Mid-March was the beginning, as some might recall, of a false-Spring. The day-shine was warm and the breezes didn’t bite, but when the sun went down the trees shook, the yards flooded, and the streets reflected Winter-cold light. Following the worst of the storm, poet Gary Snyder came out from California to warm our hearts.

As the recipient of the 10th Annual Robert Creeley Award, Snyder graciously accepted an emotional introduction by Creeley’s widow, Penelope. He slowly laid his hands flat on the podium, and I immediately felt let down by the bright fluorescence of the high school auditorium and Snyder’s small stature. But when he began to read, my heart soared: he was a mountain. Though not without a few falling rocks.

Snyder read some of Creeley’s poems, and even granted his interpretation of one. His reading of his own work was extraordinary to witness, as the genuine hippies around me rocked their heads in an odd caustic, yet welcome remembrance. No one needed much prodding to laugh or relish Snyder’s words, but he offered plenty; loose rocks of inflection and emphasis made slip the truly funny, even evocative moments. Even so, the tender chuckle that emitted from Snyder’s shoulders was so spirited, the forced-nature of old jokes quickly eased, and then came to a stop altogether when Snyder finished the hour reading with his latest poetics.

He interrupted his own poems to share an anecdote about a temple in Japan or a novice monk. He talked about haiku, and that he doesn’t write them, really. Structure like that, he supposed, isn’t built into the American poet. An important contribution to the New American Poetry, Snyder’s work often sounds like Traditional Native storytelling strung with psychedelic Zen chimes: part Basho, part Pound.

Snyder grew up on the West Coast on farm land. He appreciated the nuances in nature and expanded his knowledge by reading extensively on Eastern culture. In his twenties, he lived in Japan, traveling throughout South-East Asia to study, to fall-in-love, and to Listen to the Wind, as his dharma name denotes. By the time he moved back to California, he had built a rock foundation for artists, philosophers, even politicians, to grasp on their own climbs though life.

It seems his environmental philosophy, his Buddhist life-style, his braided and bearded body, were all to prepare for the “here and now.” In this place, if only for an hour, busy people sit and listen to stories of trees and rivers, animals and mountains. As Snyder wrote in the poem “Civilization,” though, “Those are the people who do complicated things.”

After I finished Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, I put my hand over my heart and wept. After that, I ordered a dress-form and a swath of gold leather online, dumped all my paints, pencils, brushes and duck cloth onto the floor, called my grandma, and downed a glass of chocolate milk. My reaction looks erratic, but it resembles Smith’s life in New York City in the 60s, process of creation and collaboration with artists passing in and out of the Chelsea Hotel, and travel-induced writing style. Smith’s Romantic, almost serious phrasing, reminiscent of the French poetry she obsessed over, (”Robert Micheal Mapplethorpe…was a mischievous little boy whose carefree youth was delicately tinged with a fascination with beauty,” p.13) would seem contrary to her rock-and-roll vibe if she weren’t so saline-sweet; instead, it comes off strong and declarative, a fat anchor in a world of excess.

As Patti Smith is a voice on behalf of our environment, for liberalism and for truth, her warm words peal apart the most sensitive passages of her life so we can observe the moist-letters and slimy rocks of our own. My desire to create since reading Just kids is springier and takes greater form, because my fascination with beauty is shared.

Smith’s friendship with Mapplethorpe was smeared in sad comforts and brilliant drip-dye colors. Smith promised Mapplethorpe she would write their story, and so she has. No less colorful, however, are the friendships and spirit garnered in the East Village and Central Manhattan that produced art and joy where dirt and disease once was. Smith is an incredibly believable character–she travels and grows and sours and butterflies in a categorically common way. She quickly harps on regular frustrations like her day-job, then graciously extends her hand when we can’t believe her luck. Mapplethorpe was on her arm throughout it all.

While reading, I kept a list of names, ideas or works-of-art I wanted to remember–cultural activists or actions in their own right, friends to Patti Smith:

Robert Mapplethorpe
Godard
Brian Jones
Midnight Cowboy
Williams Burroughs (Lee Burroughs)
Anthology of American Folk Music
Crazy Horse
Anna Kavan
Virgil Thomas
Arthur C. Clark
Oscar Wilde
Dylan Thomas
Thomas Wolfe–”You Can’t Go Home Again…”
The Golden Bough
Tim Bukley
Ossie Clark, designer
Wages of Fear (film)
Banny Fields
Water and eucalyptus leave for floors
Of Human Bondage
Jackie Curtis
Ray Roussel, Locus Solus
Gautier Michaux
Thomas de Quincey
Gregory Corso
Bobby Neuwirth–Don’t Look Back, “Bring It All Back Home,” Dylan
Patty Waters
Clifton Chenier
Albert Ayler
Blonde on Blonde
Genet
Arthur Rimbaud

There are many more. Forgive me if I missed or misspelled any, and if it all seems a little spastic. It’s just something Patti Smith can draw up from our creative, round bellies, like a child’s burp. “Magical!” we gurgle.

Friday, March 5 marks the release of Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland.” After checking out the Tim Burton exhibit at MoMA in New York at the end of January, I predict a scrawling, blubbering, rubberized, even colorized interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s hallucinatory Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Burton’s muse Johnny Depp plays a rouge-enhanced The Mad Hatter, Burton’s partner-and-muse Helena Bonham Carter bursts as The Red Queen, and Alan Rickman rolls languish as The Caterpillar.

It was easy to imagine how Charles Dodgson, who wrote “literary nonsense” under the Carroll pseudonym, influenced Burton’s work as we walked down museum-white hallways of edible stripes, chomping hoses, and sordid baby dolls. But Burton doesn’t liposuction the books he makes into films, he builds a lard house out of them and then lights it on fire to fuel his own eager, weird intellect.

I wonder how Carroll, back in the 1860s fueled his stories; when I was young, a math teacher told my class he wrote in opium dens. His diaries, however, indicate he was simply attuned to children, concocting labyrinths of hazy yet distinct and heightened rhetoric. The kind of sophisticated, wacked-out language kids get because their impulses detect non-sense and their minds read pleasure.

It’s with that feeling Carroll and Burton capture the sensory part of our collective brain, the pleasure center—stories that blow open the prolific, complex chapters of our childhoods tend to not forget the simple joys in life.

I can’t wait to see what Burton has done on film with the story of Alice In Wonderland. It’s a place we can fall into and feel like kids. And if we choose to, we can visit any time.

In The Catskills was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1910. Tomorrow, the publishing house is re-releasing John Burroughs selected writings about his home in the Catskills and his observational travels through them.

When I moved out to Boston from Buffalo, I thought I would work for an established publishing house like Houghton Mifflin, live in the city and eat fresh-baked croissants wearing leather gloves. Things turned out differently, and I learned what I really love about Boston is its extraordinary proximity to well-preserved trails, ponds, trees and mountains. How fortunate I am to have forged a relationship with these things, the way I thought I only could with French baked-goods.

Burroughs wrote from the bark of this kind of personable environmentalism; one which illustrates self-reflection in nature while proposing each element is worth conserving in and of itself. His work was highly acclaimed and has inspired many travel- and nature-writers to highlight a light-footed love of their own backyards as well as the grandest mountains.

My own backyard is small, but my appreciation for the nature around me is far and wide. Burroughs influence has asked us for a century, “Look up at the miracle of the falling snow”–sometimes more lovely in the city lights.

“The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” comes out today, as directed by Jodie Markell. It examines the lust and longing of Fisher Willow, a tenacious, sometimes foolhardy young woman living in the South. I picture Fisher as the kind of woman who shatters glasses, slaps faces, and kisses while sobbing. She isn’t very tough, but she likes to think she is. She’s well-traveled and flighty.

The kind of woman who lives on the verge of insanity, who won’t define right and wrong, whose radical yet brilliant values are affirmed after many exciting trials, in light of her bright eyes, long legs and cripplingly sophisticated intellect. The story, I propose, is totally romantic.

I call it romantic because this character is one I always dreamed of being. As a child, my imagination was encouraged but I didn’t have the kind of nomadic, liberal, or unfortunate upbringing that creates moody musicians, free-thinkers or the good kind of bad-asses. Of course now I know character traits like that can stem from any background. I also know there is no way to fake sexy-crazy. And besides, to force that kind of misunderstood sadness is a disservice to sad people. I hope actor Bryce Dallas Howard’s Fisher is played with sincere formidability; because as I said before, there’s no faking it. And Tennessee Williams’ would know.

“Youth In Revolt,” adapted from C. D. Payne’s 1993 novel Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp, is directed by Miguel Arteta and comes out today.

Payne, born in Akron, Ohio in 1949, lived in the mid-West until college, when he moved to Boston to attend Harvard. He graduated with a degree in History, then moved to California to edit, proofread and publish, among other things.

Director Arteta, known for his quiet, thought-provoking work like “The Good Girl,” suspends Payne’s protagonist Nick Twisp, played by Michael Cera, in a heady yet lovelorn light. Nick is often baffled and gaffed by the adult characters in the story, especially his mother and her boyfriend, who propose a vacation to a cabin-in-the-woods, which turns out to be an old trailer-in-the-park.

The setting matters to the audience because it reflects the disappointment Nick feels by being young and not getting what he longs for. What Nick wants more than anything, of course, is sex. When he meets Sheeni, a girl with her own high-school-age fantasies (French culture), he creates an alter-ego, François. Like a fantasy, Nick and Sheeni’s intelligent, well-versed dialectic creates a crisp, funny, retro foreground to juxtapose the background.

“Youth In Revolt’s” story travels outside the characters’ physical world as we become aware of the exciting potential of hip, bright young-love. The family retreat and the campfire coziness of the woods is a fun way to see through the run-a-muck mind’s-eye of a young guy obsessed with sex, but more importantly who values intellectual, world-travel-friendly dreams.