Wandering through the Universal Archive

A new chapbook of mostly Australian poetry, Wandering through the Universal Archive, has just appeared online curated by poet Fiona Hile. This anthology centres on collaboration and includes poets Michael Farrell, Oscar Schwartz, Amaranth Borsuk, Brad Bouse, Toby Fitch, Kate Middleton, Pam Brown, Maged Zaher, John Kinsella, Justin Clemens, Charles Bernstein, Richard Tuttle, Jessica Wilkinson, Simon Charles, Timothy Yu, Ken Bolton, John Jenkins, Marty Hiatt, Sam Langer, Astrid Lorange, Eddie Hopely, Nick Whittock, Tim Wright and myself.

What follows is an excerpt from Fiona's introduction concerning the work I contributed and my practice more broadly.

Somewhere in the middle of the Australian state of Victoria, the poet and artist, Patrick Jones, is painstakingly gathering and reorganising remnants and cast-offs. Artist as Family is just one permutation of an ethos of ‘permanent making’ that takes place under the rubric of what Jones has termed permapoesis and has included the design and installation of a public food forest for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Broadly speaking, Jones’ poetic mode is one of epistemological intervention. It rebels against what it thinks of as the ‘neat technocratised rows’ of printed poetry in English just as it seeks to disrupt the agricultural categorisations that insist on the eradication of weeds. For Jones, weeds repair land damaged by farming and industry and prepare the ground for reafforestation. His construction of a comprehensive Daylesford Community Commons Map that pinpoints the location of off-the-grid edible fruits and plants foregrounds issues of inclusion and exclusion. Who gets to decide what or who belongs where and to whom? If a plant or a letter or a word is in the wrong place it is viewed as a ‘mishap’, or a disruption. To overcome this ‘the eye has to get out of the machine and walk … the text becomes something the eye has to forage for or through.’ The map and the two poems gathered here constitute ‘a refiguring or reclaiming of the geopoetical – poems of the earth.’ 

One of the two poems Cordite published as part of Fiona's chapbook is called Winter's pharmacopeia, and it goes something like this:

Read more...

Walking for Food – geopoetics

Over the last month, while ima Meg recuperates from long nights of breast feeding, Woody, Zero, (sometimes Zeph) and I, dada, have gone out walking every morning noting all the free public food in our local commons.

We and our thrown together clipboard have seen cold, windy, dry, warm and joyous mornings this spring and today, adding a few last finds, we finally got rain. Ah, the joys of being car free!

Patrick Jones – Creative Commons: Foraging Commons

Yes, the map is not the territory but it has been a useful project to see just how much food is available that is autonomous and not reliant on agriculture's heavy-footed resources and processes.

Over the past several years we have kept a mental note of certain trees and plants, but carrying out this exercise has made us even more aware of the autonomous floras – indigenous and newly naturalised – that are building mutual relations. It is common, for example, to see elderberries parking themselves under blackwood wattles on the fringes of town.

Blackwoods are themselves companion plants to eucalypts. Hawthorns, which are now habitat for ring-tail possums and their berries are a preferred food for gang gangs, proliferate in these new ecologies alongside blackberries and oaks and a host of other plants, longtime or newly naturalised.

I wonder if we, newly arrived creatures, are making or looking for such mutualistic relationships. It seems while we are still dependent on conventional farming practices we are still aliens of place, extractors and miners, not those that engage in the generative and relational.

Read more...

A Victorian country town says no to abusers

Much respect to this incredible community.

Read more...

After Blake

The story of Daylesford Community Food Gardeners first nine months demonstrating how a guerilla action at one garden developed into three community gardens throughout the town.

Read more...

Our Transition

To here –

Wheel of Ecological Culture (permapoesis)

From here –

Wheel of Progress Capitalism (another false cycle)

Read more...

Greenwash #26 in Trouble - Growing a Community Food System

From Trouble magazine

Click for bigger, then click again for clarity.

Short video documenting the planting day at Rea Lands Park.

Read more...

Honey graft

Grafting the commons (cont.)...

The antibacterial property of honey makes it a perfect skin cure for a graft. In this image a hawthorn rootstock has a quince scion grafted on to it.

Read more...

Forest transformers

Grafting pear and apple scions onto wild hawthorn.

Read more...

(More) grafting the commons

Last year I wrote an article about grafting various fruits onto wild hawthorns and apples. I was keen to trial various fruits without doing any research, as this attitude can sometimes lead to the quite unexpected. However, not surprising to me now, all these grafts failed. So today, armed with a little more knowledge and an awesome grafting tool, I took a small jar of honey, some pear cuttings, a roll of grafting tape and walked into the bush.

I decided to use two cultivars of pears (Winter Nelis and Beurre Bosc) that cross pollinate with eachother. Apparently, hawthorn makes a good rootstock for any of the rose family – apples, medlars, pears, quince, etc. On a 'wild urban spaces' workshop taken by David Holmgren earlier this year we were shown a 10 year old medlar graft David had done onto wild hawthorn. It was doing really well with abundant fruit (though hard to see in this photo).

Brett Adamson and David Holmgren stand on either sides of the graft.

The grafts I did today were dipped in honey to mitigate disease before being wrapped in grafting tape. Each was then given a splint for strength and protection. I'd like to keep making rose family grafts onto hawthorn over the next two months, so hopefully I can report some significant success, even unexpected, next year.

If you have any grafting tips or anecdotes I'd love to hear them.

Read more...

Simulated poetics – beaming in from home

I'm participating in a poetry event in NSW today from the low carbon comforts of my central Victorian home, courtesy of Skype.

Of course digital culture is fully supported by industrial technics, so I'm not pretending this participation isn't without its pollutions and abuses. And I'm only guessing that my decline to be flown/driven up to participate in person constitutes a lower footprint, in comparison to using all this technology (including a plasma screen at the event end) to beam me up.

Here's the poster that was produced for this gig, in which the Bundanon Trust designer has taken an excerpt from a statement I wrote in 2004 and laid it over a photograph taken by Heidrun Lohr.

My Fellow panel participants are Yvette Holt, Chris Mansell and James Stuart.

Read more...

Permapoesis at the Victorian Writers' Centre

I gave a reading of mainly new work at the Victorian Writers' Centre last night. I came to the centre from a peripheral place, and spoke poetics, ecology, food, energy, climate chaos, population dispersal and 'slow text', among other things.

In question time I was asked about 'food security' and quoted this report in my reply.

Meg and I took hawthorn fruit leathers to share so as the audience could more fully embody the video-poem, 'A place of simple feeding' (see video on previous post), that I finished my reading with. We were gifted in exchange some home-brewed beer made by the director of the VWC, Roderick Poole. This sort of exchange or gift – the hand-made or home-made – is incredibly touching, and exemplified another key area of my talk – uncapitalised exchange.

Roderick and I had never before met, however we share 4 very similar and wonderful things: side burns, a love of home-brewing, permaculture and the love of a good Jewish woman.

Extrapolating on 'free-dying' beside Roderick Poole

(after Michael Farrell asked the question).

Read more...

Greenwash #15 in Trouble - Grafting the Commons

I’ve been in the bush again, grafting a variety of fruit tree cuttings onto wild apples and hawthorns. I pruned quince, peach, apricot, Fuji, Granny Smith, and nectarine from local street trees. I spent six dollars fifty on grafting tape and from this I aim to make about a hundred grafts onto mature, wild stocks. My girlfriend Meg has nicknamed one of the hardy, well-established wild apples we’ve been experimenting on, The Fruit Salad Tree. It’s a work in progress to see how many different varieties of fruits we can grow onto it. Click image to read on...

Read more...

Seed commons attacked (once again by private-capital ideology)

Twelve Russian scientists famously chose to starve to death rather than eat the unique collection of seeds and plants they were protecting for humanity during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in the second world war. But the world's first global seed bank now faces destruction once more, to make way for a private housing estate.

Read on here.

Read more...

Creative commons, foraging commons

I was recently invited to submit a critical work for Cordite's issue 33: Creative Commons. Here's an excerpt from All Rights Relinquished, in which I outline my perception of the relationship between private property and ecological crises.

The reestablishment of local food commons in union with the development of a global creative commons comes from the recognition that we are biological beings, evolved from fungi – and thus evolved from complex networks of interrelation; webs of mycelial and intellectual connectivity not limited by private capital. The dominant ideology attacks the reciprocity of open, public supply networks. A public supply of resources, both conceptual and corporeal, is a decentred supply system that makes local communities more resilient [in the face of climate chaos and peaking oil supplies]. Read on.

Many thanks to David Prater and Matt Hall, Cordite editors. And many thanks to Ian Robertson who came up with the title, some years back, when we first used it in A Free-Dragging Manifesto.

Read more...