Ecopoetics No. 3 Winter 2003
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ecopoetics no. 3 winter 2003 ecopoetics is published (at a minimum) annually and dedicated to exploring creative-critical edges between writing (with an emphasis on poetry) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings). Edited and designed by Jonathan Skinner, with editorial assistance from Florine Melnyk. Rates− single issue: $7 ($14 institutions); four-issue subscription: $25 ($50 institutions). All prices include postage; outside US & Canada, add $3. Please make checks payable to Jonathan Skinner. Letters to the editor are welcome. Please allow some time for response. ecopoetics will not be accepting unsolicited manuscripts during 2004. Our next reading period will be in early 2005. ecopoetics, no. 4 will appear in the Summer of 2004. Note: as email sometimes gets vaporized, please back up vital correspondence with snailmail. ecopoetics 106 Huntington Ave. Buffalo, NY 14214 USA [email protected] www.factoryschool.org/ecopoetics This issue is made possible by generous grants from the SUNY at Buffalo David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, Department of English (Charles Bernstein), the James H. McNulty Chair, Department of English (Dennis Tedlock), the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and Humanities (Robert Creeley), and from a 2003 New York State GSEU Professional Development Fund. Contents copyright © ecopoetics. Copyright reverts to contributors upon publication Periplum Editions ISSN 1536-7479 ecopoetics no. 3, winter 2003 JOHN BATKI.................Lines on Larry Eigner, Deduce Rust, Mind Your Foot Print ALICIA COHEN........................reviews Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers and Tides SIMON CUTTS.........................After John Clare, Rubber Stamp Mini-Printer ALEC FINLAY.........................................................from Mesostic Herbarium LISA FORREST..........Black-crowned Night Heron, Kingfisher, Mockingbird, Yellow-headed Blackbird ERIC GELSINGER.....................Wearing a Sweater on the Surface of the Earth JODY GLADDING................................................................Purple Loosestrife GOTHIC NEWS SERVICE......SUV Solar and Oak Grove Ranch, “Relief Not Bombs” MARY RISING HIGGINS.............................................................Scaffolds to K PETER JAEGER.........................................................Pollard and other poems JEFFREY JULLICH............................................A Temptation for Miss Juliana, Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis ROBERT KOCIK........................................................Enfranchisement Ranch JOAN MALOOF (WITH RICK MALOOF)......The September 11th Memorial Forest DOUGLAS MANSON.........Sight / Nonsight (Olmsted’s Front Park in Buffalo) BERNADETTE MAYER, PHILIP GOOD, MARIE WARSH...............Poetry Pyramid PABLO NERUDA (TR. JOHN FELSTINER).....Floods, Guilty, Lapis Lazuli in Chile ALICE NOTLEY...They Are all Dead Today, Earth Speaks, Show You His Face Young MARK NOWAK............................................................................8 June 1916 DEREK OWENS...................................................................from ngurra blues ISABELLE PELISSIER.......................................“Low Emotional Temperature” STEPHEN RATCLIFFE.......................................................................from Real TOM RAWORTH...................from Caller, (WITH FRANCO BELTRAMETTI) Animist JEROME ROTHENBERG........................................................from China Notes KAIA SAND................................................................................from Aquifer ANDREW SCHELLING..........Haibun at Thoor Ballylee, Floor of the Turlough RAVI SHANKAR..........................................................Chinese River Dolphin; Recollecting Monteverde, Costa Rica; The Old Joy of Sex ALLEN SHELTON.....................................The Mineralization of John Pelham JONATHAN SKINNER........................................reviews Jed Rasula’s This Compost, Derek Owens’s Composition and Sustainability, Andrew Schelling’s Wild Form & Savage Grammar and Tea Shack Interior, The Paper (ed. David Kennedy) JANE SPRAGUE...........................................White Footed Mouse, Field Notes ELENI STECOPOULOS.......................................................................Geopathy SASHA STEENSEN...............................................reviews Alicia Cohen’s bEAR BRIAN SWANN...............................It Should be Abstact, More Than Enough STEPHEN VINCENT......................................................A Walk Toward Spicer DAMIAN WEBER............................................................................Red Haiku NATHAN WHITING......................................The Midget Forest, The Meadow AUTHORS KEY: Batki 3, 28-29, 188; Beltrametti 101; Cohen 50-54; Cutts 49, 161; Felstiner 22-27; Finlay 80-87; Forrest 38-41; Gelsinger 75-79; Gladding 4; Good 139; Gothic News Service 10-11, 114-115; Higgins 102-113; Jaeger 169-173; Jullich 156-157; Kocik 150-151; Maloof 116-122; Manson 33-36; Mayer 139; Neruda 22-27; Notley 12-17; Nowak 30-32; Owens 37, 57-68; Pelissier 163; Ratcliffe 5-9; Raworth 101, 152-155; Rothenberg 125- 129; Sand 166-168; Schelling 130-131; Shankar 162, 164-165; Shelton 88-98; Skinner 69-74, 132-138, 174-184; Sprague 42-48, 123-124; Stecopoulos 140-149; Steensen 55-56; Swann 99-100; Vincent 18-21; Warsh 139; Weber 185-187; Whiting 158-160; You 189-190. 400 copies of ecopoetics, no. 3 were printed in December 2003 in 10 pt. Garamond on recycled paper. The covers were printed on tree-free kenaf poppy seed paper. Simon Cutts’s Aeolian Neon “After John Clare” is presently being installed in Northumberland, in a stone barn in a field, with the turbine outside, and a huge pile of stones gathered over the years. The poems published here by Pablo Neruda originally appeared in Canto general (“Floods”), Las manos del dia (“El Cupable”) and Las piedras del cielo (“Lapis Lazuli”). Felstiner’s translations first appeared in American Poetry Review. Jerome Rothenberg’s China Notes first appeared as a tel/let book (Charles Martone). Stephen Vincent’s “A Walk Toward Spicer” was originally published as a chapbook in a limited edition of 150 copies by The Cherry On The Top Press (U.K.). Damian Weber’s Red Haiku were first published by House Press. All of these pieces have been reprinted with permission of the authors. Thanks to the contributors, and to all who have encouraged ecopoetics along the way. Special thanks to Bill Sylvester, Joel Kuszai, Florine Melnyk, George Hart, Nate Dorward, Paige Menton, Elliott Skinner, Linda Hibbs, Isabelle Pelissier, Jane Sprague and the people who put it together at Alphagraphics and Quality Bindery, here in Buffalo. EDITOR’S NOTES The support and interest ecopoetics has met have been overwhelming. Especially when one considers that the focus of this magazine has been on what happens at the edges, not the deep interior of writing. (There is no inherently ecological reason for this bias since the interior sustains many rare species and events.) It is to be hoped that readers will not be dissuaded from wandering far into some of these contributions—and so ecopoetics has been sure to include sizable islands of writing. It is also to be hoped, however, that readers will be looking for something more, here, than the newest kid on the block. One of the edges ecopoetics rubs against is critical of this figuration (edge, interior, ecosystem) of the poem. Imagining endangered species is a useful act of language; writing that decenters the habitual configura- tions, enough to see who's endangered, may be more useful. It is a writing whose surface ecopoetics has barely scratched—the coming issues look forward to more critical reflection on the place of (a given) writing in this earth household. A question this editor sometimes gets is, what makes contribution A, B or C “ecopoetic”? But such criticism will be more effective when it also questions the place of its own writing—finds its way in listening and observation as much as in (self-) reflection. Though this writing somehow always finds itself speaking for, we need to hear what our housemates have to say. It may be that in decentering language from what it figures nonhumans to be saying, something “new and strange,” or “old and familiar,” will get to be heard. If not, at least a good scolding. In times of great stress, one instinct is to head for the wilderness—not to escape from but to get another perspective on events. On March 19, 2003 as American and British warjets screamed toward Baghdad, I headed alone into the wilderness of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border. For five days the only news I had was from the skies, as airforce jets conducted training runs above, night and day, and stealth bombers headed east with full payloads of “bunker busting” weapons. No radio, just the opening and closing of desert goldpoppies on the drainage slopes, the leaping and darting shad- ows of rodents at night, chant of the curve-billed thrasher with a moth in its bill, owls’ hunting calls, the speech of cactus spines in a brisk wind: impulse and boundary, expansion and contraction, tender- ness and aggression retention and surrender it’s a cactus world but it wouldn’t be nothin’ without some rainstorms on it. As I hiked the arroyos and flanks of the Ajo range, I became interested in signs of another kind of human traffic—the plastic and trash-lined migrants’ trails leading from the Mexican border up to the pass and smugglers’ vans waiting on Tohono Od’ham lands.