Landward
with Catherine Young
Thursdays around 8:25AM
Catherine Young is a performing artist and writer whose life is devoted to protecting water. Trained in fluvial geomorphology, Catherine worked as a national park ranger, naturalist, educator, farmer, and mother before completing her MFA in creative writing in British Columbia. Her prose and poetry has been nominated for Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays and is published internationally and nationally, including in the anthologies The Driftless Reader and Contours. She is the author of the memoir of place, Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal (Torrey House Press)and the ecopoetry collection Geosmin (Water’s Edge Press, Midwest Book Awards Silver Medal).
Rooted in farm life, Catherine lives with her family in Wisconsin’s Driftless bioregion. Her podcasts and writings can be found at: www.catherineyoungwriter.com/
ELOQUENCE ENGRAVED IN STONE April 7, 2022
ELOQUENCE ENGRAVED IN STONE by Catherine Young, from her poetry collection Geosmin uses an epigraph from Tony Hoagland’s poetry to describe Driftless Region geology.
SHEPHERD OF TREES March 31, 2022
SHEPHERD OF TREES by Catherine Young is from her poetry collection Geosmin.
A caretaker asks trees what they need.
PANORAMIC March 24, 2022
Panoramic by Catherine Young is from her poetry collection Geosmin. Itdescribes a lifetime as a landscape.
COMPOST & REVOLUTION March 17, 2022
COMPOST and REVOLUTION by Catherine Young are are two views of the cycle of life on a farm from her poetry collection Geosmin.
VOLUTE March 10, 2022
VOLUTE by Catherine Young is from her poetry collection Geosmin.
In VOLUTE, a fossil tells people how everything in the world curls – whether we can see it or not.
WOMEN TENDING MARCH 3, 2022
WOMEN TENDING by Catherine Young from her poetry collection Geosmin.
WOMEN TENDING moves through time and is told in 3 voices:
From women tending house and home; the women making bricks & pottery for home; the women who make art —those women who tend towards what calls us to create.
The poem celebrates the gifts women have given to the world throughout history in March– Women’s History Month.
AUBADE FOR THE NEVER-ENDING FLOW OF MILK February 24, 2022
AUBADE FOR THE NEVER-ENDING FLOW OF MILK by Catherine Young from her poetry collection Geosmin.
An aubade is a poem that is written for dawn, a poem that greets the morning, lamenting the end of night when lovers must part. On a farm, aubade can take quite a different meaning after a long night tending the birth of livestock and readying for the day.
IN FEBRUARY IT BEGINS & MAPLE SYRUPING February 17, 2022
IN FEBRUARY IT BEGINS and MAPLE SYRUPING by Catherine Young are from her poetry collection Geosmin.
2 poems for the spring season of change and the sweetness we crave
LICHEN & LATE WINTER February 10, 2022
LICHEN and LATE WINTER by Catherine Young are from her poetry collection Geosmin.
LICHEN decorates the bark like a living gift wrapping, one that’s hard to put in the woodstove.
LATE WINTER in Wisconsin is the difficult time of freeze and thaw; an anxious dance. We want the melt, but not all at once!
GEOSMIN February 3, 2022
Geosmin by Catherine Young is the title poem from her poetry collection Geosmin.
Geosmin is an ode to the scent of soil.
JANUARY BRINK January 27, 2022
JANUARY BRINK by Catherine Young is from her poetry collection Geosmin.
There are people who love summer as a time of gathering outdoors, but some love snowy winter even more. January is clean and spare, and the snow and ice catches the most beautiful light. January is an edge; a brink.
MAPPING THE EMPTY LOT January 20, 2022
MAPPING THE EMPTY LOT by Catherine Young is from her poetry collection Geosmin.
The narrator in this poem visits a childhood house after many years and finds it a gap in the city block where it had stood.
STONE CIRCLE January 13, 2022
STONE CIRCLE by Catherine Young from her poetry collection Geosmin.
From the perspective of geologic time, stone is always in motion. Glass is a slow liquid that pools at the bottoms of cathedral windows. Stone Circle was inspired by a lively and colorful painting of Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria U.K. where time becomes relative.
MINUS FORTY January 6, 2022
Catherine reads MINUS FORTY from her poetry collection Geosmin.
In the deep cold weather there is a garden of growing things made of ice.
CHICKADEES & SYLVAN December 30, 2021
Catherine reads 2 poems of season: CHICKADEES by Minnesota Poet Laureate, Joyce Sutphen, from her collection Carrying Water to the Field
and
SYLVAN (L’HOMME VERT) from poet, Donna Carnes, portraying each of the four seasons through the eyes of a tree in the imagist style.
A PARALLELOGRAM December 23, 2021
A PARALLELOGRAM by Catherine Young is from her poetry collection Geosmin.
A PARALLELOGRAM is based on the photo “Met” of a many-storied, many-paned atrium with reflections and echoes of parallelograms through which could be seen snow-covered trees. The poem is an ekphrastic response to imaginary divisions of latitude and longitude lines as all lines are imaginary.
LOST AT SEA & AT A LOSS December 16, 2021
LOST AT SEA and AT A LOSS by Catherine Young are from her poetry collection Geosmin.
LOST AT SEA considers how coal has given us light, heat, electricity, clothing, medicines—but it is fossil fuel, sunshine stored in carbon, and it has been the major contributor to climate change—which in turn leads to glacial melt and sea level rise.
AT A LOSS refers to “at a loss for words” for the amazement of the living land here in Southwest Wisconsin and concern for what we could lose. The word Migizi – at the end of the poem is the Anishinaabemowin word for bald eagle. Migizi flies at dawn to see if humans remember to greet the day so that the world may continue. And canon refers to a song round that wraps round and round.
IN DARK TIMES WE GATHER LIGHT December 9, 2021
IN DARK TIMES WE GATHER LIGHT by Catherine Young is from her poetry collection Geosmin.
The poem is a hybrid prose poem about bees and nuns, darkness and light, and the ceremonial procession of St. Lucia Day, December 13th as well as spring’s promise of renewal.
LIGHTING THE MENORAH December 2, 2021
LIGHTING THE MENORAH by Catherine Young was published in Cricket Magazine.
As the sun sets across the world, people light up the darkness. In each hour, the menorah candles are lit, prayers are sung, and candlelight steadily progresses in homes across the planet as the sun leaves them behind. LIGHTING THE MENORAH honors Hanukkah, one of many celebrations of creating light in the darkness.
IN THE ANTIQUE MALL & ART GOES UNBIDDEN November 25, 2021
IN THE ANTIQUE MALL and ART GOES UNBIDDEN by Catherine Young from her poetry collection Geosmin.
Perhaps you’ve have the experience of walking into an antique store to find objects and tools that you’ve grown up with are now antiques. That’s where IN THE ANTIQUE MALL started.
The second poem, ART GOES UNBIDDEN is an observation from my rural neighborhood in Southwest Wisconsin where, it is said, we harbor creative, eccentric people.
Smoke, Part II November 18, 2021
The essay “Smoke” by Catherine Young is reaction to and experience of the wildfire ash that began to cover our Midwestern skies in the fall of 2020 against the background of having grown up in the smoke of the largest coal mining valley in the world.
Smoke, Part I November 11, 2021
The essay “Smoke” by Catherine Young is reaction to and experience of the wildfire ash that began to cover our Midwestern skies in the fall of 2020 against the background of having grown up in the smoke of the largest coal mining valley in the world.
FARMER / JANUS & BARN ELEGIAC November 4, 2021
Catherine Young reads 2 poems from her poetry collection Geosmin that address the loss of farming in Wisconsin’s Driftless Region. The Janus in FARMER / JANUS refers to the two-faced Roman god of beginnings, doorways, passages and endings. The farmer looking forward and back while letting go. BARN ELEGIAC focuses on the empty barn and all it once held.
GATHERING ACORNS, HOARDING WORDS October 28, 2021
Catherine reads GATHERING ACORNS, HOARDING WORDS from her poetry collection Geosmin.
In his piece, “The Word Hoard” British writer-naturalist Robert MacFarlane noted the proposed removal of words about the natural world in the children’s Oxford Dictionary—and this led to an outcry across the English-speaking world. GATHERING ACORNS, HOARDING WORDS asks if children do not know the words describing land, how will they know land?
AND NOW IT’S OCTOBER & THE VAST HOUR October 21, 2021
Catherine reads 2 poems to celebrate October: Barbara Crooker’s AND NOW IT’S OCTOBER and Genevieve Taggart’s THE VAST HOUR.