In the mountains, people swap stories. People will bullshit with you, too. Each time you hear a story, it's bound to be different. You'll find yourself just listening half the time, even if you've heard the story a dozen times over. You just listen. You listen for moments, looking for continuity, deviation, and connection. Your stories become intermingled with others. Some you've heard. Some you invented. Here and everywhere, Thoreau is dead from tuberculosis. His essay, "Walking," remains. In it he claims, "Dead literatures make the richest of soils." Words were dying, dying before him. Long before that, too. Sure as hell, they still are and hallelujah for it. Because if not, we wouldn't get Nathan Hauke's Indian Summer Recycling.
     ISR uses a compositional method defined as compost (COMPOSTion): a practice that is rooted in Hauke's reading of early American texts— think 1850s: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, etc. Individuals who were attentive in relaying the way we document (and fail to do so) elements of nature—organizing, watching the areas fall in place as they're meant to be. Perhaps the most obvious connection with Hauke here is Whitman with his poem, "This Compost." With this, we get a sense of inclusivity paired with a generative re-birth: "The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its grave." Hauke asks in "Like a handsaw with a piece of black rag tied to the handle," the poem that opens Indian Summer Recycling:

How do you write ghost    rusty flowers

Reminiscent of Whitman in Leaves of Grass, the child asks "What is grass?" Poems ensuing questions not as goal-post or end points filled of answers but rather a perpetual onwardness of attention. The three epigraphs or talismans which not only help ground the reader but orient his poetics relative to certain frameworks:

Beauty is / a defiance of authority
—WC Williams, Paterson

The conditions of composition, as of decomposition, are graphic...writing is clutter and debris; trace, husk, scar, sign, particle, element: bodily remains.... The subterranean density of copenetrating language and earth...is nonetheless all surface, a biodegradable strata of attention.
—Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Rasula describes the practice of compost as essential for reconsidering the linearity and boundaries of North American poetry. Despite the traditional notion of the canon being organized, structured, and suited, Rasula describes it as "scattered" and "incomplete" (This Compost). If we believe Rasula's description to be true, we begin to uncover a more generative, "open field" of poetry. We begin to move away from what Rasula calls "archival"—mediated by intuitions, power, and often deemed with academic valor— and toward a more public, accessible reading. Hauke positions the practice of compost as a sense of poetics that challenges these notions of writing as being living and complete. For it is with this decay, much is born. Out of dust, dust returning.
     Composting is individualized and difficult to determine without losing its nuance. I'll try to describe how it works for me: I see it as a practice—like centering, which J has been thinking of recently, or yoga or mediation—that uses the human body as an instrument of measure and of participation. Charles Olson, in his pivotal essay, "Projective Verse," concerned with how the body intersects with the language, calls poetry being energy transferred from the page to the reader, the performance to the reader. That's a long way, he concludes:

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by the way of the poem itself to, all the way over to the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.

How is energy transferred from poet-to-page-to-reader? Is it through the sound of the voice? Music? If energy isn't transferred and dies out, where do we go to find it? If it's lost forever, it will be fine? Hauke says in his fiddle tune cover of Hank Sr., "Long Gone Lonesome":

Corroded as music          (which is our body)
Ragwort           (which is our body)

Humans: we are constantly experiencing and participating in nature, an ever-moving field of frequencies, static, harmonies, discord, images, etc. humming around us. Pittsburgh, the busies, the hospitals, the gentrification, too hot in the sun, too cool in the shade, a new barber shop opening, boxes of cardboard with maggots near the foot bridge, a handrail reads all cops are bastards.
     In ISR, I'm interested in how the self (ego) makes for a faulty perception, shaping and contorting the point of view at times. Perhaps most notable in "Color is worse than eternity." The speaker here, hyper-aware of how the perception of self and desire for agency conflicts with nature:

Walking the dog   with a mouthful of blackberries

Rain leaves mirror everywhere

Trying not to   step in it

Thoreau: Our life a forgetting

I get afraid to go to sleep before 10:30 sometimes. I'm afraid I'll miss it, something that I've been waiting all day to happen. It could happen shortly after I turn-in. For if I don't experience it, what good is it? Energy wasted. That is an unnatural thought. I remind myself of this as I write a few poems using various how-to garden manuals. Their language is about flowers, growth, moving, rain, fertilizer. I use my words, and it's like I had a say so in what was going down. Shit, I just held on and wound up here.
     At times, the "I" seems to be a sharp lens of connectivity, reminding the speaker of tender and wrenching moments that we experience as a body, as a collective:

I woke up crying the day you died

Laid my hand on his chest to feel his rips and make sure he was breathing

Hefted your ashes back into the church in trance

The relationship of music is personified in familiar terms humans can relate to. As music, in all of its glorious temporality echoes and falls into background noise, so does life. This awareness and frustration pushes it even further along:

Stupid to cleave to music     it changes

Learn to live with death it only

Grieves the living

It is in this moment we become the closest we may ever get to the speaker. Instead of a voice speaking from on high or from the ditches, see face-to-face with the issue of life and music, its leaving.
     Compost Journal Activity #1—catalog the sounds heard in a fifteen-minute session of listening:

Fifth + Wood Street, Pittsburgh 2019: clack hmm breathing breath thee is a barn stable cut perforated by silence by crowd diesel hum hum hummmm gathering arrowheads thee beyond ultra breathe breath drain slipping gurgle twist turn perforated by mhmm by yond der hmm breathing silence silence perforated by rust

     Music is a sound relationship, amplifying life. If you log onto Nathan's website, you see a talisman he holds near to his poetics. It's Cage saying, "Music is permanent; only listening is intermittent." But as Cage suggests, Hauke's compositions are also "intermittent" at times, scurrying to tune into a frequency but instead of being lost in the static, they become grounded in moments that are human and tender:

Honeybabe. Your eyes

Chirp a patch of Johnson weed

Reverberating through an overturned stove

Trash at the edge of a clearing    your eyes

Moments of music are harmonized with proximity, relationships. In these moments, Hauke and readers both become grounded—fully able to feel, witness, and experience the tensions of today: a spectrum spanning from elegant, somber, mundane, self-doubt, doom, and death.
     Death, dying, decaying is a generative, natural process in Indian Summer Recycling. This requires a new perspective, one that constantly needs reframing.How we each ache and long to be put to rest in ways similar to the "Spent firework in the grass" that "must have been some pretty thing." How we long to become "Micronutrients from decomposers" that are small but necessary to lifeforms, like the "Hatchling insects" which "obscure the clarity of the riverbed."  Throughout the book, we become accompanied by the sprits that latch onto the space. We get a fragmented memory of a suicide from a nameless individual, a holy three times: 

Dark windows of the rickety barn

Where X hung himself

Thicket riddled with light

 

Windows cut into the barn like velvet

Where X hung himself after he lost all the family money

 

"Old barn where X hung himself

Moss gathers in roots along the bank

Stamina like bubbles of foam disintegrating on the surface

With each memory, more begins to unfold. Such is life, such is poems, such is trauma. Here, Hauke is expressing how the high-stakes purist of capital damages rural communities and the self. What we are doing, at times, is holding on: our "stamina" often "disintegrates on the surface." There also seems to be an attempt to reframe this, out of bravery, out of a need for one's own keeping-on. We look for similar processes occurring in nature. Individuality is valued away, free from commerce. "Folk art made by folks for tourists" creeps up and "Knocks the wind out of you." Often swept away almost entirely by a flood-brown river, swiftly moving on. We become the "moss" which "gathers in the roots along the bank." Thoreau: Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. More less "Stray feathers / unsettled along the periphery / The rest is decomposition." Art, like all experiments, is sometimes successful in producing a recognizable outcome, yet sometimes turns grey and clouds up, requiring reassessment, a turning back, or even abandonment. We move on. Sometimes the movement alone haunts us.
     Location is central to Indian Summer Recycling. Many of the poems were composed near my hometown of Jefferson, North Carolina. Tensions of Appalachia ring through the static. The primary maker we encounter throughout the book is nature, a natural order, one that is in "disorder," and one that creates as its own form of beauty. Of course, with this, Hauke, as a self-described recovering Baptist kid, is quick to acknowledge God and the choir songs that inhabit the region. "Bands of strata" attempt to reconcile a self in continual states of change or rebirth apart from a religious upbringing:

Circumstances

Childhood's    boarded-up window

Abandoned nest     stripped loops of thread

Old brinks    acoustic nodes distressed to weather

It's difficult to say what triggers this introspection, maybe it's simply "the thought of salvation" that is portrayed as a necessity. Maybe it's the distortion and perversions of a gospel that has lasting effects:

The WORD OF GOD    stricken in hateful preacher's mouth

Certain to degrade   an unclaimed sparrow.

Regardless, the thoughts enter and press against a waking attention. At times, how we want to disappear, to be sustained and left alone against tension, become the "molted fawn" that "eats the wood she disappears into." To sustain and be sustained by the environment, you make habitat. Concepts of "belief" and "religion" are explored here as they relate to the individualized process of becoming:

Belief ...

Sneaks up on you at the screen door

 

&

Religion: asking for the widest definition of presence

What we come to know sneaks up on us, betrays us, cowers away and tosses itself into a brushed area that only goats and "Classic sun-leached plastic Santa" can survive in. Among everything, it leaves us. We are left to stumble away from it. One of my students said, "I'm from here, I know that. My parents lived here. I grew up in their house but my truth is different." In other words, how do you reconcile a religious past when it's rooted in the dirt? When you are tangled in the old-time gospel tunes? When will you "sit down beside my Jesus"? Echoing locational circumstance. Waves of heartbreak, isolation invade the psalms: 

As elegy is glass   turpentine       rags to remember the dead

Crickets scrape and file       a grave harmony

Knitting furrowed black over green

Each summer, no matter how endless it seems, becomes invaded by frost. There's a section of the New River I fish out in Todd, NC when I'm around the house. I can hear the fuzz of trucks and vans hauling canoes for tourists who've come to float through the shallow current. In my mind, it's summer. The water temperature is just slightly cooler on this fork than the main river. There's a healthy stocking of rainbow trout. A limb is waving as the truck goes by. I'm making sure my flies are floating. Nine people slow down and wave. Two of them I've never seen before in my life. I can feel how it is temporary.
     Being around the mountains, you've probably heard some iteration of the first line of Indian Summer Recycling: "Some people have it made and some don't." I've heard my dad say it. I've heard it said condescendingly to rich folks. To "have it made." Of course, to be privileged, to be given things, to own things, to have things in order to pass them down. Life is easier when it is made. All of those contexts are acknowledged and lifted; however, I'm interested in the tension this creates in terms of compost, or "dead literatures," and how "having it made" implies a maker. Having being made, died, and passed down. I'm moved into the hills, flipped out of the john-boat, and gathered to find my ringing cellphone on the shore. As poets, what we gain from compost is both generative and meditative. We are able to almanac a way of awareness to things alien and familiar, archaic and raw. The binaries become translucent and complicated only by agency, never by nature. Olson said human beings were both the eye and the I. Mary Rowlandson said I was alone and God was with me.
     Composting depends on the practice of attention. Poems are happening around each of us and, as Hauke puts it, "Some things / you could see them forever / Means they've got you." All we poets are doing is directing the attention: poetry is reality amplified, suggests Hauke. "An artist does not create, but cultivates attention" ("Fill Every Pore With Music"). Compost—an attentive practice of inclusivity; an awareness to relationships of sounds; music. See, it isn't that we shouldn't create, we can try; but as Hauke suggests: artists don't create, they simply concentrate. Creation is done. It's over. It's nature. That's not a human labor, hallelujah, we don't bare that burden.
     As Cage urges with all music, Hauke's poems are "intermittent" at times, scurrying to tune into a frequency but instead of being lost in the static, they become grounded in moments that are human and tender. In many ways, ISR is an ethnographic study of language that calls readers to participate in the meaning making of the poems—individually and as a collection. The phrases you read from Hauke will echo through you on your morning commute, your moments in the coffee shop, on the phone with your parents, in the horror movies you watch, on your evening walk, when you spin your favorite record. The vibrations, as harmonious or discordant as they appear, should be acknowledged for what they are: present. Music is "all in one ear / And out the other" and "worn / dirty / full of holes." We tune in. John Cage tells us to begin anywhere, and so does Hauke.