“Everything Flows”: Seed 11 Pacific Salmon, in Dark Mountain 21
May 4, 2022 § Leave a comment
I’ve admired the Dark Mountain project for years now. One of my seed poems, Seed 11, Pacific salmon (oxyrhincus) has just appeared in Dark Mountain 21 (Spring 2022):
Our twenty-first issue revolves around the theme of confluence. The image of watersmeet, of two streams merging into one, has long had sacred connotations, as shown by the votive offerings left at the point where rivers meet. This book goes beyond watery metaphor to explore confluence in its complexity: both life-affirming and death-bringing, nourishing and troubling, creative and destructive. Increasingly, the times we live in feel like a confluence of catastrophes: climate, ecological, political, cultural and existential. ‘Collapse’, as poet Sophie Strand notes, ‘is when things that shouldn’t be connected merge.’ The climate disaster unfolding around us is itself a convergence between the breakdown of ancient organic matter and modern industrial ambition, technology, greed and carelessness, a calamitous meeting of worlds.
This is a joint collaboration between Dark Mountain and saltfront.
Poets in this issue: Jeffery Beam, Sharon Black, Adam Gianforcaro, Finn Haunch, Joel Long, Michael McLane, Paul Rankin, Kim Trainor, Jonathan Travelstead, Christopher Watson
Editors: Nick Hunt, Anthea Lawson, Eric Robertson. Poetry: Michael McLane. Art: Ava Osbiston. Production: Nick Hunt.
Cover: ‘Meander’ by Cecily Eno
Dark Mountain: Issue 21 is a hardback book, 264 pages long, printed on FSC-certified paper
ISBN 978-1-8384160-2-7
Excerpt from “Seeds” published in Ecozone
October 28, 2021 § Leave a comment
An excerpt from “Seeds” was published today in Ecozon@, Vol.12, No.2, 2021; “Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene. Seed 8. ELYSIACHLOROTICA(CHLOROPLAST,ENDOSYMBIONT) and Seed 19. GAIA (BIOSPHERE, THE CARNAL FIELD).:
The light reactions, the dark reactions, leaf unfurling, the light—
eastern emerald Elysia, clade Sacoglossa, Elysia chlorotica
littoral, in the salt marshes, the tidal marshes, small pools and shallow creeks,/
leaf unfurling, the light—the pigment chlorophyll absorbs the blues
the reds, the spectral blues, absorb a photon, lose electron flows
to pheophytin to a quinone, flow electrons flow the light reactions…
“Black Mud” + “Tardigrade”
August 1, 2020 § Leave a comment
Two poems of mine have just appeared in Otoliths, Issue 58, Southern Winter 2020 edition. My thanks to Mark Young for publishing another seed, “Tardigrade,” from a sequence on resilience and ecological destruction, as well as the long version of “Black Mud.” I cut down a much shorter version of this poem to serve as words for an Art Song, with music composed by Yi-Ning Lo, for Art Song Lab 2020. Its performance can be screened here.
ᚁ, k’i, betula
April 29, 2020 § Leave a comment
My poem “ᚁ, k’i, betula” has just appeared in Otoliths magazine, Southern Autumn 2020 (Issue 57, 1 May 2020). It’s part of a long sequence I’ve been working on called “Seeds.” My thanks to editor Mark Young for accepting it and setting the complicated text.
ᚁ, beith, birch, first letter of ogam ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜ the tree language.
Is there something it is like to be a birch tree, in the conversion of sunlight to green shadows and tree flesh? …
kim trainor 