Monday, June 23, 2008

What is going on with all the wild animals coming in to urban areas and hunting? What does it mean? We've had racoons for years, I wouldn't classify them as wild necessarily; but now we have coyotes eating neighborhood cats (this happened a few blocks from us), and more . . . (see article below, perhaps it will trigger a poem for you?).

Nanny saves child from coyote's jaws
And other strange stories of human, animal conflicts

By CLAIRE TRAGESER, P-I REPORTER

Seattle isn't the only city with aggressive animals. Strange stories from across the country have accumulated over the past few years to paint a vivid picture of the growing conflict between humans and urban wildlife.

In April, a hawk in Boston's Fenway Park swooped on a teenage girl and scratched her scalp with his talons, causing her to bleed.

A Florida woman was walking her dog in March when a bobcat approached, grabbed the pet in his mouth and retreated to the nearby woods. The woman has not seen her dog, a Maltese named Bogie, since.

In November in Clintonville, Ohio, a deer stabbed a dog with his antlers in at least five places on the dog's side, chest and face. The dog, a Doberman, suffered a ruptured diaphragm and stomach, but survived.

A black bear opened a glass sliding door to enter a woman's home in the middle of the night in Aspen, Colo., in October. When the woman heard noise in her kitchen and went to investigate, the bear clawed her in the face. Two weeks later, wildlife officers trapped and killed the bear.

An 11-year-old boy was dragged from his family's tent and killed by a black bear last June in American Fork, Utah. The bear was found and killed by wildlife officers two days later.

A nanny pulled a 2-year-old girl away from a coyote that had grabbed the child while she was playing in a sandbox in Chino Hills, Calif., in May. Coyotes bit three other children in the same area that month.

Wild turkeys wander the streets of Boston, chasing joggers and small children, damaging cars with their beaks and occasionally attacking people. In 2006, a turkey jumped on the back of a woman in Brookline, Mass., and attacked her with its talons.

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I spent most of Sunday putting together a lecture/workshop on line breaks/line endings. I used Logenbach's The Art of the Poetic Line, Myers and Wukasch's Dictionary of Poetic Terms, Dobyns' Best Words, Best Order, some articles i had saved over the years, the new Center "Symposium on the Line," (great issue!) and added some of my own ideas. I think it is going to be a really fun presentation. A sort of taxonomy of types of line breaks, from the kinesthetic to the affective, with examples, and then an exercise.

1 comment:

Justin Evans said...

I wish I could attend that workshop. That's one I really
need. I would say
that workshop would go to great
use
around these
parts.