Seeds
“Seeds” is a sequence from my fourth poetry collection, A blueprint for survival, which will appear with Guernica Editions in Spring 2024.
It thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Each numbered section or ‘seed’ centres on a different organism or human-made object: lentil, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, the order Hymenoptera, tiny house, among others.
Each seed in this long poem is a blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to the current existential threat, each showing a different way of being in the world. I’m also interested in the idea of attention as a moral act, as observed by the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist: “without alertness, we are as if asleep, unresponsive to the world around us; without vigilance, we cannot become aware of anything we do not already know.” I want to focus attention as a form of respect for these organisms, not as resources, but as beings in their own right, withdrawn, dark noumena.
Poems from this series have been published in, or will shortly appear in, international journals: The Journal of Wild Culture, Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, The Cold Mountain Review, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, and Otoliths: A Magazine of E-Things.
These poetry films are scored by the musician Hazel Fairbairn, who also created the music for my poetry films (in 5 segments) based on Ledi. Integument screened at the 20th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, and Ghost, which is an official selection at the 9th International Video Poetry Festival, hosted by +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] in Athens, Greece, screened early in 2021.
Lentil
An experimental poetry film on the sixth mass extinction and the importance of eating lentils.
SARS-CoV-2
“O little virions.
O diatoms. O tardigrades. O mosses. O virion of the horizontal
gene transfer. Reservoir of genetic diversity. Driver of evolution.
O virion of the last universal common ancestor.”
TARDIGRADE
An experimental poetry film on the microscopic tardigrades shot to the moon on the Beresheet lunar lander, followed by a brief statement on existential threats and archival cultures, and a haiku. Recently screened at Det Poetiske Fonotek’s Nature and Culture — International Poetry Film Festival.
PACIFIC TREE FROG
70 ways of knowing.
THE BEAUTIFUL CELL
“The essence of glass lies in its serving as a passage to other objects its nature is not to be itself but other things.”
—José Ortega y Gasset, “An Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface” (1914)
kim trainor 