A Poetic Legacy | Clarice Short, The Owl on the Aerial

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If Clarice Short had not chosen to become a great educator, she might have developed into a major poet. Her poetic output, excellent in quality but admittedly limited, reveals her as a woman dedicated to her major career, one who took precious time to express herself in poetry only when she could not stanch the flow of creativity. 

Her second book, The Owl on the Aerial, published posthumously by Signature Books, is an interesting amalgam of her previously unpublished poetry and diary excerpts selected by Barbara Duree, with an appreciation by Jim Elledge.

Introduced to Short by her literary executor, Emma Lou Thayne, herself a fine writer and a personal friend of the teacher, readers of this volume will recognize Clarice Short as a person of excellence even before examining her work. But within the lines of her poetry lies the secret of the woman—if there is, indeed, a secret. How refreshing it is, in this world of poetic obscurity, to find a poet who capably illustrates what she sees, hears, and senses and carries the reader along with her for a thoroughly enjoyable journey without the trauma of mystic interpretation. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Short’s poems, which encompass her love of the land and its beauty. Drawing upon childhood experiences, she writes passionately about the land and the life of a farmer, images flowing effortlessly through her work. And years later, after her retirement in New Mexico, her writing still manifests her abiding love for nature. Her life was filled with constant observation; living, loving, and absorbing everything around her, she then wrote of her experiences without pretense. 

Although Short labored long years in her chosen profession, she hated her high school teaching assignments and was fired from her first job because she was unable to maintain discipline in the classroom. Despite this, she persevered, warning herself over and over that she must work harder. She earned a master’s degree, then a Ph.D., and went on to teach first at the University of Kansas, then at the University of Utah for twenty-nine years, where she earned the reputation of scholar of note, honored (and feared) teacher, committee worker, and woman to be reckoned with. Students in her classroom-turned cathedral listened in awe as Dr. Short revealed the intricacies of poems ranging from sonnets to villanelles and from poets as diverse as Christina Rossetti and Dylan Thomas. 

Short’s own writing became secondary to that of her students. Her first book of poems, The Old One and the Wind (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), was not published until 1973 when Short was sixty-three years old. Always modest about her poems, she had been “unusually patient about collecting them,” according to a Virginia Quarterly Review, which gave Short’s work superior critical notice (Owl, p. 167). 

Raised in the Ozarks in relative poverty, Clarice Short was anything but impoverished. Although she often appeared brusque and stubborn, she harbored within her splendid mind and spirit a richness and warmth illuminated by her interest in and tolerance for others’ differences. “Methodist by baptism, Christian at large,” Short confessed. “Utah didn’t ask me to come here; I asked to come to Utah. .. . I like what I find here” (p. 6). 

Actually, Clarice Short probably liked whatever she found, wherever she found herself. Early poems in The Owl on the Aerial, such as “Etchings and Print” (p. 21), display her love for her surroundings. 

Winter is for etchings:
The magpie’s blacks and whites, 
The camp-robber’s gray 
Are right; and the simplified line 
Of the apple boughs, the half-buried fence,
Suggest sleepers under the snow. 

Simple yet elegant imagery. And on to more scholarly matters, note “Anatomy of Angels” (p. 20): 

No one would dare to ascribe to the sons of God 
Structure like that of insects—six legs, four wings. 
Physiology of vision should go un questioned; 
But, having entered this realm of heresy,
One cannot return to innocence again.
            (If only a fossil seraph could be found!) 

A somewhat cryptic last line often adds a touch of humor to Short’s most profound verses. 

We do not know 
What sounds were made by the birds
That went into the silence 
Of extinction, long ago.
We do know though
Two species endangered now
Are trumpeter swans and whooping
Cranes, and we might conclude
It was whooping and trumpeting 
That laid them low. 

Lines such as these, in “Sound and Silence” (p. 19), allow a glimpse of the very human woman who wrote in her journal, “It is pleasant to live in a community where neighbors call each other to look at a rainbow” (p. 9). She never seemed enamored of her scholarly tendencies, as these lines in “After Failing Some Examinations” (p. 103) exemplify: 

Oh, wise old men, with your tired faces
Look not with pity upon me. 
I have watched deer drink in secret places,
In cool, green places you’ll never see.

Clarice Short believed in balance. Loving nature as she did, and people as she must have, still she found herself possessed of a powerful intellect which cried out for expression. Often, as in “Tired Scholar” (p. 118), she referred to the varied aspects of her life: 

A firm stone, 
Time, and a good chisel—
Left alone 
Through sunlight, moonlight, 
Minds unbound, 
Let us carve a few clear words, 
Long pondered, sound. 
The weightiest thoughts consigned to leaves may flutter 
To swell a packrat’s nest or choke a gutter. 

With her farming and ranching background, both in the Ozarks and later in New Mexico where she retired, Short might have grown complacent about the beauties of nature, but she didn’t. Enthralled until the end of her life, she wrote in her diary, “I never saw anything much prettier than the shadow of spruce on the snow and the intensely blue sky back of white aspens and the firs” (p. 82). 

“I have lived two lives,” she admitted, “—that of the farmer and rancher and that of a scholar” (p. 73). She might have added to those a sportswoman, traveler, teacher, and poet. The Owl on the Aerial proves the latter, and the Clarice Short Memorial Fund for Teaching Excellence, established at her death, underscores her dedication to her chosen profession. 

Short traveled widely toward the end of her life. From such exotic locations as Crete and Rome, she filled the role of poet as prophet and penned verses anticipating her own demise. 

                        On the Shore of Crete 
It would not be unfitting 
To die here on the shore of Crete 
Between mountains that look like my own
And the sea whose rhythmic run up the smooth beach 
Sounds like the calm breathing of a large beast. 

I have prepared as well as I could: 
Walked through fields of blossoming asphodel, 
Saved the right coin for the fare of passage,
Laid by small stores of bread and wine. 

But there is the problem of disposal:
International regulations are involved;
One may simply not be hid with a little earth 
So as not to become the food of scavengers.
I have envied the sodden gull that for a while 
Is decently covered with feathers until the whole 
Is swept away by a wave to the great deep
Or assimilated by the patient sand. 

            Protestant Cemetery: Rome 
If one is half in love with easeful death,
The unambitious pyramid of Cestius
Marks an appealing place to leave the half 
Death-loving. 
                        Yet the still life-loving half 
In May finds the graves rich with straw berries, 
Wild ones of small sweet fruit and dark green leaves, 
Under white-petaled blooms. 
                        Persephone 
Ate six pomegranate seeds and ended sum mer. 
Who knows what price the gentle dead may demand 
For wild strawberries, blossom and fruit together?

Clarice Short, scholar and teacher, might have expected to leave behind her a legacy of learning. Her poems will add lasting beauty to that legacy, as seems fitting for one who loved the world as she found it—and left it even more elevated through the quality of her spirit, manifested in her poetic writings.

The Owl on the Aerial by Clarice Short (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990), 177 pp., $14.95.