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:

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Our Transition

To here –

Wheel of Ecological Culture (permapoesis)

From here –

Wheel of Progress Capitalism (another false cycle)

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The Post Carbon Reader (a video snapshot)

I'm currently reading The Post Carbon Reader, which is a timely anthology of resilience thinking and transition planning. This video is a brief summary of its parts.

"...excessive human activity – either resource exploitation or waste production – can erode the functional integrity of the same ecosystems that make these human activities possible..." p27. "...the human enterprise is a fully embedded, totally dependent subsystem of the ecosphere." p32. "Resilient communities will develop policies that favor greater regional self-reliance..."

– William E Rees, Thinking Resilience, Ch.3, The Post Carbon Reader, Edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, 2010

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Eucalyptus (Oprah) Winfrey

I made this prohibition-sign-cum-visual-poem in 2004. With talk around here of Oprah visiting our pretentious little town in the next few days, this work, if I can be so conceited, borders on prophecy. The tourist operators, the baby boomers who still feel the need to cash up and burn as much resources as they damn well can, are wetting themselves at her possible arrival, their good selfless work in the community emulsifies into profits from unsustainable tourism: increased wealth = increased travel = increased pollution. Oprah brings 300 idiots from America and not one mention of this cost to the planet. Go figure.

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Tipping Point: the realities we face

My inspiration for life is our parents; so many of the values we have come from them … they told us that if you live by your conscience there is no reason to be afraid. - Vandana Shiva

This was probably the most important conference I've attended, and the only one that has employed social-ecology frameworks, while paying attention to the environmental details (such as the considerable percentage of the food that fueled us over two incredible days was organic and locally sourced). It was very apt that the feature on Shiva's life and work appeared in The Age yesterday, the second day of the conference. Shiva will be in Melbourne on friday. My own contribution was, naturally, centred around art and resources, specifically food:

Today I speak on behalf of my household, the Artist as Family, and our very intentional practice of transition away from pollution based ideology. We believe there is a direct exchange between the resources we consume and the kind of art we make. I call this exchange permapoesis. Read on...

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Greenwash #14 in Trouble - Urban Food Forestry as Public Art

Cheap oil has made us forget the proper relationship we once had to the first six inches of the Earth’s crust. Yet we now know that microbial forests—networks of microfauna and microfungi—operate invisibly beneath us, generating the conditions for plant life to flourish and thus produce food. Soil not oil is a clear enough message, but increasingly difficult to translate to an expanding urban population evermore estranged from the interdependent processes of healthy soil ecology and permanent food supply.

To read on click for bigger

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