Category: Poetic Musings

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.

 

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.

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 21^st 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.

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 Admin on JUNE 19, 2018 in CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

June 21 Book Launch of Ghost Fishing: An Eco Justice Poetry Anthology

Read about the March 18th event and continued walking invitation, as well as some art-ful offerings:

March 15, 2018

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

I never think of people on the coast living in condos

even though I sleep seven floors above a false creek.

 

We deserve dirt pathways, or gravel, but

not that stuff crumbled down by us and trucked in from elsewhere.

 

Line us up along the shore to squat where we

can smell new salt.

 

Let them see us shucking our oysters,

our children diving into blue bushes to gorge on real sugar.

 

Seagulls will bark overhead, drop their stale snacks. Those wings

mix the wind, put on a show.

 

Leave it to the birds to export the organic seeds; we

will stay grounded.

PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Carl Leggo

when I write

a poem I begin

by laying down

letters and words

even though I

seldom know

where the words

will take me

 

I am always on

a Winnie the Pooh

meandering explore

that might lead

somewhere but

probably will not

 

I must be patient:

how many colors

of green are there?

can the colors

of green be counted?

 

Rita’s photo does not

call my attention

to a punctum

 

instead I am lost

in the maze     maelstrom

chaos     except I am not

really lost     I feel

a sense of belonging

here     a sense I cannot

make simple sense

of this image composed

of shadow lines colors

 

I see the sunlight

in the gaps     I gasp

because I also see

the light in the leaves

 

I can almost see

photosynthesis at work

the leaves convert

light energy into

chemical energy

and oxygen for

sustaining life

on Earth     I want

to attend to light

I want to know

synthesis     I want

to acknowledge

how the parts are

put together     made

wonder     full

like art and poetry

 

I will learn to breathe

with the tree like

pulmonary veins

carry oxygen

from lungs to heart

 

I will linger

with Rita’s art

so I can see with

the heart how all

of life is created

connected     sustained

by intricate networks

of communication

steeped in love