New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

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Poetry: Transition

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Transition

The sand is sifting, time’s moving on,
A tear drops from the Dolphin’s eye,
A flower wilts, a tall tree tumbles,
The weakened Eagle can no longer fly.

Forlorn Elk keep sniffing the earth,
But no green pasture are they able to find,
A flock of Turkeys wander the fields,
But foul fumes and pollutants make them dizzy and blind.

Man pushes buttons to know what to do,
Instructions come forth in their mechanical way,
The voice speaks up clearly and he follows suit,
A cog in the wheel, controlled day after day.

But is this the way it was meant to be,
Sacrificing our souls due to weakness and greed,
Losing our essence, giving up on ourselves,
Become a new form of man, spawned by electronic seed.

Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.

Poetry: Legacy Poem

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Legacy Poem

Someone must think this through,
to ward off our short-sightedness
daily pounding us into the ground
like so many disquieting habits
we recognize in ourselves but
somehow can do so little about —
or so we think, because habituated
inside our non-existent cell block
we carefully crafted for ourselves
mostly out of nothing but thought
forms and knee-jerk reactions, or
what is our legacy to the future?

Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.

Adirondack Non-Winter Poem

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Adirondack Non-Winter Poem

I admit to never having witnessed winter
in the Adirondacks. My major excuses are
how we mid-southerly flatlanders don’t
know how to drive in deep snow—the
drive from our otherwise year-round
Maryland home is a solid 10-hour trip
even in favorable summer conditions.

Not to mention how our four-room cabin
has zero, zip, zilch insulation. And our sole
heat source is a stone fireplace, that might
well supply more unwanted heat to global
warming than to fuel our cabin’s comfort.

Besides which, I have zero levitation skills
and no useful experience on snowshoes,
which, I am told are necessary in winter—
not to mention skis, which have frankly
only ever managed to stir up fright in me,
especially now with my new artificial joints.

Music and Politics in the Early United States

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ben franklins world podcastWhat was music like in Early America? How did different early Americans — Native Americans, African Americans, and White Americans — integrate and use music in their daily lives? This episode of Ben Franklin’s World is the fourth of a 5-episode series about music in Early America.

The exploration continues with music and politics in the early United States. Billy Coleman, an Assistant Teaching Professor of History at the University of Missouri and author of the book Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 (UNC Press, 2020), joins Liz Covart to investigate the role music played in early American politics. [Read more…] about Music and Politics in the Early United States

William Henry Arlt’s Painting ‘Flowers’ Being Conserved

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Flowers, William H. Arlt, 1949The Historical Society of Woodstock‘s goal of conserving works in need of care in its fine art collection received a boost this month when the Historical Society was awarded a grant of $2,750 to conserve an important floral still life on paper by William Henry Arlt (1868-1952).

The grant, from New York State Council on the Arts and the Greater Hudson Heritage Network’s Conservation Grant Program, will be used to conserve the gouache which dates from 1949. [Read more…] about William Henry Arlt’s Painting ‘Flowers’ Being Conserved

Poetry: Self-Portrait in a Placid Beaver Pond

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Self-Portrait in a Placid Beaver Pond

As reflection would have it, the air still,
the pond surface at certain angles like
woodlands opposite. Or at other angles
mirroring sky, and close-on to the angler,
like a woodlands studio reflection caught
of him or her as a portrait-taker might
be headless beneath their black cloth,
the angler at a loss, seeing only through
his or her camera lens, if at all, he or
she being one and the same against
a background of woodlands but not seen
by the camera, now focused far out onto
the grassy pond, more a meadow with
tall vegetation, broad-leaved, almost
up to your waist and a pond no longer,
but stream channel through tall grasses,
the water surface more of the sky, just
now a near-cloudless Adirondack blue.
It is the kind of sky you hope to wake to
back in your cabin, remembering when
all the children were young and could
be rambunctious all day, whether in
or out of the cabin—rain the disrupter
of mature human calm going back, all
the way back, to cave dwellers, no doubt,
despite how caves tend to be few here
and small, this being a function of our
bedrock’s granitic, not erosive, nature,
unlike limestone, say, and made more
vulnerable now by our acidic rains
as erosive agent belched into the skies,
then distributed by winds even far onto
those few now innocent of acidification.
Flat-out, the pond surface’s reflections
distort nothing, short of winds’ rippling
them, or insects’ slight surface stirrings
often stopped dead by a trout’s harvesting
perpetrators of such distortions from below,
one supposes like a vacuum cleaner, if we
could see the actual distorting of air, not
just its effects on whatever nearby may
succumb to its force, difficult to visualize
as the result of the breathing strength
implicit in those trout often caught here,
ten-inchers being trophies in this pond.

Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.

Music in British North America

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ben franklins world podcastWhat was music like in Early America? How did different early Americans — Native Americans, African Americans, and White Americans — integrate and use music in their daily lives? This episode of Ben Franklin’s World is the second of a 5-episode series about music in Early America.

The exploration continues with Anglo-American music in British North America. Liz’s guest is David Hildebrand is a musicologist and an expert on early American music. [Read more…] about Music in British North America