What follows is a slightly edited version of my keynote address for the Tulsa Lit-Fest, April 2026.
I begin with M. Scott Momaday:
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon
the remembered earth …. He ought to give himself up
to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from
as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.
He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at
every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.
He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest
motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon
and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth.
It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which
we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race
is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as
deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones.
But many may never have had this experience to draw upon—may not have a sacred landscape—and for too many of us, this memory has been and often is interrupted. Certainly, this was true for Momaday’s ancestors on the western plains. Certainly, it was true for Black Americans coming to the “Territory” seeking a new life after Emancipation.
And in our contemporary experience, the news assaults our psyches. We are bombarded with:
War in Iran
White Christian Nationalism
The Epstein Files
ICE in the streets
Identity and race issues under attack
Inflation and tariffs
Supreme court rulings
AI pronouncements
And here we are, with all this chaos circling us, trying to talk about the environment—specifically, writing and the environment. This seems almost irrelevant at times, given all the other frustrating news that dominates our headlines. And yet here we are.
Like the foundation of a building, the environment supports all our goings and comings, all our politicking, all our familial life, every aspect of culture, of human existence, obviously rests on the foundation of a healthy environment—and yet we ignore it, remain ignorant of it, live in denial of challenges and issues facing it—we take it for granted.
So, tonight, I am thankful that you are here, joining me, to consider ourselves in relation to our environment. I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect on my own writing life as it intersects with environmental concerns and ecological values.
Maybe first of all, as writers, our job is to remind us of our truest selves. To help us belong, to fortify each other—as writers and readers—in our efforts to maintain our truest self. Maybe our job is not to let ourselves and our fellow citizens forget that we are part of Nature, participants in cycles that predate us, and that will outlast us. That each of us: gay and straight, urban and rural, conservative or liberal (if those terms mean anything anymore), and all of our racial and ethnical heritage and contemporary selves—all—share a planet with limited resources.
It seems to me that today the poet must play the role of prophet. We must move beyond art for art’s sake, and even beyond self-expression, to create art for the sake of cultural sanity and ecological survival. Our task involves both forecasting the potential outcomes of our destructive patterns, as well as closely analyzing the realities of our contemporary world in this present moment—how we might live. How we are sustained. The essential reality is that we cannot escape the fact that our humanness is concomitantly linked to the ecosystems that house us.
As Aldo Leopold lamented nearly 80 years ago, you’d think conservatives and conservation might have some overlap, but alas. If we dare speak about the conservation of our Natural resources, we are dismissed, insulted, and branded as a radical environmentalist, as if hugging a tree is somehow a problem, somehow a weakness.
However, I think, deep down, we all know that the issues that comprise environmental writing will not go away. Like returning dandelions. Like twisted, stubborn black jacks on a dusty prairie, some matters endure, and they require our attention, unless we want to join Elon Musk on his toy spaceship and live on Mars. No thank you!
We are here this evening, gathered under the banner of “Wild World, Wild Words” and this title reminds me of Thoreau’s dictum: “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
But despite the essential fact of wilderness in our lives, we fear wildness. We try to ignore it, or we pretend it is something other than what it is—as if it is something that can be artificially simulated, as if it is something optional, substitutable—rather than essential. Maybe it is the poet’s job to remind us of the wildness within, even as we paint the wilderness that colors the globe we call home.
Since Leopold’s seminal book, A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, in which he thoughtfully and even heroically articulated an ethic about “Wilderness” among other ideas—since then, a proliferation of American writing about Nature has occurred. Everyone from Rachel Carson, to Gary Snyder, to Wendell Berry, to Barry Lopez, to Annie Dillard, to Terry Tempest Williams to name just a very few, that great tree of the American book market has been covered with thousands of leaves, all appreciating, loving, informing, advocating, warning about the environment.
And so, we are left with an uneasy question: What good does writing about the environment do? Can poetry change the perception of a consumer-laden populace?
In this somewhat distracted context, I’d like to offer a few of my own poems to suggest how landscape and wildness informs my own sense of self. I start with the poem “Cimarron” which translates to “Wildness.”
A wildness that will not fade
calls in the crimson twilight.
Our tangled roots of dirt and desire and denial
are embedded in cyclical rhythms
linked to the full moon shining
over Cherokee County, pulling
the Cimarron River along
to the Arkansas, filtering sand from clay,
leaving the heron a feast,
the mallard a respite.
Survivors know these rhythms –
these voices calling out in wild red darkness.
A bit about me: my family migrated from Hungary in the 1890s to the prairies and gypsum hills of northwest Oklahoma. My father, tired of the tractor, became a minister and was transplanted to the Ozarks to pastor a small country church. So I grew up with two homes, two identities. Though the landscapes of these two places are very different on the surface, in my imagination and in my experience both places offered Wildness—uncountable numbers of stars on a dark night in west Oklahoma, an endless landscape of prairie grass, filled with flycatchers and quail among bluestem, sage and the acrid smell of forever.
This home was parallel to my living in the Ozark mountains, saturated with dogwood, walnut and oak—the sacred Buffalo River—and a landscape marked by the honeycomb terrain from which we drank our spring water. (for 16 years I drank from a spring, which is one plausible reason why I’m so damn good looking).
On a more serious note, in both contexts, the people were close to the land, inseparable from it, really. Our days were marked by the movements of the seasons. We understood the wildlife, the fauna and flora. We celebrated the great variety of songbirds, even as we heard the owls at night, the geese in predawn, the wind—all the more remarkable when evening stillness fell. And we knew we belonged. I was raised poor, but I was raised as a child of landscape. And I have never outgrown that, even in my travels or when I’ve had my tenures in Dallas-Fort Worth and other urban places.
So my first poetry combined my attempts to make sense of pain and dysfunction, poverty and bad religion, all within the context of landscapes that informed, inspired and instructed.
And to my surprise, some people tended to like my poems (some of them anyway), and I was labeled a “Nature Poet”—and that felt odd. Because, I wanted not to be merely sentimental (since Nature can be so very harsh), but also because the label “Nature Poet’ suggested mere representation, something pretty but lacking in artistic quality. And I wanted to be a real artist. People would approach me and tell me how they liked a particular poem, say about a river or a place that reminded them of their grandma’s homestead, but something was missing. As someone seriously concerned with environmental issues, I am often troubled even as I welcome the appreciation. Don’t they understand, I would think to myself, that the lyric or the aesthetic of the poem has a subtext—we have to protect the river. We cannot blacktop and overwhelm the prairie homesteads with high-def lights, invasive grass, urban sprawl, fracking, and all things at war with Nature.
So how to be a “Nature Poet” but also a prophet about environmental concerns, concerned me. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know if it could be done.
Sometime after grad school, I adopted the term Literary Ecologist for myself, as one who sees the world from an interdependent relationship, a de-centering of human economies and man-made tragedies. I learned to read texts not only from an anthropomorphic point of view. And that offered insight and some solace. It defined me, and it sustains me.
But still I wonder: Can poetry effect the change I want? Can it protect the hardwoods, keep the streams flowing clean, keep oil leaks out of the Gulf?
Like many poets, when I first started writing poetry, I was way too expository, too preachy. I felt the need to explain every part of the written text, and the implied subtexts. But the artistic value of the poem suffered. After all, if you have to explain a poem, perhaps you didn’t write it well enough. Maybe it still needs winnowing. That was, and is, my challenge. I want everyone to be honest, committed stewards of our ecosystems. And I’m thinking I’d rather belong to a society that practices sound ecology, than for me to be a successful poet.
But of course, I want both, and so I keep trying.
Some have suggested that poetry is its own unique discourse, and so, perhaps subconsciously, or surreptitiously, the care for the environment is communicated within and throughout the actual discourse of the poetic form. In other words, the images, the structure, the white space, the layered language, all of it combined, speaks to the heart of audience members who hear it, and are moved to think about the poem’s deeper reality, to ingest its truth. I’d like to believe that, but still I worry. After all, if Wendell Berry or Robinson Jeffers or Gary Snyder didn’t forever change the American populace, how could I?
What does writing accomplish? In particular, what does poetry do for a planet gasping for relief?
Let me illustrate this a bit from one of my early poems:
“Blue River”
She calls me to secluded pools
along quiet shores
beneath canopies of White Oak
and Red Cedar.
My pace slows –
thoughts diminish,
sounds hush
in this cloistered place.
I sit in shadows smoking
a soft cigar,
the full moon peaking
above the ridge.
Beyond the dense timber,
purling water
and tree frogs abide
a humble campfire.
I have no need tonight
for noise,
no desire
for that other life.
Only primal sound matters,
these ancient rituals
merging fire and water,
earth and sky.
For me, the nexus of the poem—speaker and place—moves toward the phrase “that other life”—that is, the existence that attempts to tame wildness, that “other life” which contrasts to the “Blue River” experience which is “primal”—marked by “ancient rituals / merging fire and water, / earth and sky.” In other words, something essential to restore the calm wildness to the soul.
I have titled my presentation: “Writing Like There’s No Tomorrow” for a couple of reasons. For one thing, sometimes it seems there really may be no tomorrow, and in this world, the imminent crises of war and a disregard for the Constitution may relegate environmental concerns to the back burner. But the tragic irony, of course, is that we will in fact run out of tomorrows if we don’t take care of the environment, along with all these other challenges we face.
In this current time of anxiety, I think coming together is so important—our literary festivals with feature authors as well as more informal, intimate settings with friends and neighbors reading to each other on the back porch. More than ever, I think we need to come together, to recognize, to belong to the community of devoted souls, to humans trying to be fully human, refusing despair and plastic consumerism. In addition to our ranting rage at the political atrocities, we must, for the sake of our souls, our wild souls, we must also pay homage to the Natural orders that precede us, that will shape us, and govern us, if we are willing to be aware.
What good is a poem when the world is on fire? Well, I can’t think of a better way to sustain ourselves, even, if necessary, to eulogize ourselves. Maybe we can learn something from the Mayfly.
“Confluence”
Maybe what I love most
about rivers is how
they bend together
toward some mystic
whole we imagine.
Confluence is a lovely
word, a word that implies
sharing, getting along,
making new space
from disparate parts.
No atom, no action exists
alone: water joins
water joins tree and
plant, sand and soil,
grass and flower.
Even the Mayfly
that emerges, but for
a desolate moment
only to die, plays its
part to perfection.
When we commit to the rhythms of Nature, we find ourselves moving toward harmony within ourselves. The meditative quality of the life and death of Nature provokes our own sense of destiny, however humble, and inspires a truer sense of self that cannot be so easily bought and sold.
“Nearly Angels”
We are nearly angels –
I’ve been told.
We should dominate
the earth, then –
I have heard.
But other voices
whispering
in night-breezes say
we are part
of an unimaginable whole –
grains of sand,
drops in a river,
stars in countless galaxies –
say only fools
wish to trade places
with angels.
I’m thinking of William Stafford who emphasizes silence, waiting, and receptivity. And the courage to fail. He writes “for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream.”
What comes to us may be material for art, but it can be unsettling. Trying to keep balance, trying to stay in tune with the song of the universe, reminds us of our transient reality. This is something I struggle with. I talk rather easily about transience—our lives flowing like wind and water, but in truth, I struggle with change, and if you are like me, you find interruptions a real pain in the pocket.
Here are two early poems speaking of transience:
“River Song”
Motion helps us
understand –
helps us cope.
It is right to move
downstream
to avoid stasis
to resist delusions
of permanence,
the futility
of holding on.
To feel the flowing
around me,
through me
is life.
To be one
with the current –
this much
is real.
And a similar theme with another elemental force:
“Wind Song”
Tell me secrets
in the night-sky;
whisper lines
the ancients knew.
Night voices sing
hope, fire
imagination,
kindle souls
Into red-flame
that destroys
but purges,
re-seeds –
Creating –
these Saturnian voices
singing
of transience.
I believe most people, when they first begin to write poetry, understandably tend to rely on two almost predictable topics: either some place or object in Nature to be represented, or their personal identity to understand, value, and defend.
I would like to merge those necessary impulses, and locate them into what I call the “Natural Self”—in which I am suggesting that becoming Natural with ourselves is a primary goal of art, defining ourselves within the contours of the cosmos. Who am I really? Am I only a fragmented being? Am I destined to be a stranger in exile on my planet, in my community, in my family? Am I divided into gender, hobbies, education, religion, class and race?
Am I simply a consumer? A user? A hoarder? Am I a use-it-up-and-move-on type—oblivious to the effect of my presence on the planet? Am I an imposter?
Or can a fragmented self—with those broken pieces—can they coalesce—like gravel of various shapes and sizes and densities into a streambed through which our writing, our poetry is clarified as it is transported? And in that transportation, a transformation may occur. We become more than an observer and more than a bland commentator. A Natural Self moves with the integrity of a river. The turns, the ironies, the dry seasons and flood stage, none of this devalues a river.
What we are calling for is embodiment, for reincarnation of self and soil. Barry Lopez refers to two “landscapes,” one outside the self, the other within.” In his chapter titled “Landscape and Narrative” he explains the connection of story and our Natural self: “A story draws on relationships in the exterior landscape and projects them onto the interior landscape. The purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between the two landscapes, to use all the elements of story—syntax, mood, figures of speech—in a harmonious way to reproduce the harmony of the land in the individual’s interior. Inherent in story is the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of those relationships we call ‘the land.’”
If I may substitute poetry for story, I believe what he claims for narrative is equally true of verse. The relationship between the land and the inner self is the beginning and perhaps the end of art.
So I want to be a Natural self, which is to say, I want my true sense of self, with its identities, its heritage, its anxiety, its temperament, all of that, to be merging, transforming, making myself comfortable with myself, fit to dwell on planet Earth, as steward and benefactor.
The phrase “Writing Like There’s No Tomorrow” may remind us of McKibben’s essay, “The End of Nature” in which the daily routine is forever altered, and the possibility of cataclysmic disaster now foreseeable.
But another aspect of this title involves the existential moment—that is, tomorrow does not yet exist. There is only Now, which ironically may help us redeem the past, and without which, no future is possible.
Becoming a Natural self will not magically end the problems of our society and our world. We are the creature that fouls its own nest, and I’m not foolish enough to believe we’ll make a garden of Earth. Really, the notion of a grand garden is part of the problem. We are afraid of wilderness. We want cultivation because we want control. We want to dominate, to satisfy our indulgence, when wildness requires cooperation, submission.
Becoming a Natural self grounds us in wildness, plants us in fertile soil that redefines the present moment, that helps us navigate the waste and destruction others overlook, if not sadistically enjoy.
The Natural self knows how to die. We follow our ancestors, and our writing predecessors in the Romantic movement, and we join the modern Naturalist and the contemporary blend of all things ecological in the patient return of ancestral death—and, thus, live a life made meaningful by what it sheds—shedding a skin of vile greed and polite but violent consumerism—replacing it with a vulnerable but vital energy, without which, we might as well go board a rocket bound for Mars.
You notice I have twice referenced the planet Mars, because, for some reason, this lifeless planet holds some weird fascination with Americans (maybe it has something to do with war?). Once I was asked to contribute to an anthology of surreal and magical realism poetry, so I created a series of four poems, each located on Mars. Each of the poems represented a stage of human life. Of course, I used the Mars context symbolically, as an ironic foil to suggest how life on Earth could be, ought to be. So with a bit of trepidation, I’d like to read now the culminating poem of that series:
“Dying on Mars”
I never left. I thought I would, planned
to go more than once, but things kept me here.
I became fixated with red glow.
At the end of your days, your mind
looks backward but finds little to hold.
The empty bucket has betrayed
me. It can never be filled if the holes
cannot be patched. So, here I remained.
Made the best of it – enjoyed myself
fishing, watching birds, and making love.
What else would one want? My only
complaint – everything I see now
everything I have seen for years
is red. I know only red: fish, birds,
even my beloved lies red
before me in the rocky surface.
I made a home, red in these strange
hills, where I hope, at last, someone
will dig a good grave for me,
and erect a white cross,
unstained, for a time, by red.
Poetry offers a way for us to enter our sensory lives, to find a true inner spring, the beauty of which, never idealized, nonetheless serves as an act of defiance. Imagine someone reading Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” to Congress. They wouldn’t get it. But we would. And we do.
“Wild Geese”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Yes, read it to them. They won’t get it. Be we would. And we do!
Image Credit: Thomas Cole, “Storm King on the Hudson”
