Pony Fish, Nancy Wahl Poetry

An adaptation is, by definition, something functionally effective that arises from the long-continued action of natural selection. A good example is the special light of a pony fish, an admirably sophisticated aid for solving an immensely important problem.
As Darwin pointed out, familiarity with the animal kingdom shows the existence today of just about every stage in a plausible sequence; every stage in this sequence is subject to variation, and every stage is clearly useful to its possessor.
--George C. Williams, Author, Evolutionary Biologist and retired Professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook

Physical reality is invested with a freedom of choice; encouraged, lured, toward good....We are always in the process of becoming.
--Dr. Richard C. Hutchison, D. Min. D.D., from his Seminar on A. N. Whitehead’s “Process and Reality”

An actual entity is at once the subject experiencing and the superject of its experiences.
--A. N. Whitehead

Nancy Wahl attended UC Berkeley and CSU, Sacramento; she was awarded the First Place 2000 Award for poetry by Literature Alive, the First Place 1998 Bazzanella Literary Award, Poetry, and the 1999 Bazzanella Award,
Fiction, and her work has appeared in the Suisun Valley Review, Tule Review, Poetry Now, Healing Voices and the Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems.
"Either she knows all this stuff, or she purloins whole libraries of dictionaries; and it doesn't really matter, since the object of this poetry is to play, a lighter and more lyric play, just as Ingalls' is a deeper philosophic play.
But there are serious notes, as when Wahl's speaker notes the pleasure she enjoys and the disturbances she knows she fends off..." Tom Goff, Poetry Now
"Nancy Wahl's narratives are speculative and rich with allusions ... lit from within like the title poem's Pony Fish." ... Dennis Schmitz
"Nancy Wahl's poems combine, in a magical way, the intellectual, sensual, spiritual and psychological experience." Norine Radaikin