kim trainor

My fourth book of poetry, A blueprint for survival, (Guernica Editions 2024) will be published on the spring equinox, 19th March 2024. Allitup interviewed me recently about its inception: 

Open Book:

Can you tell us a bit about how you chose your title? If it’s a title of one of the poems, how does that piece fit into the collection? If it’s not a poem title, how does it encapsulate the collection as a whole?

Kim Trainor:

A blueprint for survival is taken from a special 1972 issue of The Ecologist that was trying to draw attention to our path, already seen clearly at that time, towards environmental planetary destruction. While the topic is existential, I love the hope embodied in the word ‘blueprint,’ which suggests a model or path forward towards survival. The first section of the book, “Wildfire,” documents a long-term relationship against the background of increasing ecological devastation and wildfires – a baseline – while the second section, “Seeds,” is a long sequence that thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. I was thinking of each seed/poem as a blueprint, (metaphorically, each ‘seed’ is either a simple human-made tool/activity/group or a complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to our current existential threat), and each seed shows a different way of being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, “the beautiful cell,” among others. The Vespa orientalis, for example, as noted by Robert Bringhurst in Learning to Die, has evolved a band of the obscure pigment Xanthopterin to draw sunlight out of air and generate a small voltage. The endangered chinook salmon travel thousands of miles to their spawning grounds in the Fraser River and feed the rich coastal ecosystem. Tiny houses, mobile wood frame cabins outfitted with solar panels, are being built by the Tiny House Warriors in unceded Secwépemc Territory in the interior of BC to challenge the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline. The connection is serotiny – some organisms require heat, fire, burning, in order to thrive. 

In particular, I loved the tiny advertisement inside my Penguin copy of the book, that reads: 

FURTHER INFORMATION: Organizations wishing to join the Movement for Survival and all others seeking further information should write to the Acting Secretary, The Movement for Survival, c/o The Ecologist, Kew Green, Richmond, Surrey.

Sending off an inquiry to join a Movement for Survival that is advertised at the back of a copy of The Ecologist—that’s hope!

For the rest of the interview, please click: Allitup interview with Kim Trainor