Middle Creek
Publishing & Audio

The Mountain is focused on the roles and places held by mountains in the lives of those who love them, travel them, meditate in them, choose or find challenge by them. The poets in this collection take contemplative note of their connections to mountains as a living, defining, valuable, enriching and spiritual aspect of their own personal lives. They are a part of the growing reawakening environmental consciousness and the literary canon of human ecology and rooted in such poets and writers as Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, John Muir, Cid Corman, Lorine Niedecker and Sam Hamill.

“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia.”

― Robert MacFarlane,
     form Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit.


Middle Creek Publishing is dedicated to promoting this very type of ontological poetry which reveals that our environment is not only something external we experience, but something more, to put it in the words of a favorite literary saint, Gary Snyder, interpenetrating. Intelligence is the ability of taking two things and finding a third thing — a connection. These poems illuminate an ecological literacy perhaps more aptly described as ecological wisdom. They reveal a deeper beauty beyond the surface of landscapes and landforms, they reveal connection and the richness of meaning to be found in the solace of wild places.

You are invited to walk and listen into the intimate thoughts of poets you may or may not know, poets you may encounter on the labyrinthine paths of life, woodland trails or wilderness areas including: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, James Crews, Kathleen Willard, Sandra Noel, Aaron M. Moe, KB Ballentine, Sharon Corcoran, Maria Berardi, Art Goodtimes, Mary Crow, Amy Wray Irish, Nicholas Trandahl, Olin Wish, Paula Gordon Lepp, Deanna Kern Ludwin, John Whitney Steele, Diane Stone, Lynn Kincanon, Laura Foley, Penny Harter, James B. Nicola, Joan Shapiro, Judith Brice, Lorrie Wolfe, Kierstin Bridger, Charlie Brice, Sarah Dickenson Snyder, Jule K. Shavin, Sheryl Clough, R.C. Hoerter, Christopher James, Liza Wolff-Francis, James Stuart and David Anthony Martin who also curated this collection and is the founder of Middle Creek Publishing.