>, which, by interpretation,
\nIs a honeybee is the only
\nWord I ever learned in reformed Egyptian;
\nUtah is the land of milk and honey
\nAccording to the Book of Mormon. That\u2019s why
\nWe call ourselves the Beehive State. Our hives
\nAre full of matriarchal insects sweetly
\nPollinating flowers, not sister wives,
\nAnd by our motto, \u201cIndustry,\u201d we mean
\nWe are like busy bees, and not that we
\nStand in support of uncontrolled pollution
\nReleased from factory farms or industry
\nOf that sort, never mind what the Deseret News
\nReports about Utah and our conservative views.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

First appeared in blog associated with\u00a0<\/em>Winged: New Writing on Bees<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Expedition Diary<\/strong>
\nWe set up camp for the evening
\nAt the angle formed by the junction
\nOf Descent of Man and alpine tundra:
\nTo the north, hollow-eyed skulls
\nContemplating death (inhale, exhale<\/em>);
\nTo the south, the glassy gaze of ptarmigan,
\nSnowshoe hare and yellow-bellied marmot,
\nUpholstered and reassuringly benign
\nUnder cerulean sugar-eggshell skies,
\nBut although we had now entered
\nThe fabled Land of Great Apes
\nWe saw no person but ourselves.<\/p>\n

At dusk the lights winked out.
\nWe shined our flashlights on and hiked
\nBack down to the Late Jurassic,
\nBy Allosaurus fragilils<\/em>, her comb of teeth
\nGrinning hungrily like the joke\u2019s on us,
\nAs she taught her kittenish hatchlings
\nHow to catch a skeletal sauropod.<\/p>\n

Then giving thanks and praise
\nFor air conditioning, indoor plumbing,
\nDrive-thru coffee, synthetic fibers,
\nWe nestled into sleeping bags.
\nThe green glow of northern exit lights
\nDanced curtains in the high-vaulted past.<\/p>\n

At dawn the stage lights came up,
\nA tableau of animals posed like mimes.
\nCue the soundtrack; A rosy finch,
\nSongbird of extreme environments,
\nWarbled; an indignant pika chirped,
\nTheir refrain looping, calling,
\nFrom the tumbled stop-motion rockfall.<\/p>\n

How we longed to get out of that dark hall
\nAnd wander about among the scree,
\nSky pilot, columbine and forget-me-nots!
\nTo feel damp foreboding thunderstorms,
\nSparks prickling in our hair!
\nWe looked around for a little three-legged table,
\nA bottle beautifully labeled, \u201cDrink me\u201d
\nAnd finding none resolved to hike on further.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>*<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Bonneville Cutthroat,<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Never mind if people call you dull
\nOr criticize your freckled dorsal spots
\nToo sparsely scattered on your pale yellow
\nSkin, less vivid than your fellow trout,
\nThose Colorado greenbacks, Californian
\nGolden trout, the brilliant Yellowstone
\nCutthroats, all as lovely as the mountains
\nThat spawn them. Ghost Fish of the Great Basin,
\nYou are the desert made of fading, dusty
\nLight and camouflaged by floating shadows
\nHiding unanticipated beauty
\nYour throat and fins are lit by alpenglow,
\nYou swim invisible against the pebbled
\nStream, judicious with the color red.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Spiral Jetty<\/strong><\/p>\n

Et in Utah ego<\/em>\u2014Robert Smithson<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I am walking down the dark mountain
\nPast tumbled boulders of black basalt.
\nParticles of dust and tiny drops of water
\nChange the direction of sunlight;<\/p>\n

The sky is blue behind high ringlet clouds.
\nCartoon rays of light spike down
\nPainted in the recursive sky above the lake
\nBy some anonymous communist artist.<\/p>\n

Sunlight bounces and breaks apart
\nOn filmy sluggish gray waves
\nSudden flashes of peacock and gold
\nAre nothing after all but water, light and salt.<\/p>\n

I am walking through the dusty parking lot
\nPast crayon-colored cars and trucks
\nMade in factories far away from here.
\nA woman barks the name of her running dog,<\/p>\n

I am following the rocky spiral path
\nThat coils around its watery image
\nA skiff of brine shrimp cysts drifts
\nIn smokelike wisps of suspended animation.<\/p>\n

Primordial soup must have been like this:
\nSloshing against black volcanic spew,
\nFrothy with white, pillowed foam
\nStinking of something pickled.<\/p>\n

This is Arcadia for haliophiles
\nFeasting on shining beams of light
\nI am immense, reaching for a small stone
\nThat glints with square prisms of salt;<\/p>\n

Circles ripple from my tossed stone.
\nA gull screeches for bread in indignation.
\nSalt burns my wounded feet.
\nI am standing in the center, spinning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

first appeared in<\/em>\u00a0Red Savina Review 2.1<\/p>\n

#<\/p>\n

Copyright, Amy Brunvand, 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amy Brunvand grew up in the Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake City and went to East High School.\u00a0 She is an academic librarian at the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library where she specializes in government information and environmental\/sustainability studies. \u00a0She writes for Catalyst<\/em>\u00a0magazine, mostly about environmental issues and dance, and has a long, eclectic list of other publications ranging from academic articles to book reviews to cranky letters to the editor. She sometimes writes poetry as well, and some of her recent poems appear in Dark Mountain<\/em>, saltfront, Canyon Country Zephyr, Kudzu House Quarterly<\/em>, and a forthcoming anthology Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands.<\/em><\/p>\n

Past featured writers in <\/em>15 Bytes\u2019 Sunday Blog Read:\u00a0Katharine Coles<\/a>, Michael McLane<\/a>, Darrell Spencer<\/a>,Larry Menlove<\/a>,Christopher Bigelow<\/a>, Shanan Ballam<\/a>,Steve Proskauer<\/a>, April Wilder<\/a>,Calvin Haul<\/a>, Lance Larsen<\/a>,Joel Long<\/a>,Lynn Kilpatrick<\/a>,Phyllis Barber<\/a>, David Hawkins<\/a>,Nancy Takacs<\/a>,Mike Dorrell<\/a>,Susan Elizabeth Howe<\/a>, Star Coulbrooke<\/a>, Brad Roghaar,<\/a>Jerry Vanleperen<\/a>,Maximilian Werner<\/a>, Markay Brown<\/a>, Natalie Young<\/a>, Michael Sowder<\/a>, andDanielle Beazer Dubrasky<\/a>,\u00a0Kevin Holdsworth<\/a>,\u00a0Jacqueline Osherow<\/a>, Stephen Carter<\/a>,\u00a0Alex Caldiero<\/a>,\u00a0Stephen Tuttle<\/a>, Raphael Dagold<\/a>, David Lee<\/a>,\u00a0Lisa Bickmore<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Kirstin Scott<\/a>,\u00a0Jesse Parent<\/a>,\u00a0Craig Dworkin<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Laura Stott<\/a>,\u00a0Jana Richman<\/a>, Melody Newey Johnson<\/a>, and C. Wade Bentley<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SUNDAY BLOG READ\u00a0is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah\u2019s literary writers. Each month, 15 Bytes offers works-in-progress and \/ or recently published work by some of the state\u2019s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction and memoir. Today we are featuring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1566,"featured_media":33489,"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":[69,35,2513],"tags":[26,2876,2878,1301],"class_list":["post-33483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-bytes","category-literary-arts","category-read-local-first","tag-15-bytes","tag-amy-brunvand","tag-ecopoetic-artistic-vision","tag-sunday-blog-read"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Amy-Brunvand.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-08 16:25:43","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\/33483","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\/1566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33483"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35431,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33483\/revisions\/35431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}