Showing posts with label biophysical poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biophysical poetry. Show all posts
Walking for Food
Monday, April 30, 2012
I've been in Hobart for twelve days staying with my friend Glen, attempting to put together a first draft of all the chapters I've been working on over the past thirty months that constitute my doctoral research work, 'Walking for Food' (working title).
While at Glen's I was able to forage in his local neighbourhood. I brought to our table rosemary, figs, mallow, dandelion, hawksbeard, apples, feijoas, fennel, borage flowers, stickyweed, rosehips, crab apples, and up on Mount Nelson high above the suburbs I came across the one fungus I saw in hobart, the curry punk (Piptoporus australiensis), which I consumed only as sensory delight. Walking and foraging helped me loosen up my sedentary studious body, but I also resorted to quick break outs in Glen's apartment overlooking the Derwent River.
Arriving back in Melbourne yesterday morning I wandered once more disappointingly into The Age while I waited for a cup of tea and read another stupid article on foraging. Will the bourgeoise please take a plate of death caps now. Actually the article was not really on foraging at all but on secreting, privatising and selfishly capitalising on the autonomous food commons. Arseholes!
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| Photo: Meredith O'Shea |
At the dinner I was on the affirmative team with Tasmanian food writer Graeme Phillips and my friend Alison, a photographer and fungi educator who I've been doing an informal apprenticeship with while helping her out with the brilliant workshops she runs. We argued for a return to commonsense and self-accountability, not the continuation of the nanny state. Naturally I found this debate a platform to critique anti-ecological society, its estrangement due to a lost connection with food. We won!
Then after the dinner I hooked up with Glen for a final bash at Hobart nightlife, and headed to the Brisbane Hotel to see the FUN FUN FUN world of the 5678s. They were very cheap, cool and mingled with the common mycelium after the show. I had a chat with bassist Akiko Omo about all things punk, fungus and Hobart.
We went to the garden of love
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Community gardeners, poets and readers met at the new community garden Rea Lands Park today to share poems and food in the sunshine.
Some of the poems were musical.
Some political and intense.
And some a little difficult to swallow but were appreciated as part of this creative commons.
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Revisiting older writing while thinking about form and ecological poetries
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
From How To Do Words With Things: A Free-dragging Manifesto (2008), this text first published as Lalgambook: the Djadjawurrung and Coca-Cola Amatil, in D!SSENT magazine, Spring 2008.
Revisited, revised, reposted...
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Is the metabolic potential for a biophysical poetry – formed by the body (in an era of unfolding climate chaos and fossil energy descent) – an essential transition from catabolic literatures, which feed upon each other and perpetuate the systems of art that mediate our logic?
Leaves and limbs
Monday, December 6, 2010
...and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855Read more...
The question is carried
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Is the metabolic potential for a biophysical poetry – a poetry of the body and its environment (in an era of unfolding climate chaos and fossil energy descent) – an essential transition from catabolic literatures, which feed upon each other and perpetuate the systems of art that mediate our logic and make us increasingly separate from the experience of everyday life?
Applying Fukuoka to Poetry
Friday, December 3, 2010
Can we apply Masanobu Fukuoka's 'Four Principals of Natural Farming' to poetry? The principals are: 1. No cultivation. 2. No chemical fertiliser or prepared compost. 3. No weeding by tillage or herbicides. 4. No dependence on chemicals. Here goes:
1. No cultivation – no paper; no page*.
2. No chemical fertiliser or prepared compost – no vowels.
3. No weeding by tillage or herbicides – no consonants.
4. No dependence on chemicals – no alphabets.
*Nevertheless, the perennial problem of representation remains.
Site-specific question: Is the metabolic potential for a biophysical poetry – a poetry of the body and its environment (in an era of unfolding climate chaos and fossil energy descent) – an essential transition from catabolic literatures, which feed upon each other and perpetuate the systems of art that mediate our logic and make us increasingly separate from the experience of everyday life?
Photos: Meg Ulman
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A permaculture poetics
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
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.
Click for bigger.
Plasticity?
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
I was recently invited to submit a short video poem as part of a collection to be exhibited at this year's Sydney Writer's Festival (17-23 May), curated by Angela Stretch. What, video poetry at a writer's festival? Outrageous! But don't be alarmed, the exhibition doesn't make the official programme.
So, I decided to make a new work with Zeph, which I finished editing today. It will be viewed without sound in Sydney, but I've made it to work with audio as well. Meg helps build the vocals and all together we make another Artist as Family + Peej collective effort. Enjoy!
born free of ideology
we are gullible and trusting.
we learn from our elders
and we pass on the abstractions
to our children.
the depression rate
doubles every ten years.
Read more...
born free of ideology
we are gullible and trusting.
we learn from our elders
and we pass on the abstractions
to our children.
the depression rate
doubles every ten years.
Primitive poetics
Monday, March 8, 2010
On Saturday a few of us adults took 12 boys on a bush adventure for Zeph's birthday. We walked for two and a half hours, stopping to make, observe or find things to collect. One of the activities they were assigned was to collectively build a shelter in ten minutes. The first peg shows the result. At the end of the walk we came across the remnants of a large forest installation I made between 2000 and 2005, where boardwalks and wallaby grass tracks led you through a series of environments subtly altered as physical or biophysical poems.
The type of sedge grass in this forest is the oldest locally living flora. Their origins predate eucalypt forests and are supposedly as ancient as the dinosaurs.Greenwash #9 in Trouble - Uncapitalised Fruit
Monday, March 1, 2010
Have you ever wondered why public parks (with few exceptions) are not filled with fruit and nut trees, vegetables and herbs? Or why schools don’t teach children about local ecology and Indigenous food plants? Well that would be sending the wrong message: That people could forage at their leisure for their own resources.
Click on the below text to continue reading.
The work just installed, 1999.
Zephyr practicing parkour on the library wall, 2010.
Giving a Fuji a light late-summer prune, 2010.
Showing Zeph the ropes for maintaining the poems, 2010.
This work also derives from childhood memories of walking home from school with my older brother, picking apples and plums on the 'nature strips' as we went.
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