David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

A Trail Poet's Manifesto

As poet-in-residence for the New England Trail I will use poetry to amplify awareness and expand general understanding of this 215 mile footpath while enriching the experiences of hikers.  I seek to use the written and spoken word to assist all who encounter the trail to get the most out of every moment whether they are through travelers, on a short jaunt for a view or exercise, or enjoy just reading about this unique pathway that travels on ridges and mountain peaks,  through valleys and villages, along wetlands and across streams, past agricultural lands and into large forests.

Poetry can enhance appreciation of the trail by capturing the landscape and experience of hiking in words that memorably resonate with people.  This includes not only seeing common sights in new ways, but expressing the full range of senses from the smell of a fern glade to the feel of traprock to the taste of a sassafras leaf.  Poetry can take what is invisible and render it visible in the mind’s eye by bringing to the fore legends, cultural history, natural processes, and a sense of change and continuity over time.  Through poetry, the trail community will learn to see in four dimensions—in time as well as space.  Poetry can also evoke the feeling of being on the trail— sweat, wind, cold, heat, muscle aches, unexpected joy.

As poet-in-residence I will probe the very idea of “trailness,” that notion of connectivity so important in human affairs and of which a continuous footpath is the physical embodiment.  I intend to highlight the many confluences of nature and culture along the way from places painted by great artists to old cellar holes to plane crash sites and colonial roads once traveled by George Washington and Revolutionary War soldiers.  I want to emphasize that the trail is a cultural artifact laid over natural phenomena.  Poetry will not only enable trail users to see anew, or with greater mindfulness, it will promote transfigured vision by injecting awe and wonder into ordinary experience.

Great philosophers and poets from Aristotle to Wordsworth to Thoreau and beyond were peripatetic thinkers, people whose bodies and brains were in conversation.  Hiking may be a kind of poetry in motion.  We can connect the legs to the heart and mind with poetry.

David K. Leff, October 31, 2016

About the New England Trail
The New England National Scenic Trail is one of eleven national scenic hiking trails, of which the Appalachian Trail was first.  It was established by an act of Congress and came into being in 2009, and is largely composed of the historic Mattabesett, and Metacomet, and Monadnock trail systems.  It runs through 41 towns from Long Island Sound at Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border.  The trail is a unit of the National Park Service and maintained by the volunteers of the Connecticut Forest and Park Association and Appalachian Mountain Club.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/about-trail

Take a Hike on Radio! Poet-in-Residence

Is there a connection between the New England Trail and Poetry?  Can words enhance hiking and hiking amplify words?  Listen to my October 27, 2016 conversation with River Valley Rhythms host Stephan Allison on WESU in Middletown, Connecticut at 88.1 FM and find out.  We talk about this footpath in the woods and my recent appointment as New England Trail poet-in-residence, the first such designation in the country.  Make the journey one thought and one footstep at a time at https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms10-27-2016

The New England National Scenic Trail, like the Appalachian Trail, is a unit of the National Park Service.  Maintained largely by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association and the Appalachian Mountain Club, it's 215 mile journey from Long Island Sound in Guilford Connecticut to the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border.  Join us in discussing upcoming public events and how poetry can enrich the experience of hikers and how the trail can provide inspiration for poets and other artists. Let's connect the legs to the heart and mind with poetry!

 

Canoeing Maine's Legendary Allagash: Thoreau, Romance, and Survival of the Wild

Winner of two Silver Medals

Memoir, Nautilus Book Awards

Regional Nonfiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Homebound Publications | 2016 | 180 pages | ISBN 978-1-938846-33-5

Paperback at $17.95, also in Hardcover, Audio Book in early 2017 | Order Your Copy Today

Meet Henry David Thoreau, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and other intrepid explorers as you travel northern Maine’s  rugged woods and waters.  In a wild country of ledge and trees that stubbornly resists encroaching civilization, find a young couple padding through the trials, triumphs, and sheer mental and physical exhaustion of wilderness travel severely testing their ability to get along and even complete the trip.  Fill your ears with roaring rapids and yodeling loons.  Smell pungent spruce and dank swamps.  Encounter moose and majestic sunrises cloaked in morning mist.  A few pages, and you will find yourself deep in the evergreen forest.

What People Are Saying About This Book

“If you have been on a canoe trip, you know the adventure is the center of a complex venn diagram of relationship, history, and a testing of character and adaptability. David captures this and more in an artful way that will make you dream of hitting the water to commune with nature and your very soul.”

—Walter Opuszynski, Northern Forest Canoe Trail, Trail Director 

“Readers will hang onto the back of David Leff’s roiling canoe in this story. He steers through the early fractures of a relationship amid the beauties and terror of a wilder Allagash, and skillfully adds in details of the explorers and exploiters who floated before him. Refreshingly honest.  A very strong narrative voice!”

—Christine Woodside, Editor-in-Chief, Appalachia

 

Discovering Windmills

Tilting at Windmills
What is it about Windmills that captivates the imagination?  Are we fascinated at harnessing an invisible power?  Do the spinning vanes lull us into a sweet hypnosis?  Are we nostalgic for childhood fairy tales with tulips and wooden shoes?  Is there a connection to a deep past when these machines performed  life-giving tasks like grinding grain and pumping water?  Old agricultural wind pumps near my home in thickly settled Connecticut may suggest a languishing reminder of simpler, more rural times, but the rise of giant pinwheels to spin electric turbines has thrust windmills into contemporary controversy.  Tilting at windmills no longer seems as quixotic as it once did.

Driving a narrow road through a scenic precinct of Fairfield, about fifty miles from New York City, I hit the brakes hard when an eighty-foot-tall octagonal tower sheathed in fishtail shingles came suddenly into view.  Situated at the pavement’s edge in a neighborhood dominated by large, historic homes and sprawling lawns, I got out and let the structure carry my eye upward to a dizzying blue sky dotted with fleecy cumulus clouds.  Although the rotating vanes (or sails in technical lingo) were long gone, a small hand painted sign announced the presence of the Bronson Windmill, built in 1894.  Later I learned that it was erected to supply water to a dairy farm and substantial mansion.  A large water tank was within the tower and a cistern beneath it.  Although windmills were once familiar sights in the area, this was the last one standing in Fairfield.

Save for my frequent mini golfing forays, where cute Dutch style models are a standard feature, I hadn’t given much thought to windmills.  But having seen the Bronson tower, I was suddenly fascinated with these once essential engineering marvels.  Frankly, I was obsessed.

New Names for Old Places

Names and their Places
Roaring over a dam and flashing white among ledges and rocks before winding beyond sight, the Farmington River twists among hills a block from home.   Principal tributary of New England’s Connecticut River, the name “Farmington” suggests the pastoral aspirations of seventeenth century Europeans who settled downstream.  Where I live, the Native American moniker “Wattunkshausepo”—fast flowing and winding river—seems more accurate and evocative.  Unfortunately, the musical Indian name has long faded from memory.  Nevertheless, knowing both names enlivens my understanding.

Whether adorning political entities or natural features, the names of places where we spend time become part of our identities.  Synergies between life, etymology and topography form maps of meaning in our minds and culture.  Doubt the power of names?  The words “Vermont” and “New York” conjure very different images even though they are adjacent states sharing many natural, cultural and historical attributes.  Perhaps Juliet’s Shakespearean rose “by any other name would smell as sweet,” but a name might bias our perception of the rose’s scent or whether we take a sniff at all.

Eagle & Heron: On the Wings of Metaphor

Two birds flew past me—a bald eagle and a great blue heron.  They were awe inspiring, graceful, and heartbreakingly beautiful.  About a mile from home, I was   sitting on a rusting steel I-beam atop the concrete abutment of the lower Collinsville dam on the west side of Connecticut’s Farmington River.  Long abandoned, the structure hasn’t generated a kilowatt in half a century.  I perch here often and lose my thoughts in the sound of the falls and hypnotic rushing water.  Winging by in such a mesmerizing moment, the birds suddenly and strangely transformed into metaphors.  Within my imagination the symbolic became strangely as palpable as the flesh and feathered creatures themselves.