One poet visits another...

Benjamin Laird's excellent trek through various zones of my poetical biota.

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Greenwash #11 in Trouble - a poethics of foraging

For a few years now I’ve been interested in how permaculture, and its siblings – biodynamic and natural farming – can inform an arts practice. In other words, how an arts practice can follow suit in the way in which it produces things, biomimicking natural systems and therefore having something to return to the land it has taken from. More recently I’ve been thinking about foraging as another such activity that can inform art and help move it on from an industry embedded in capitalist structures. An ethic of foraging attends directly to the reclamation of public food lands and to the reclamation of a ‘collective wealth’. Read on here.

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See also: collectivewealth.org

Image: (detail) Feral Fruit Map, Google map collaboration (as initiated by Axel White), Melbourne, 2010 onwards. To participate contact: axelinaustralia@yahoo.com

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Greenwash #9 in Trouble - Uncapitalised Fruit

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.

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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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Regenerating Community

I gave my Processes of Circularity: Permapoesis and the Shed of Interrelation presentation today as part of the panel Understanding the Value of Arts in Communities at the ReGenerating Community conference, RMIT. My participation was joined by both Ian Cuming's and Victoria Stead's presentations, and there was much biodiversity in our thoughts and activities. My work begins using pragmatic language and ends up as a poem, a transgressional device I have been working on to shift language from the 'rational' to the poethical. It starts:

By the time crude oil was discovered early on in the twentieth century the major socio-political forces – capitalism, communism and the third option fascism – were busily competing for attention and power. Sadly, not one of these three systems offered human societies an ecological model and we have paid dearly for this grand omission ever since.

You can read the entire work here.

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