Showing posts with label slow text. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slow text. Show all posts
Dwell, at Plumwood Mountain
Thursday, February 6, 2014
We publish poetry that may broadly be understood as engaging with a more-than-human context, in a variety of poetic forms, articles on the poetics and intent of ecopoetry, exploring ways in which poetry not only responds to and affects its world, but also ways in which poetic practice can model ecological systems and concerns, the ways in which poems themselves are material, breathy things in a world of animate matter, and reviews of collections of poetry that understand themselves or could be understood as ecopoetry.Plumwood Mountain is part of a cultural reshaping toward what Val Plumwood called an ‘environmental culture’.
My slow-text mesostic, Dwell, was published in this first issue.
Read the previous post regarding my current collaborative performance project.
Step by Step
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
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. Read more...
Pink Blossom
Monday, October 31, 2011
Anthony Petrucci sings my slow text mesostic, Pink Blossom, at the launch of Rabbit Two.
Read more...
A scientific justification of nonscientific 'slow text'
Monday, May 30, 2011
Just as I was finishing a slow text treatment of a Bernard Stiegler transcript (below), my friend Ian sent through a link to an article that states “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”
A Free-dragging manifesto - FREE
Saturday, May 28, 2011
We have just made Words and Things, and my A Free-dragging Manifesto from How to do Words with Things (with Peter O'Mara) available for free download. More info can be found down the right hand column of this blog. Otherwise just click away.
Energy, primitivism and slow text
Monday, May 9, 2011
Primitivism, as a purely intellectual thing, is indeed problematic terrain. However, once the primitive, by which I mean activity that transcends history (such as foraging), cohabits everyday practice, it ceases to be utopian and becomes instead pragmatic, or something not of wishfulness or fantasy. This is especially the case if we are to consider global energy powerdown, where primitive forms will again have currency due to a fall in affluence.
So often ecological thought rides exclusively between humanism and ecology and skips energy altogether. "The energetic is nearly always left out of the equation" (David Holmgren, 2010), which seems strange especially when the aestheticisation or mediatisation of nature – our very predicament, or crisis – is precisely linked to high energy inputs – our affluence. Three hundred years of high fossil fuel productions has necessitated that art leads the disembodiment or 'hyper-separation' (Val Plumwood, 2002) process as populations swell into cities and radicals, peasants and indigenous folk no longer have anywhere to practice unclocked forms.
William Blake, printer and poet, with a love of being naked and in the garden, is one such marker of the end of European art as a low energy, unclocked, minimal noise activity. At the time of writing The Garden of Love (1794) coal furnaces were being build and beginning to change his beloved Albion for ever. Today, the screeching, oil dripping 'blob' of Thomas De Zengotita's Mediated (2005) culture, or the all-tech 'ambient blur' that Timothy Morton describes in Ecology without Nature (2007), are both – blob and blur – necessarily immersed in cheap crude oil, and they must necessarily find primitivist forms abhorrent or at best just another choice in a smorgasboard of options. Whereas, when you consider a powering down, even as a 'long descent' (Greer, 2010), the options to pollute, to be allopoetical, or to drive aesthetics globally, necessarily reduce. This reduction is very scary if you imagine energy powerdown (post global aggregated capitalism) as a return to agricultural toil, direct animal cruelty (as opposed to the indirect global cruelty we exhibit today; passivism is an option as long as others are doing the dirty work), and authoritarian sexual repression. But not so if one considers the possibility of an eroding private property (intellectual and physical) culture and the reestablishment of a foraging commons courtesy of collapsing globalised economies wholly reliant on cheap fossil fuels.
Rather than some vague Rousseauian pigmented or pixalated image of primitivism, which is of course just groundless fantasy, we now have real, of the soil, applied ecological breakthroughs that are current practiced modes of primitivism. These can be evidenced in Masanobu Fukuoka's 'do nothing farming', Permaculture's 'food forestry', and in a growing culture of urban foraging witnessed across the blogosphere (such as here and here).
For me, at least, primitivism is not a conjuring of the old world for old world's sake, but rather an attempt to concieve of a present and future with low energy inputs; today, for reasons to do with social and ecological justice, and tomorrow, for issues of species resilience. We are at the tailend of an era of cheap oil and many thinkers haven't factored this within their intellectual framework. It's like there's an abiding belief there will always be an abundance of energy, making what we do today always possible. Conceiving energy powerdown is to concieve of redistributed (reruralised) populations, which, among many other things, will attend to the homogenisation of global ascent capitalism – the so-called global village. Any socialism – from Marxism to Fascism – persevering with industrialisation is thinking fairly short-term, unless of course there is a conjuring of fantasy world resources on some distant planet.
I'm not advocating here a pure primitivism or necessarily a whole primitivism. It's way too simplistic to think along these lines, or perhaps just too early. However, in attending to technofetishisation and the spectacle and 'false cycles' (Guy Debord) of clock-time, I am advocating a rethinking of the primitive per-se at a time of peaking fossils, phosphates, fish, water and just about every other essential element that drives industrial culture on and on.
As a kind of 'doing-saying' (Joan Retallack) evidence of this rethinking, I repost my video-poem-recipe, A Place of Simple Feeding, after re-recording the spoken words today and adding a brief visual clip of the poem as a slow text 'mesostic' (John Cage) for the page. Or, at least a seconds worth of detail of it. The aesthetics aren't pure, instead they're mutable responses to the less than bodily in art today. The slow text (super and subscripted vowels) shows the physical relationship between letters, words, chance, foraging and berries. A move away from Cartesian letters lining up in monological rows (like this text), or ambient representations requiring large energy inputs – styrofoam art, international careerism et al.
Decapitalised art, decapitalised food.
Read more...
Natural Bitterness
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Natural Bitterness is now available online as a slow text mesostic:
Read the full work here.
Sketch – Making a slow text poem, with hyper (hyphae?) text inputs
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Video-sketch: Drawing, singing, yelling, thinking a slow text poem into being with hyper text inputs and world-as-everything mania, this video illustrates a fictional process of writing the first four stanzas of a new slow text mesostic, Step by Step, after the fact. The attempt with a slow text mesostic is to create silence out of industrialisation's hammering, thus utilising John Cage's mesostics as a chance-induced trigger for slow reading.
Permapoesis at the Victorian Writers' Centre
Saturday, March 26, 2011
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.
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...
Fungi's answer (a slow text mesostic)
Monday, June 7, 2010
Click for bigger.---------------------------
1. Val Plumwood, 2002
2. ibid.
Slow-text as food forest
Monday, October 26, 2009
detail: Jones, P. ‘A Free-dragging Manifesto’, pp. 41-43, ecopoetics, no. 6/7 2006-2009, Australian Ecopoetics Feature, eds. Michael Farrell and Jonathan Skinner, Periplum Editions, USA
A return to free-dragging
Thursday, September 10, 2009
I have just returned from a poetics symposium at UWS organised by Kate Fagan and chaired by Ivor Indyk. Some of the things discussed involved language, translation, identity, form and ecology by poets and academics – Ann Vickery, Philip Mead, Pam Brown, Stephen Muecke, Martin Harrison, Anna Gibbs, John Hawke and Peter Minter, to name a few. And at the end of the symposium a number of us read including Tom Lee, Fiona Wright, Jill Jones and Michael Farrell. I read A Free-dragging Manifesto for the first time this year and, for the first time, as a 'fast text'. The work is about to be published in US journal ecopoetics in its original 'slow text' form. In the meantime you can read a fast text version here.
My book, A Free-dragging Manifesto, can be purchased from this site. Just scroll down the right hand side column and find the details. In case you've missed the many plugs of this two-sided book on my various sites... Peter O'Mara's brilliant volume of spatial poetry, subtext, is published on the reverse side and we share the overall title How To Do Words With Things. Read Astrid Lorange's review in Jacket.
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