{"id":63724,"date":"2022-05-29T09:52:34","date_gmt":"2022-05-29T15:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=63724"},"modified":"2023-11-13T13:52:43","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T19:52:43","slug":"truth-the-news-in-rob-carneys-accidental-gardens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/truth-the-news-in-rob-carneys-accidental-gardens\/","title":{"rendered":"Truth > The News in Rob Carney’s Accidental Gardens"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In addition to chapbooks and incidental publications, poet and Utah Valley University professor Rob Carney has published three volumes of poetry. His fourth and latest book, however, comprises 42 innovative prose chronicles, each suitable for dipping into to nourish and kick-start the imagination. Because the form of expository prose Carney chose to build this book on often incorporates verse, it may take a while for a reader to fully grasp that these are, in fact, primarily narratives rather than prose poems. In fact, they belong to a venerable Japanese tradition known as haibun<\/em>. These were originally personal stories, each of which ended in a haiku: a succinct poem containing an image that sums up the preceding thoughts. Carney is as likely to insert a poem mid-way, or omit it altogether, but overall he strives to find ways to bring a haibun-like conclusion to each memoir.<\/h4>\n

Consider an example. “In the Beginning Was a River” recollects a decision by New Zealand\u2019s House of Representatives to grant full human rights to a river in their jurisdiction. After briefly marveling at a government that could take such a visionary action, Carney suggests some other improbable recipients of such recognition: stars, bodies of water, mountains. Then he prompts readers to think of their own lists: “Isn\u2019t there a long distance drive you\u2019ve taken with a good enough reason at the end of it?” Then comes the coda:<\/h4>\n

Anyway, it\u2019s April, soon to be summer in Utah, where most aren\u2019t yelling and opposed to helping refugees. Most don\u2019t think it\u2019s okay to zero them out, leave them trapped in their national horrors.<\/h4>\n

In New Zealand, they\u2019ve granted more rights than that to a river, which ought to be an elemental lesson.<\/h4>\n

Let\u2019s hope it flows all the way from there to D.C.<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s not a haiku, not a tight arrangement of 17 syllables. But it does make the image of a river flowing, developed at the beginning, and make it a metaphor for humane and democratic action: for government of, for, and by the people.<\/h4>\n

Carney is first and foremost a poet, and even in a collection of prose works he regards his work according to the standards of poetry, as so many of the best writers do. Poetry is like the DNA of language: the place where speech, and so writing, get the aesthetic elements they build into every other literate form. But that said:<\/h4>\n

Poets don\u2019t get an audience, at least not usually. Still, we never stop trying …<\/h4>\n

It would be helpful to know what someone\u2019s noticing, that poems don\u2019t drop like pebbles down a well and disappear. Maybe they ripple a bit, maybe echo and change the taste of the water, make the moss on the nearby stones a little greener; that would be nice. I\u2019d like to add that to my r\u00e9sum\u00e9: Greener-Up of Living Things, Echo Riding on the Water.<\/h4>\n

Carney is the poetic equivalent of a contemporary artist: a poet writing in the present moment, and in places he shares some of his thinking about today\u2019s technical issues. Reading this prose can serve as a relatively painless introduction to some of the ways different poems work \u2014 kind of like knowing the difference between oil painting and watercolor. It can also be skipped without missing out on the poet\u2019s observations on nature, but there is no point in pretending that thoughts about poetry are not a vital part of Accidental Gardens<\/em>. It\u2019s worth noting as well that Carney\u2019s views aren\u2019t sentimental, either on poetry or on nature. Neither is the stuff of greeting cards or late-night TV meditations. Carney shares with the original Romantics an awareness of sublime nature, red in tooth and claw, and admits to having watched some of his subjects hunt each other. And he writes about what he sees. In “Commonplace Beasts and Where to Find Them,” he lists the locations where he encounters alien creatures \u2014 he\u2019s wants us to remember that all non-humans, even our pets, are separate entities with their own habitats and their own ways of filling their niches \u2014 which include his front yard, his living room floor, the local ballpark, tonight and tomorrow, and the TV news. About that one, he says this: “Even without the sound on, you can tell the politicos are lying. Impossible to look that smug without lying first to themselves.”<\/h4>\n

Carney is angry about the way society takes nature for granted, which has led to global warming, an increase in violent weather, and sharp declines in plant and animal populations. No one should start his book who can\u2019t abide some bad news or righteous indignation about it. From time to time, readers may feel indicted by some of the accusations he levels.<\/h4>\n

As Stormbird Press, an Australian publisher with a focus on ecology, was about to release Accidental Gardens<\/em>, much of eastern Australia was devastated by massive wildfires that destroyed millions of acres of forest and killed perhaps a billion wild animals, including kangaroos and koala bears, the horrific deaths of which humans find particularly distressing . A minor footnote was the destruction of Stormbird Press, along with the town where it was located. The alliance between the author and the publisher, if not inevitable, was certainly predictable; both are devoted to the celebration of Nature and the struggle to preserve what is left of the natural world. The fires, while also not inevitable, were equally predictable: part of a future that increasingly features a sixth great extinction. So delayed, but not prevented, what turns out to be a uniquely structured book expressing a unique and distinctive personality, one characterized by a complex combination of lust for life\u2019s pleasures and anger about the way things are going, has eventually arrived.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Accidental Gardens<\/em>
\nRob Carney
\nStormbird Press
\n2021
\n206 pp<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In addition to chapbooks and incidental publications, poet and Utah Valley University professor Rob Carney has published three volumes of poetry. His fourth and latest book, however, comprises 42 innovative prose chronicles, each suitable for dipping into to nourish and kick-start the imagination. Because the form of expository […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":63725,"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":[2751],"class_list":["post-63724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-rob-carney"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/accidental-gardens.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 02:50:42","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\/63724","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\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63724"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70664,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63724\/revisions\/70664"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}