Adam Beardsworth : Global Weirding: Poetry at the End of the World

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

          Things aren't going well. The globe warms. Oceans acidify, glaciers melt, seas rise, species die off. Poetry persists, but I often wonder why; or rather, I ask myself what role poetry and other aesthetic pursuits has in helping to stave off the sixth mass extinction. It's probably this question, more than any other, that troubles my own writing practice, perhaps driven by a semi-conscious guilt that I need to be doing more than playing with language when faced with such existential threats. But what is that "more" in a poetic context? The American poet Forrest Gander, like Emerson before him, says the goal of poetry is "To see what's there and not already / patterned by familiarity."[1] From an ecocritical perspective, this means paying attention to the ways the ecological itself has been "patterned by familiarity," and seeking a language capable of liberating representations of Nature from an Enlightenment rationality that has taught us to see it as either resource for human consumption or pastoral space for human retreat (which kind of amount to the same thing). Writing ecologically today must be more than writing about "Nature," with all the culturally constructed codifications that term brings to bear. Such nature writing is guilty, consciously or not, of externalizing the ecological, positing it as something outside of us, as the less privileged term in a Nature/culture binary that continues to exalt human (and humanist) interests above ecological embeddedness. Too often, in Stacy Alaimo's words, it "removes us from the scene and ignores the extent to which human agencies are entangled with those of nonhuman creatures."[2] Ecological writing today must chip away at this binary by focusing on the embodied entanglements of ecology and organism.

          The challenge of ecopoetics, as Cary Wolfe writes in relation to Wallace Stevens, is to "listen, watch, observe, and be . . .  in the context of our multitasking, ultra-distracted mediascape."[3] As if we are looking at Stevens's blackbirds. Doing so, however, requires commitment to what Timothy Morton has termed "the ecological thought," which he characterizes as "a virus that infects all other areas of thinking."[4] To think ecologically, for Morton, is to deconstruct Nature as both ideology and reified commodity. It recognizes that writing ecologically does not necessarily mean writing of forests, rivers, landscapes, or oceans. Rather, the ecological thought is "a practice and process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings--animal, vegetable, and mineral. Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy."[5]

          For me, how to write the ecological thought is a consuming question. How does one locate a poetics that, in Wolfe's words, "reproduces rather than represents the complex logic of physical (and, specifically, biological) systems in ongoing acts of meaning-making that are, at the same time, processes of individuation."[6] One possible path is through the weird, what Morton refers to as "global weirding": "In the term weird there flickers a dark pathway between causality and the aesthetic dimension, between doing and appearing, a pathway that dominant Western philosophy has blocked and suppressed."[7]  Not just paying attention but paying attention to what has always been there but has not always been seen outside of its ideological contexts. Like when Don Domanski writes of "the physical music / and the physical body / and that papery feeling / behind all physical things." (18).[8] Or when Christopher Dewdney reminds us that "the eye of the needle / is still the eye of the storm" (15).[9] It's that "papery feeling" or the "eye of the storm" that ought to direct ecological poetics, an autopoiesis that foregoes knowing in favour of letting be known, a search for the irreducibly strange, for that which renders clear the falsity of the Nature/culture binary, the logic of domination that overdetermines language in its domestication of the ecological. Easier said than done, but a direction for those of us writing on the precipice of ecological collapse.

 

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[1] Gander, Forrest. "Unto Ourselves: To See What's There." Twice Alive. New Directions, 2021.
[2] Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. pp. 144
[3] Wolfe, Cary. Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens's Birds. University of Chicago Press, 2020. pp. xii.
[4] Morton, Timothy. "The Ecological Thought." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Third Edition. Eds. Vincent Leitch et al. Norton, 2018. pp. 2621.
[5] ibid.
[6] Wolfe, Ecological Poetics. pp. xiii.
[7] Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology. Columbia UP, 2016. pp. 5.
[8] Domanski, Don. "An Evening in Cape Breton." Wolf Ladder. Coach House, 1991. pp. 18.
[9] Dewdney, Christopher. "This My Emissary." The Radiant Inventory. McClelland and Stewart, 1990. pp. 15.

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Beardsworth is the author of No Place Like (Gaspereau 2023), and the critical book Confessional Poetry in the Cold War (Palgrave 2022). He is the editor of Horseshoe Literary Magazine and a professor of Literature at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University. He lives with his family in Steady Brook, NL.

Miranda Mellis : Coincidence is Poetry

For Denise Newman

 

 

 

we three are assigned to signs, second attention sees
co/incidence
deities woven throughout the web of creation 

when we discover continuity, our ordinariness
we simultaneously observe the fragmented guesswork of consciousness, how it
speculates, makes collages, connects experiences
to make a house inside infinity 

Denise says coincidence is poetry
self-other boundary collapses as she calls across the field
the answer that is no answer confirms space itself, refuge
of all silence and noise 

Denise says death is a kind of language
writes her elegy into the universe 

readers, writing is a mystical act
writings are conceptual whirlwinds, vortices
we enter them and spin
dialogue between living and dead, past and future 

Denise says
your adversary is you
the monster is a puppet 

is this why teachers say
invite the demons to tea?
give them an offering 

respect their need
to be known and seen 

the shapeshifter Proteus
caught in the mesh
has no final form
keeps changing
is mind

 

 

 

 

Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (Nightboat Books); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody (forthcoming, Solid Objects 2026). With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she is a professor at The Evergreen State College. Read her intermittencies here.

 

Jon Cone : Thoughts Prompted by the Publication of AGAINST PERFECTIONISM & OTHER POEMS

 

 

 

 

It is nearly impossible for me to write poetry without an awareness of my reading of poetry. I am hopeless. I read poetry constantly. Perhaps I’m addicted. There are times when I think I’ve been ruined by poetry. I might, for example, find myself having to write a simple note to a contractor yet I’m utterly prevented from doing so. It’s hilarious or it would be, if it were happening to someone else. The amount of poetry I’ve written far exceeds my published record. Nothing unusual there. The work I’ve published is relatively small but mostly presentable.  Two or three early disasters sought penance. I revisit my published work at times and wonder how did I manage to write it, how many bright unbalanced insights. The poet as he or she ages moves towards the minimal. This seems a natural development.  Yet there are eruptions of garrulous exuberance, often spiritual in tone. I was never much for narrative when younger, though I longed to tell stories. Of course, I continue to try: when a story approaches me it does so by indirection or even evasion like a fugitive. Truly I admire story tellers. My father stuttered, surely an impediment to storytelling. While I don’t stutter, I have habits of hesitation that might be gifts for poetry in disguise. I think in terms of singular images, and the space between one image and the next might be comparable to the space between one stanza and the following. The poetic sequence has always appealed as a method of building something substantial from out of the atomic elements. However, the compressed lyric seems enough all on its own. William Bronk, the neglected American poet, who ran a family quarry, wrote brilliantly compact lyrics. They were like chunks of rock, granitic some of them. Robert Bringhurst, wrote poems of great clarity, mining the pre-Socratics, creating poems that seemed made of fire and air, ice and antler. And that is certainly another way to do it. I also engage in the pursuit of poems about ordinary events. Then I might read Roo Borson and suddenly see how the ordinary becomes its own mysterious form of transcendence. Then I’m inspired to write a poem, or attempt to write a poem, along the lines Borson demonstrates.  Years ago in elementary school I remember reading the animal stories of Sir Charlies G.D. Roberts (1860-1943). I’m sure no one reads those anymore, perhaps with reason, but they were thrilling stories because Roberts had great empathy for the non-human which he managed to convert into powerful language. Some aspect of the poet’s enterprise was foretold in my encountering those stories. I try in all my poetry to raise up – I paraphrase – the mysterious quanta of language that seems to pulse beneath the living tradition itself.  I hope most of all my efforts are sincere.

 

 

 

 

Jon Cone is a Canadian poet, editor, and writer who lives in Iowa City. He grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario, attended University of Western Ontario, in London, where he majored in English and Philosophy. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Recent publications also include New Year Begun (Subpress Editions: Brooklyn, NY, 2022); Liminal: Shadow Agent, pts 1 and 2 (Greying Ghost, Salem, MA, 2022); An Ice Cream Truck Stalled at the Bottom of the World: a collection of plays/written with Rauan Klassnik (Plays Inverse, Pittsburgh, PA 2020); Cold House (espresso, Toronto, ON, 2017).  His recent poetry has appeared in the journals ant5 (Eugene, OR) and Scant (Manchester, UK).  His recent reviews have appeared in Rain Taxi (Minneapolis, MN). For eight years he edited the international literary review World Letter (Iowa City, 1991-1999).