Can poetry save the world?

Wendell Berry says he doesn't want his words to be reduced to a bumper sticker. In the slogan-steady city of Melbourne tonight, a new film on Berry's life and work is being premiered. It's called Look & See.

I considered joining mates and travelling down to the "city that looks like every other city" to celebrate this global elder's work, but instead I chose to stay home, far away from bumper stickers, their cars and the brightly lit billboards. Not exactly news. In fact it's exactly this non-news that I crave, and that stays present to what could be Berry's greatest bumper sticker of all, It All Turns on Affection.

Four years ago Rasha Tayeh made this film highlighting many of the themes Berry has been writing on for decades. The Growing Food Project features my poem Step by step and numerous other voices that call for action in the present, not to wait in blind hope for governments to act. Rasha's film champions poetry's potential for such autonomous storytelling. It gives another kind of voice in articulating the rarely spoken assumptions of our time and culture. Like the Look & See trailer, Rasha's film suggests that poems might have a role in the grand attempt to save the world.

Peter Minter, writing about my work, asks: "Can poetry save the world? Jones’ poetry is challenging, perhaps not for everyone, but the world he is saving is the same one you’re living in." Berry sees it differently: “Maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly on it.” And, in the same piece (Our Only World, 2015) he writes:

“Oh, oh, oh,” cry the funerary experts, looking ahead through their black veils. “Life as we know it soon will end. If the governments don’t stop us, we’re going to destroy the world. The time is coming when we will have to do something to save the world. The time is coming when it will be too late to save the world. Oh, oh, oh.” If that is the way our minds are afflicted, we and our world are dead already. The present is going by and we are not in it. Maybe when the present is past, we will enjoy sitting in dark rooms and looking at pictures of it, even as the present keeps arriving in our absence.

Be we an optimist or a doomer, there is always trouble. What we do in response to the sticky material of trouble that dwells in the living present is the making of us, and the making of the/our world. Berry expresses the hopelessness of blind hope, as much as he expresses the agency of people to live savingly and presently, with little and with much. 

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All Rights Relinquished

There is a colourful stoush going on at Overland about:

PLAGIARISM:–
More virulent than MODERNISM
More critical than POST–MODERNISM
Read the full story inside!

Home, Stewart. Plagiarism: Art as Commodity and Strategies for its Negation, London: Aporia Press, 1988.

Tipping, Richard & Mansell, Chris. Lessons for Plagairists (with a Special Proem by Bill Posters, Complete with Precepts and a Handy Compendium of Instructions), Sydney: Well Sprung Productions, 2013.

And more grist for the mill at Notes from the Sinister Quarter.

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Walking a poemline

Artist as Family are planning to walk to Melbourne from our home in Jaara country and we wish to do this respectfully acknowledging the elders and traditional communities of the country through which we slowly travel.

The walk is to celebrate the completion of my manuscript, ‘Walking for Food: Regaining Permapoesis’. My manuscript and AaF's five day walk to Melbourne both attempt to raise issues around food and energy sustainability and environmental ethics. The book heavily quotes Aboriginal voices and sensibilities relating to the respectful treatment of country.

Artist as Family's five day walk to Melbourne 2013

On the fifth day I will present the last chapter of Walking for Food at the poetry symposium, The Real Through Line. This chapter constitutes a letter to Maya Ward regarding her book The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage and critiques the place of writing within a culture of ecological intransigence. 

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Reading with Australia's favourite redneck (and scone fresser)

A reading with Les Murray in Melbourne yesterday took me back to an afternoon in my youth where I came home from school to find a large poet sitting at our kitchen table eating his way through a bowl of scones mum had just cooked. My mother was the president of the local literary society and had invited Les to come share his words with the community. Although I did go to the CWA tea rooms that night in 1984 (or was it 83?), my hungry teenage mind wouldn't leave the lost scones for the poems. Yesterday, all these years later I actually got to hear his words in relative peace.

Les bookended his reading with Quadrant fitting subjects – big machines and type 2 diabetes. I guess they go hand in hand. Les is the literary editor of Quadrant, the pro-industry rag which boasts Keith Windschuttle as its deregulatory helmsman. As a segue into his read yesterday Les grumbled about big machines not being fashionable today... Perhaps Quadrant could give out free Tonka mining trucks and hamburgers with fries and coke to encourage younger readers.

Les Murray at the Butterfly Club for the 4W launch Melbourne Dec 2012

The main reason the little group of writers and listeners assembled in Melbourne yesterday was to celebrate the launch of this year's 4W New Writing anthology (#23), which includes nearly seventy writers from around Australia and overseas who together constitute the long-list for the 2012 Booranga Prize. I met David Gilbey, the 4W editor, and quite a few poets I hadn't heard read before.

This guy for example, Pony, who has the sort of short bio you can really do something with:

Pony lives somewhere in Melbourne. He spends his time writing poetry, growing vegetables, reading, resting, hanging out and partying. And making online dating profiles and deleting them.

Pony 

Another gardener, Stu Hatton, read a nifty little poem called 'a book of buddhist monks', which ends with a thud. You'll have to seek it out to see why; no spoilers here.

Stu Hatton

I read one of my weed loving poems, Noxious, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Booranga Poetry Prize alongside Stu Hatton, Brett Dionysius and Vlanes poems. Michael Farrell won the prize with The Structuralist Cowboy – good one Mickey Faz! 

Noxious

A weed is by common definition a plant in the wrong place, in my poems a number of letters follow such arrangement.

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Step by Step

My permaculture poem Step by Step was yesterday awarded joint runner-up in the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Today I recorded the poem with some guitar accompaniment.



Overland will publish the poem in the next issue. Here's what judge Peter Minter very generously said about the work:

I think it’s probably fair to say that reading Jones’ ‘slow-text mesostic’ poems (cf John Cage) is a bit like extruding the brain through barbed wire mesh. But, as the saying goes the grass is always greener on the other side, so it’s a worthwhile endeavour in the end. Jones makes an explicit attack upon the romantic self-consciousness of white Australian literary culture and its oblivious transportation of European aesthetic modes into antipodean landscapes. ‘Step by step’ is not about ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Its typographical interferences and static slowdown, hook and strain the reading process, such that emotion, reflection and cognition are caught and inflected in the present-time of reading. Jones forces us to grapple with a specific set of poethical considerations: how does language-use contribute to the violence of colonisation and machineries and economies of ecological destruction? What kinds of vernacular interventions might inhibit such violence? Can poetry save the world? Jones’ poetry isn’t for everyone, but the world he is saving is the same one you’re living in. 

Congratulations Joel Ephraim who's poem Rock Candy won the prize, and Sam Langer's Clouds fall like snow on the sky’s clear rocks who shares runner up with me. Also congrats to commended poets Rebecca Kylie Law, Alana Kelsall, Ella O’Keefe, Astrid Lorange, Fiona Hile, Stephen Nichols, Andrew Slattery, Banjo James, Molly Murn and Aden Rolfe.

Read Peter's full report here.

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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.

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A first solar poem? geopoets, geopolitics and the first world oil war

In his comic masterpiece, The History of Oil, Robert Newman insightfully states that Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wouldn't be known today if they were sent to Iraq instead of France almost a century ago. Looking deeper at this claim it seems conspiratorial that mainstream historians have not focussed on oil as the main trigger for the outbreak of war. In his book Oil and the origins of the ‘War to make the world safe for Democracy’ (2007), F. William Engdahl writes of the origins of the First World War in geopolitical terms:

Beginning the 1880’s a group of leading German industrialists and bankers around Deutsche Bank’s Georg von Siemens, recognized the urgent need for some form of colonial sources of raw materials as well as industrial export outlet. With Africa and Asia long since claimed by the other Great Powers, above all Great Britain, German policy set out to develop a special economic sphere in the imperial provinces of the debt-ridden Ottoman Empire. The policy was termed “penetration pacifique” an economic dependency which would be sealed with German military advisors and equipment. Initially, the policy was not greeted with joy in Paris, St. Petersburg or London, but it was tolerated. Deutsche Bank even sought, unsuccessfully, to enlist City of London financial backing for the keystone of the Ottoman expansion policy – the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway project, a project of enormous scale and complexity that would link the interior of Anatolia and Mesopotamia (today Iraq) to Germany. What Berlin and Deutsche Bank did not say was that they had secured subsurface mineral rights, including for oil along the path of the railway, and that their geologists had discovered petroleum in Mosul, Kirkuk and Basra. Read on here.

Britain, with its coal-to-oil-transitioning navy (under Churchill), couldn't accept these strategies in the race for greater industrial power, and so youthful bodies soon started piling up on the Great Dead Heap 1914-18, including the following unmarked body that Owen memorialises in his poem Futility.

Move him into the sun -

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, -

Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

Full-nerved, - still warm, - too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?

The last two lines almost speak in geopolitical terms; of mining the earth. Solar energy frames this poem – the potentiality of the sun over the futility of war; fossil energy – ancient sunlight – used by industrialists for a century of war (from Owen to now) against the world.

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