A permaculture poetics

Last year I wrote that "The potential for a (post-industrial, post aggregate-growth) biophysical poetry originates in the development of intellectual humus – nutrient rich, responsive, aerated and well-drained minds not functioning in isolation to everything else" (Angelaki 14:2, Ecopoetics and Pedagogies). I was outlining why I believed permaculture, at a systems level, was a far better model for the arts and for culture generally if we are to move beyond the dominant anti-ecological ideology of aggregate growth capitalism. Employing biomimicry as a conceptual model for our food production can also apply to the arts, and will assist in building an ecological culture.

This year I was invited to submit a poem to a new online poetry journal called Spiral Orb, which its US based editor, Eric Magrane, suggests is "an experiment in permaculture poetics". Wow! Things are really moving now. Here's the link to Spiral Orb's table of contents page, itself a composted poem. And here's a link to my contribution, Permamesostic, my first substantial poem for the year (which you can see a detail of below).

So, enjoy the polyculture that is this exciting new poetry journal!

With poems by Bailey, Bowden, Buckheit, Buntin, Conrad, Delea, Doreski, Gens, Jones, Lang, Peterson, Rerick, Staples, Sugar, Toso, Wankan and an opening poem composting lines from each of the pieces in Spiral Orb One. Each line is embedded with a hyperlink to its original poem. Once at each poem, you will find links to the other poems in Spiral Orb One. Anticipate the poems making contact with one another in an odd and perfect manner.

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Aggregated idiocy

We are at a point in time in Australia where environmental consultants are having to recommend to government which rivers will need to die in order for others to survive. Such is the legacy of our occupation. Man-made ecocide follows the banners of "progress" and "growth". But the reports will get buried; another ecological violation will go unaccounted; another government policy, greenwashed as "sustainability", will seduce and delude a largely urban constituency.

The often-invoked term 'sustainability' tends to obscure the seriousness of the situation; clearly no culture which sets in motion massive processes of biospheric degradation which it has normalised, and which it cannot respond to or correct, can hope to survive for very long. Val Plumwood, 2002

Greenwash #10 in Trouble - Art, Abstraction and Animal Cruelty

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