Weekend Round-up: Wolf says Meow, gigantic garden seed pods, and Notre Dame Cathedral visits the West

The garden has been winterized and the bulbs are in the ground. A pretty good year for tomatoes and Purple Podded Pole Beans, which I keep getting from the library's seed library because I like the name. Sounds like a crop a Martian might grow. The vines took over my container garden. Not tasty raw but can grow to incredible lengths because the beans blend in with the purple stems. There are some big ones, too. Not "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" big, but they're scary. The bigger they are, the tougher they are. Tomato varieties: Gold Nugget and Baxter's Early Bush Cherries. 

Mystery foliage still thrives in my big front yard flower pot. Looks like parsley but at first I thought cilantro since I was throwing around cilantro seeds in the spring. I used Plant ID but came up with nothing. I'll take some leaves into the Botanic Gardens and ask the experts. 

My two crabapple trees seem to be taking hold. Planted by Rooted in Cheyenne in August, they're six-feet tall and the leaves are dropping with the seasons. Must remember to water them on a regular basis. Weather Channel has mega-storms hitting the West Coast but whether the moisture makes its way to the Interior West is yet to be seen. Forecast calls for hurricane-force winds and giant waves on the Washington coast and up to eight inches of rain in California and multiple feet of snow in the Sierras. Pray for snow! Fortunately, Halloween is nigh and we all know what Halloween usually looks like around here.

I finished an article for WyoFile this week and it should appear online mid-week. It features two Wyoming-bred artists now living in Denver who highlight their work at the new Meow Wolf Denver. The four-story art outpost, wedged between I-25 and Colfax Avenue, opened Sept, 17. More than 300 artists contributed to the immersive art exhibit called Convergence Station, “the convergence of four different dimensions.” Haven't seen it in person yet but traveled there virtually through the imaginations of the artists. Look for my byline this week.

I just read "The Lincoln Highway" by Amor Towles. Color me clueless but I had never heard of this writer who has written many books. I will read more now that I blew through the latest on Kindle. The title attracted me. I live along the Lincoln Highway which was Hwy. 30 until it was swallowed up by I-80. I've researched the origins of America's first transcontinental highway for my novel. Fascinating stuff. Billy, an eight-year-old Nebraska boy in Towles novel, is fascinated by it and wants to travel it. But wanting to travel it in 1954 as Kerouac did just a few years earlier is tougher than it seems and launches his 400-page adventure. Great read. 

I'm also reading the new book of poetry by Betsy Bernfeld of Jackson and Laramie. Betsy is not only an accomplished poet but also an attorney and former librarian. I still treasure the tour of the old Jackson library Betsy led me on when I first came to work at the Wyoming Arts Council. That was the old log cabin library that smelled of wood. The new library is a work of art. I visit it every time I'm in Teton County. Betsy's book, "The Cathedral is Burning," was published by the fine Finishing Line Press in Lexington, Kentucky. It's one of the small presses that keeps literature alive in the U.S. and around the world. The book's cover features "The Mothers: Las Madres Project. No Mas Lagrimas, a public artwork about migrants in the Arizona desert at Pima Community College in Tucson. 

The other day I was thinking: how come there aren't more movies about poets? There are a few big names who have made it to the screen: Dante Alighieri, Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Emily Dickinson. That's a pretty good start. 

Surfing the streaming channels, I came across a film on Netflix about John Keats. I know Keats as a suffering English poet of the Late Romantic Period who died young at 25. He excelled at odes -- you don't see to many of those these days. "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," etc. I wasn't familiar with "Bright Star," a poem that speaks of mortality and youthful love. It's a beautiful poem that became the title of Jane Campion's movie, "Bright Star." Set in 1819 in a rural area just outside London, it tells the tale of a morose Keats and Fanny Brawne, a lively young woman was makes her own clothes and loves to dance. She is smitten with the scrawny poet. He eventually is smitten enough to write her several poems. His consumption gets supercharged after a night out in the rain. 

It's all over but the suffering. 

Thing is, Keats is doomed but the film is about Fanny's lovesickness. She is obsessed with Keats and she gets little in return. When he travels to London, she's in bed for five days, asking her mother why love hurts so bad. I kept hearing Nazareth's "Love Hurts" in my head. But her infatuation puts any pop song's lyrics to shame. She is physically ill when Keats goes to Rome to heal and won't take her along. She is torn asunder when word reaches her about the poet's death. They weren't married but were only informally engaged because her mother won't consent because she thinks her daughter is tetched and "people are talking." In mourning, she makes her own widow's weeds, cuts off her hair, and walks the heath for six years reciting her man's poems. That is worth a collection of odes right there. So sad to see her walking the heath reciting "Bright Star." She eventually marries and has three children but her future is also tied to Keats' gathering fame. 

Today I read a batch of Keats' poems and they are impressive. I also read some criticism that followed Keats post-mortem. I've always been more taken with Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake of the Early Romantic Period. Later, Shelley was pretty cool although his wife was more cool. Lord Byron dies the true Romantic's death when he leaves poesy to fight a war that had nothing to do with him. Strange thing is, it seems as if Keats has a stronger legacy as the suffering creative genius. He was poor and unknown in his time. But the poet who suffers is still with us. And the poet's betrothed is the one whose suffering I felt most.