“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…
Dark Matter: Women Witnessing
October 18, 2020 § Leave a comment
I participated in an editorial discussion via Zoom with some fellow writers on the subject of wildfires and buried seeds this August. The transcript of our talk has just appeared in Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, along with a poem—“Shelter”—from my sequence ‘Seeds.’ Live now in this month’s October 2020 edition: “EDITORIAL: Buried Seeds in Burning Times”
“From our Call for Submissions: We are living a moment in which planetary concerns converge acutely with the concerns of this journal. It’s a moment that feels dark to many of us and is uncertain for all of us, that has exposed much that was buried before, a moment in which we can no longer deny that we live in bodies and that the health of our bodies cannot be separated from the health of our social and eco-systems. Dark Matter: Women Witnessing was made for this moment of knowing and unknowing.”
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 