Alan Casline
Will Christman is a farmer poet from my watershed. I've written about him a bit and every year we have a Tribute to him on part of his old farm which has been a long time nature preserve. He corresponded with Walt Whitman and below is a poem he wrote: WALT WHITMAN "Walt Whitman" appeared in The Untillable Hills, published by The Driftwood Press: North Montpelier, Vermont 1937. After Will Christman (1865-1937) died his son Lansing, Fred Lape, and others gathered every June 1st at Christman's land and read poems in his honor. Names of poets on June 1, 1939 (two years after his death) are Lansing Christman, who lived there on the farm; Fred Lape, builder of George Landis Arboretum on land that used to belong to his family and publisher of Trails Magazine; Daniel Smythe of Hanerville, Mass and Duanesberg and Foster W. Bennett of Esperance and South America. These four called "Heiderberg School of Poetry" by Robert P. Tristram Coffin, the Maine nature poet and friend of the group. Coffin wrote the forward to Will Christman's last book The Untillable Hills. Also attending were Raymond Tifit Fuller of Winterton, Sullivan County, identified as "world traveler and author"; William M. Hoag; Rev. William J. Reynolds of Quaker Street; and Carl Vail of Windham. Catherine Bradt, Will Christman's widow and partner, was also there. Some of these folks are known and others "lost in time" (at the moment). By the power of names and associations you can see the roots and branches of these tribute gatherings. Our own gatherings began in 2007, small but each successful, we are now up to year four. What do we find in Will Christman’s poetry? First, a language of local and particular earth. I find thoughtful verse passage and whole poems of keen beauty. He has the sage’s bent as well. Poems of the soil and garden; poems of the woods walk; poems of idle pause by the side of a brook: Fellow nature poets, here is your elder and teacher. As he would have wanted it, Will Christman is inseparable from the hills, fields, and hollows of the place he spent his life. Through friends, correspondence and his books, he reached wider into the world but here was a man with pride of place, with all the good attributes of such a way of life. As his known way of rural life faded, Will Christman saw change roll in with the farmer’s acceptance of the necessity of toil as a path to future reward. He was early to plant trees on land he deemed not suited to the erosion of the plow. He was early to provide for birds and other wild life, realizing their kinship and clever adaptation to a growing landscape of human construction. He saw as well their need for habitat undisturbed — a need he understood as mutual. He found a sacred place and his desire, with his family’s concurrence, was to set the place aside so as to leave an open land of trails for those who came after him. He could not hold just to himself what others could also appreciative and enjoy. - - - The Nature Consevancy provides all year access to The Christman Preserve. For information on the 2010 Tribute, please contact Alan Casline at ACASLINE@AOL.COM Alan Casline is poet, editor, and small press
publisher. He has published a number of collections of poetry and has
written on watershed wisdom, folklife, natural history, sustainability,
and local poetry. Beginning in 1975 in Canton, New York, he edited and
published Rootdrinker, a long standing magazine of watershed poetics,
art, and non-fiction. He has published several volumes of poetry,
including Birdsfoot (1985), Some Late Thursday Night Poems (2007),
Grandfather Carp (2009) and Thirty Poems (2009). He is director of
Rootdrinker Institute, which promotes rediscovery of the inspirations
and creative visions of earlier artists and writers of each unique
watershed. His Benevolent Bird Press has published a number of
collections of poetry by other writers. In addition to Rootdrinker, he
has edited and published Normanskill (2007) a watershed anthology and
the creative folklore anthology The Annals of Perious Frink (2007).
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