Author: Margaret McKeon

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Book just published: Language, Land and Belonging: Poetic Inquiries

Natalie Honein and Margaret McKeon are thrilled to share that our book Language, Land and Belonging: Poetic Inquiries has now been published by Vernon Press. We are very grateful for all the contributing authors whose work creates the beautiful tapestry of this book.

Available at 24% discount using coupon CFC124152876D at https://vernonpress.com/book/1686

 

This volume takes up themes emergent from the 7th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry (ISPI) which invited participants to reflect on the United Nations Declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. In this refereed collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors use poetic inquiry to explore the importance of their ancestral languages and lands, and consider the Indigenous languages and peoples of the lands where they live.

Situated in diverse global contexts, poet-researchers examine the intersectionality of their languages, their lands, and their sense of belonging. They offer relational understandings of, and articulate obligations for, their environment and communities. Through stories of shared generational pain and renewal, each author brings the reader into their world of learning and growth. They do this through discourses of belonging and relational responsibilities that tie them to a place, a genealogy.

As a method of study that incorporates poetry into academic research, poetic inquiry is concerned with particularity, complexity, and transformations. Making research more visceral and evocative, it invites researchers to examine and engage with the knowledge they seek through a continual process of questioning, welcoming, and awareness. In this volume, poetic inquiry helps to honor languages and histories taken for granted; it allows looking back in order to reexamine, redefine, and make sense of the present and its shortcomings while reimagining a different future. This work seeks to reclaim, through poetic inquiry, wisdom of language, land, and belonging.

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New collection, Götterdämmerung, by Len Gasparini

We’re glad to share an excerpt from a new ecopoetic collection by Len Gasparini:

Götterdämmerung is an ecopoetic collection, a lyrical assault on the Anthropocene. The poetry collection includes three essays, two of which are a sociological reflection on the works of Milton Acorn and Ted Plantos, and one that reflects on the connection between nature and poetry. The title poem is like Eliot’s “The Waste Land” of the 21st century.

 

 

 

You’ll find it here:  https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/978177183547

Götterdämmerun

I

In 2018, I saw by the false dawn’s light
the first robin of spring.
It lay on my doorstep. Dead.
If signs are taken for wonders,
what sign was this?

The signs environ us.
As a tellurian of the Anthropocene,
can you not tell the signs
by sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch?
We have despoiled Nature with pollution
beyond the point of no solution.
We have created a second Nature
in the image of the first
so as not to believe that we live in paradise.
(From Mother Earth to Earth Mother
to Mother Nature only women know nurture.)
Nature is full of surprises.

The signs environ us.
Earth, air, water, and fire.
We live, and we expire.
Acid rain, acid rain, go away,
don’t come again another day.
We’ll go to the woods no more,
the trees have been clear-cut.

I see condo-mania under construction
in a deep excavation a city block square …
Sky-high decadence, says an advertisement.
(“buildung supra buildung supra buildung”)
Termite towers
Montreal Toronto Vancouver
I hear a pneumatic drill. I smell an oil spill.
I remember the taste of road tar I chewed as a kid.
By a streambank I touch the seedpod of a touch-me-not.

The natural world resides in the rhythms,
variations, and combinations of certain patterns:
the spirals of pine cones, fish scales, seashells;
the zigzags of lightning, the geometry of spiderwebs;
the symmetry of snowflakes, the wavy lines of surf;
frostwork, palm trees grazing the horizons …

Is technology conditioning us
to become an abstraction
in a virtual environment?
Are you a mere mechanism
in a mechanistic universe?
Have we all lost touch with life?
We are in danger of dehumanizing ourselves.
Nobody dances anymore.
Nobody dances anymore.
We have nothing in hand but our cell phones.

For global warming read GLOBAL WARNING.
We drove past the first sign years ago
when gasoline and diesel fuel were cheaper.
Climate change: a euphemism
that sounds like a video game.
Greenhouse effect: a misnomer.
Ditto greenhouse gas; moreover,
the etymon of chaos is gas.
Do we need to make new cars every year?
Earth Day 1970. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

“The poetry of earth is never dead,” said Keats.
“The whole earth is our hospital,” said T.S. Eliot.
“The earth is an Indian thing,” said Jack.
“Nobody owns the earth,” said Bill.

The earth is licking its festering sores.
The earth is suffering from overpopulationpollution.
“We are a plague on the earth,” said Sir David Attenborough.

Garden gnomes are picking the tomatoes.
Farming has gone to pot.
Ill from breathing herbicides, the scarecrow
now lies in a woodlot.
Swamps and marshes are drained for farming …
the water table has dropt, harming
plants and wildlife—and it is too goddamn late,
too goddamn late to replant this earth.

____

Len Gasparini is the author of numerous books of poetry, five short-story collections, two children’s books, a work of non-fiction, and a play. He was awarded the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize and won the NOW Open Poetry Stage event. He resides in his hometown of Windsor, Ontario.

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Montreal International Poetry Prize

The Montreal International Poetry Prize is inviting submissions, reaching out particularly the ecopoetics community.

This year’s judge is the Pulitzer Prize winning American poet Yusef Komunyakaa.

The prize offers $20,000 for the winning poem. The submission deadline is June 1st, 2020.

Please follow the link for information: https://www.montrealpoetryprize.com/2020-competition

The Montreal International Poetry Prize has become a truly global competition, supported by its international jury of award-winning poets from North America, the Caribbean, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Nigeria, and Uganda, and with participants from more than 70 countries. The management prize is hosted Department of English at McGill University.

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An Ever River, Ecopoetry from David Russell

Glad to share from a recent collection of ecopoetry from David Russell, An Ever River, published by Palegrave Press.

An Ever River

Prime time, swallowed whole.
Could the universe, just once,
have poured itself into a molecule
so that, thereafter,
nothing could flow?

Never to suckle a broken circuit
for sparking life;
never split by caesarean pangs
of primal punctures.

Black hole never thinned to liquid,
boiling mud, foundation pustules,
turning all to gas.

All words are now compelled to use
the speech synthesizer of the global dish.

So whence the river,
its source in rejection
generating dragging threads –
bubbling, puddling, squelching,
steaming, clouding, drizzling,
splashing process

Where would we be if nothing flowed?
or would the truth be bared
if water found its ends
without the flowing means

* * *

Round every dam,
above all inundations, beyond all droughts
the river bubbles
blobs it             ever on

bleeding out the parched bed’s cracks.

One river is in every river.
every river recycles to one river.
Let all be laminated, superimposed
rising through fired mud beds,
their crystal sheen, chemical, pure
tippling underground,mountain rill;

forked, widened through basin faults,
embracing every swelling,
feeding the clouds to give all back,

siphoned off to feed past plains,
for grains and pulses
stock, rodent, and their plague-guests;

so that the sea, long past greedy
would not devour it all,
sucked off for dams and factories,
vast barriers, shields
for ravaging and wars,

pockets through the centuries
to save and drown –
only at rare junctures diverted.

Once laden, this river dragged its sludge
throttled by pustule settlements,
banked by insect-egg bin-liners,
scummed, frothed and sediment-clouded:
The acrid stout of a fumbling home-brewer

now cleansed, through dereliction,
readmitting life,
a happy adjunct to proclaim

the true mess swept from sight.

Once, far beyond erectus, sapiens, Neanderthal,
it fed, embraced stampedes,
massed reptilian, bird and mammal flesh
in swallowing, fossil-printing beds
suffused meanwhile with blood and effluent.

Then, in our species time,
it flanked massacres,
punctuation marks for ruthless millennia
straddled by canoes, submersibles.

Some bodies floated, bloated to clog downstream,
some helmets loosened,

inverted to build meaningless boats.

Sometimes it flanked great ceremonies, phased into festivals,
got scummed with battered lager cans and sodden wrappers,
mulch-brown and creamed with tack, peppered from abandoned ashtrays.

The dredgers came and went and, present-focused,
the contorted loop

full circle of prehistory from monocellular poison
to strained reaches of torture growth, perverted contents, twisted molecules.

* * *

On revisitation,
with masses under the bridge,

generic memories shrunk and muted, I stand in a clear stretch
where there is no bridge in sight.

Such myriads transitory, one-directional;
some can reverse into the human memory.

Old palaces, monuments crumble into their own façades, mirrored by brash renovation.

The cycles emulate and modulate the tides.

Clean, dirty, overpopulated, vacant squeaky splendor, son et lumière,
beams us back to what we thought things were before the truth unbunged the drain,
emitting odour of perspective,
its trickling blended with the general stream.

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Call for Submissions: Poems That Explore Our Impact and Reliance on the Watershed

Below is a call for submissions shared here: http://caitlin-press.com/call-for-submissions-poems-that-explore-our-impact-and-reliance-on-the-watershed/

by on JUNE 19, 2018 in CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Call for book two in the Refugium Trilogy

Working title: Poems for the Watershed

Caitlin Press is currently accepting submissions from across Canada and beyond for an anthology of poems that explores our impact and reliance on the watershed.

Deadline for submissions is October 15, 2018.

A watershed is an area where water — the necessity of life second only to air — falls, filters and collects.

In Canada the watershed runs into the Pacific, Arctic, Hudson Bay and the Atlantic. This sweet water houses the aquatic ecosystems that feed and nurture not only the people, industries and animals on land but also drains into the world’s oceans. Industries, dams and pipelines threaten the very life force of living species and the land on this plant.

In this second book, following on Refugium: Poems for the Pacific Yvonne Blomer is calling on poets to find the metaphors and language for a new revolution, one that will travel into the thoughts of readers and create openings in them that could lead to change. Without change, poems, music and stories may be the only refugium of these waters and the creatures in them.

Please submit up to two poems to:

Yvonne Blomer
Poems for the Watershed
1101 Glenora Place Victoria BC V8P 2C2

Or email as pdf or word attachments or in the body of an email to

refugium.watersheds at gmail dot com

Please note the following:

  1. contributors are invited to read Refugium: Poems for the Pacific, the original, for a better understanding of the poetic ecosystem the editor is creating in the trilogy;
  2. the editor especially encourages Indigenous writers, writers of colour, writers from the LGBTQ2S community, writers with disabilities and women-identifying authors to submit their work for consideration;
  3. contributors should ensure that their name, mailing address, citizenship, phone number and email are in the cover letter along with the titles of the poems;
  4. contributors will receive some remuneration;
  5. expected publication date: fall 2019 (not guaranteed);
  6. previously unpublished poems preferred but published will also be accepted

Yvonne Blomer, Victoria’s poet laureate, will edit the anthology. Blomer has published three collections of poetry, most recently As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press) and a travel memoir titled Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur. In 2017 she edited Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017) and also co-edited in 2013 Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press).Her first book, a broken mirror, fallen leaf, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She won Leaf Press’s Overleaf Chapbook Contest in 2017 for her poems Elegies for Earth.

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You’re invited!

Our ecopoetics group has partnered with Christi Kramer on the Vancouver launch of an exciting new book, Ghost Fishing: An Eco Justice Poetry Anthology. This event will take place on the summer solstice, June 21st at 7pm at the Historic Joy Kogawa House.

Please refer to the attached poster for details: Ghost Fishing

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Margaret: Walking Pacific Spirit Park

Walk quiet among quiet trees

and dog, airplane, helicopter

projectile turbo muffler, but

without wind, trees are quiet

 

Four kiddy children nimbly scale

a fence that guards the brook’s fish fry

to play in the still brook with a stick

“Jack, Amy don’t get muddy shoes”

 

Man on a bicycle, grey ponytail

and his voice fly behind and ahead

Sing a trumpet song to quiet trees

Trees are quiet, there is no wind

 

Raven wings stir a whistling wind

above a quiet walk among quiet trees

One raven and two, small exchange

and a nest, rough but silver inside

 

Sunshine lifts moss laden lower

branches, green fire huffed alight

Sun hums in long shadows, floor

laden with staff lines sings

 

Walk quiet among quiet trees

Blue sky barks and sunshine

roars. A still brook laughs giddy

photosynthesis trumpets and I sing

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