ERRATICA

I remembered the sedimentologist Karen Kleinspehn saying to me in these same mountains, “You can’t cope with this in an organized way, because the rocks aren’t organized.”
—John McPhee, Assembling California

1.

There’s a term that’s been circulating in the spheres of poetry I like: geopoetics. I’ve heard it for several years, and have always loved it, despite never fully grasping its meaning. I figure it has to mean something beyond simply “poems about rocks,” but if that’s all it means, well, then I like it even more.

Right now I won’t attempt to track down a geopoetic manifesto to clarify the matter, because I’m at a cabin pleasantly removed from the grid, and I don’t have an internet connection, and anyway it seems like geopoetics and the internet shouldn’t have anything to say about each other. But I do know that a book associated with geopoetics is one called Cascadia, by a poet I deeply admire named Brenda Hillman. I had been keeping an eye out for a copy of this book for a while, and during a West Coast tour in the fall I found one sitting on the shelf in Point Reyes Books.

This copy of Cascadia happened to be used. I don’t mind some wear and tear, and it never hurts my skinny dirtbag-poet wallet to save a few bucks, but I have a hardline rule never to buy books that have writing in the margins; it’s too distracting, and it makes it impossible for me to have my own experience with the work. At first glance I could see that there were ballpoint scribbles in abundance, marginalia popping at random like wildflowers out of the gridded fields of pages. Per my policy I was about to set it back on the shelf, assuming I’d have to continue my search for an unblemished copy of Cascadia elsewhere, but then I happened to read Hillman’s poem “Sad Cookies.” The poem contains the exquisite deadpan line “there is no president of cookies,” next to which the book’s previous owner had drawn an arrow and written, in tall blue lovely cursive,

But there should be!

(Exclamation point included.)

It was like two poems for the price of one. Five dollars later, this copy of Cascadia had found a new home.

2.

Of course I connected quite deeply with the book. Over the intervening winter, I reached out to Brenda Hillman to ask where a few of the poems from Cascadia were written. Each one seemed beholden to a specific geography, a specific geology, and I explained in my breathless fan-boy email to her that I hoped to travel through her Cascadian landscapes, and to scale a few of the rocks I found there, using her poetry as a kind of gestural guidebook. It was a weird request, but she’s a weird poet (that’s a compliment), and I felt optimistic she’d understand.

Reader, she did! In her generous reply, she mentioned among other locales that the boulders near Lake Tahoe were a touchstone (now a geopoetic term) for parts of , including one of my favorite poems from