re:)Fermenting culture (audio version)

I have recently recorded re:)Fermenting culture: a return to insight through gut logic 

as an audio book. 

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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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Dwell, at Plumwood Mountain

Plumwood Mountain, an Australian journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics, recently published its inaugural issue. According to the journal's editors,

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.

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The poet's footprint is the poem

I've been following Adam Roberts' engaging five part series on the state of contemporary poetry, published in The Atlantic. I'm honoured to be included in his fourth post in the series, which looks at ecological and slow poetries.

With Slow Poetry in mind, it might be necessary to say that it's not enough, anymore, for a poem to be "about nature" for it to be properly ecological... Jonathan Skinner's journal ecopoetics and Brenda Ijima's anthology eco language reader are two resources that do wonders towards helping move this discussion along. The basic argument goes something like this: the "nature poem" of old – insofar as it holds the "natural" and "human" apart as separate categories, repressing social and political context – risks reducing nature to a kind of territory for human epiphany, engaging in a kind ecological orientalism. Says Skinner: "Juliana Spahr, a poet in the Bay Area, put it brilliantly...the nature poet focuses on the bird and the bird's nest, but doesn't turn around to confront the bulldozer ... Ecopoetry expands the frame to include the bulldozer."

In this article Roberts hints at something very important and rarely discussed in ecological poetries – the relocalisation of poetry itself; the poem has to be walking distance, to expand Cuban permaculturalist Roberto Perez's maxim – 'the food has to be walking distance'. How this changes the poem is the context for my doctorate.

We went foraging for yam daisies a few days ago. Yams were once an important staple of the Djadja Wurrung, our local Yes people. Including yam daisies and other bush foods (lomandras, bracken fern, pigface and warrigal greens) into our within-walking-distance-diet calibrates us to Djadja Wurrung thinking – ecologically embodied resource-gathering, hunting and nomadic farming. Through foraging we become aware of the ecological intelligence that has been lost since invasion, and we become deeply sensitive to nuance, complexity and intensity within reciprocal-competitive natural systems. After returning from our yam forage I wrote this poem, Moonar (yam daisy), as a slow text mesostic to celebrate our increasingly relocalised existence and our deep respect for the traditional peoples of our local landbase.

Click for bigger.

For me, the important thing with a slow-text is the physical impact the poem has on the body. A coke 'n chips attention span just isn't going to cut it (either in terms of reading poems or having a future). A slow text forces a slow reading, at least for the first read; the eye stumbles over rocky ground, no neat flat monological lawns for it to glide over like ad copy; or to use 60s language – no rows of words lining up like colonising soldiers across the page.

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After reading ecopoetics 6/7 and coming home

A poem for Jonathan Skinner and mIEKAL aND.

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Slow-text as food forest

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

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