La cabaña de Thomas Rain Crowe, el lugar del poeta

Thomas Rain Crowe, 2005

(...)" Growing up in the wild and relatively unpopulated mountains of western North Carolina, the first scent of honeysuckle in the late summer was one of my favorite things in life."

(...) For two years, readers of the Smoky Mountian News have followed monthly installments of Zoro’s Field, a book by Jackson County resident Thomas Crowe about his solo back-to-the-land mission, a calling he carried out in the late 1970s in a small cabin in the woods of Polk County. (...)

(...) "But we need people to go back and plant the seed of the bioregional movement in the places where they are actually from. There was this opportunity to live in a cabin back in Western North Carolina, and I just went back to North Carolina to check it out. In the process of checking it out, I just stayed.” (Life before Zoro’s Field. From Graham County to San Francisco and beyond. By Becky Johnson)

Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published writer and the author of twelve books of original and translated works. He was a founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians, which Gary Snyder called the best bioregional publication in the U.S. His memoir Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, written in the style of Thoreau's Walden and based on four years of self-sufficient living in a wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982, won the 2005 Ragan Old North State Award for the best book of nonfiction by a North Carolina writer, as well as the Southern Environmental Law Center's Philip Reed Book of the Year Award for environmental writing. It was also a finalist in the Independent Publishers Book Awards for Regional Non-Fiction.

Mr. Crowe lives along the Tuckasegee River in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. He writes features, editorials, and columns on culture, community, and the environment for the Smoky Mountain News. As an activist, he has been involved since 1979 with such issues and organizations as The Canary Coalition (Clean Air), AMUSE (Artists and Musicians United for a Safe Environment), and the Project to Protect Native American Sacred Sites in the S. Appalachians. He has been on the board of the Southern Biodiversity Project and the Environmental Leadership Council for western North Carolina. Duke University's special collections library recently bought his literary archive.

THOMAS RAIN CROWE Tuckaseegee, NC was born in 1949 and is a poet, translator, editor, publisher, recording artist and author of twelve books of original and translated works. During the 1970s he lived abroad in France, then returned to the U.S. to become editor of Beatitude magazine and press in San Francisco and one of the "Baby Beats" and where he was co-founder and Director of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival. In the 1980s, after returning to his boyhood home in North Carolina, he was a founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians and founded New Native Press. In 1994 he founded Fern Hill Records (a recording label devoted exclusively to the collaboration of poetry and music). Almost immediately, he formed his spoken-word and music band The Boatrockers--who have performed widely in the Southeast and produced two CDs. In 1998 his books The Laugharne Poems (which was written at the Dylan Thomas Boat House in Laugharne, Wales during the summers of 1993 and 1995 with the permission of the Welsh government) was published in Wales by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.In the same year, his ground-breaking anthology of contemporary Celtic language poets Writing The Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (The New Celtic Poetry) that includes poetry in Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Cornish and Manx was published in the U.S., and his first volume of translations of the poems of the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz, In Wineseller’s Street, was released. As a translator he has translated the work of Yvan Goll, Guillevic, Hughes-Alain Dal, Marc Ichall and Hafiz. In 2002 a second volume of his translations of Hafiz (Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved: 100 Poems of Hafiz) was published by Shambhala. For six years he was Editor-at-Large for the Asheville Poetry Review. His memoir in the style of Thoreau’s Walden based on four years of self-sufficient living in a wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982 (Zoro’s Field) will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the spring of 2005. He currently resides in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, where he writes features and columns on culture, community and the environment for the Smoky Mountain News. His literary archives have been purchased by and are collected at the Duke University Special Collections Library in Durham, North Carolina.

Interview with

Thomas Rain Crowe
from Nantahala Review, 2004

A Pond in the Woods

There are answers in the ponds at night.

Like the silence of fish.

How many wheels are turning in these woods?

Little lives

unseen in the dark

as I walk alone by the lantern-light presence of moon.

For those who don't die,

their lives are like the time that is locked up in rocks.

Stones thrown sleeping into

the bottom of the pond

where bream bed and are born

to the water in flight.

This night

like remembered moonlight

reflected in the eyes of owls.

The Saw-Mill Shack

I have come to this land, 

how many years. 

Alone, and for many months, 

I have built this saw-mill shack. 

Stone stacked and mortared on stone, 

logs laid and joyned in joints, 

rough oak boards nailed to beams and rafters 

with 9” spikes. 

Eat lunch each day listening to 

rushing stream running over rocks, 

through rhododendron, off Doubletop Mountain. 

Sound of grouse wings drumming in the woods -- 

With roof on, windows in, 

and woodstove sitting in the hearth, 

I stand outside gazing at what 

these hands have done. 

An old chimney, still standing and covered in vines, 

now a place to live. 

Tired from labor and a body 

too old for work. 

Lay another flat, smooth stone into the outyard wall.

John’s Creek. Spring, 2001

I've always been fascinated by firsts. Who was it that did what, first. The first person to break the four minute mile. The first person to climb Everest. The first to break the sound barrier. The first to sail around the world. The first to fly. The first to discover DNA. The first poet to write in free verse. The first woman in space. The first man on the moon...(Firsts. Thomas Rain Crowe )

The essays of Thomas Rain Crowe combine with the stirring illustrations of Robert Johnson to produce a prophetic vision of the world in which we live--a vision of what we have and what we stand to loose through our careless disregard for the Earth and its finite resources. 

A kind of activist’s handbook, this is one man’s attempts at saving his homeland  from mindless hedonism, outside invasion, and outright denial--writing as if there might be enough universal truth to be of some use to others experiencing similar incursions in their own locales.

There are many Thomas Rain Crowes--Baby Beatnik, Sufi mystic, Celtic anthologist, bio-regionalist--that's what makes him so much fun. Crowe, the nature writer, achieved a great publishing success in 2005 with Zoro's Field, his Thoreau-like account of living simply off the land in Polk County. The End of Eden brings together essays that serve as a musing prologue to either Eden or environmental Armageddon; and then gains bite when Crowe discovers that his idyllic existence in Jackson County is threatened by development. "When I moved here in 1993, I truly felt that this place would sustain me in these kinds of ways for the rest of my life." Since the day he spotted a Florida company's surveyors working at the edge of his property, Crowe started talking with activists and experts, "trying to get a realistic picture of exactly what has been happening to Jackson County during my long idealistic sleep." Smart Growth, a pro-beauty media campaign, farmland preservation, conservation purchases, and the local food movement become Crowe's focuses for the remainder of his book.

-----Rob Neufeld, The Asheville Citizen-Times, The Read on WNC

From the Book ---

It's the end of October and I’ve still got tomatoes on the vine. Native, June-blooming rhododendrons are flowering again. Hummingbirds are still here and coming to the feeders. Walnuts hanging from the leafless walnut trees like Christmas tree ornaments, not able to drop. Yellow-jackets still coming and going actively to their underground nests. Raccoons still coming into the corn patch thinking that August must have come ‘round again and that there is corn. Following the wettest summer on record, we’re in the midst of a draught. Here in Tuckasegee, it’s only rained twice in the last two months. I’m having to hand-water the heather, just to keep them alive. With my woodpile ready for the winter, I’ve not even thought about starting a fire. Strange days.

For more about Thomas Rain Crowe:

http://www.newnativepress.com/

http://enews.lmc.edu/?p=546

http://www.mainstreetrag.com/TRCrowe.html

http://www.oysterboyreview.org/archived/06/crowe.html

http://www.ncarts.org/freeform_scrn_template.cfm?ffscrn_id=239