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Content From Issue: Volume 1 Number 1 (February 2014)

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Editorial

by Anne Elvey

Plumwood Mountain, the journal, is written- (and posted in the light and shade of electronic media)-into-being at a time when there is a freshness in Australian poetry in response to being situated colonially and postcolonially in relation to country, where a kind of ecological thinking prompts a rethinking, reimagining, and restorying of what it means to be human—an unsettling of selves, of languages, of poetics. This freshness is expressed in: Jeremy Balius and Corey Wakeling’s edited collection Outcrop: A Radical Australian Poetry of Land, reviewed here by Susan Pyke; the dedicated issue of Angelaki (2009) on “Ecopoetics and Pedagogy” edited by Kate Fagan, John Kinsella and Peter Minter; recent guest edited issues of Southerly; the new-look Island, particularly for example in poems there by Gig Ryan; Cordite’s Gondwanaland issue; “animal” appearing as the theme of the most recent issue of Australian Poetry Journal; Forrest Gander and John Kinsella’s Redstart: An Ecological Poetics; and the work of the Kangaloon group, to name only some. In this responsive reworking of language and poetics, the questions of poetry and environmental ethics, poetry and ecological activism, questions already at the heart of Judith Wright’s praxis, return with new urgency.

Martin Harrison asks, “what are the necessary criteria for a writing which in some measure fulfils an ecological requirement—which is to say, a requirement to be up-to-date in its understanding of the world around us and intellectually equipped to be meaningful in this decade”? He sets out three criteria for such a writing. The first is a kind of indeterminacy in which “a work leaves open how it is a work”. The second is what I would call a situatedness, which is for Harrison, “a reference-level which explicitly opens up a field within an environment”. Third is “a way of positioning discourse outside of the discursive self”. As Harrison avers: “to understand interconnectedness with natural, biological and cosmological systems is now paramount in how we define ourselves as humans”. [1]

This is a challenge—particularly to Eurowestern ways of thinking and acting—to understand human being in fresh ways; it is a turn central to an ecopoetic task. We find something of this turn in Michael Farrell’s poem “Music, or a kangaroo chats about chastity”, where human sexualities and a kangaroo eros converse in a complex ecology of bush, books and search engines, and where music pertains to bodies (not necessarily human ones). Kate Fagan writes, “[w]hen ecopoetics stands outside of a nature that is constructed according to human-centric principles, a failure of scale and reality occurs. Nature has to be de-naturalised so that humans can take place in catastrophe, to act within it”.[2] Farrell moves in this direction of de-naturalising “nature” so as to “act within it”.

John Kinsella is critical (and as a poet himself one suspects self-critical) of writing in a time of catastrophe: “My problem with all writing is that it is a delaying tactic: we still make use of the tools of destruction to create and disseminate it.”[3] In the Anthropocene, a time when as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues humans as a species are acting on the planet on a geological scale, ecopoetry inhabits an unsettling place where writers and their works are witnesses implicated in that to which they witness.[4] In this issue Philip Harvey’s “Hesiod” and Jennifer Mackenzie’s “If the earth was” address anthropogenic climate change laterally. At a more local level, Brett Dionysius’ sonnet “Freckled Ducks” provides an example of witness. While I prize the idea of a poetry that witnesses, the idea of witness—with its attachment to seeing—could reinscribe a problematic self/other polarity. Dionysius avoids this when he plays with the trope of home, across species, and (bravely, some would say) likens the slaughter of ducks to war on particular ethnic communities in the twentieth century. Rose Lucas’ “Unexpected Fall” witnesses to the sudden, accidental death of an individual grouse, evoking a shared mortality.

Nonetheless, despite our ecological interdependence and interconnectedness, there is a kind of estrangement proper to ecopoetic writing, as Ali Alizadeh comments: “Ecopoetry … is neither a linguistic celebration of nature nor an attempt at, as it were, capturing it in a piece of writing; but it is instead conditioned by what Anita Plath Helle has observed to be ‘a certain recognition of estrangement.’” Engaging conscientiously with otherness, the poet refuses (or attempts to refuse) a dichotomy between self and other and “the ecopoem becomes a subversive form of writing, presenting an anti-possessive, anti-oppressive contemporary challenge to the dominant discourses of English literature since Romanticism”.[5]

I am hesitant to go all the way with Alizadeh in moving on from Romanticism. As Kate Rigby comments in her review of Entanglements in this issue, ecopoetry in many of its forms has its roots in European Romanticism, and some contemporary ecopoetry participates in a kind of neo-Romanticism, that while perhaps perpetuating an urban/rural or wild difference, not only mourns that which is lost or soon will be, but celebrates what has survived and is, in its survival, also flourishing. Ecopoetry cannot stop here; it is not landscape poetry or nature writing, but a way of being toward a world and toward a self that are not separable, rather selves are simultaneously entangled and estranged in that world, as matter with other matter (together what Serpil Oppermann calls “storied matter”).[6] What is produced in the act of writing is, moreover, also matter (a page; light and shade on a screen; a patterning of the breath which is always already embodied).

Therefore, Jack Collom can say that: “Poetry is a branch of ecology.”[7] He does not qualify “poetry” as ecopoetry. For Collom, “poetry proposes that language has always functioned more as a musical, gestural, plastic expressive medium than as a purveyor of denotations”.[8] Poetry is already “inside” what might be called nature; here, as Kinsella writes, “referents are realities and have real implications in terms of survival”.[9] He says further: “The irony is that whatever poets want to believe, poetry is textual, and if it’s to have an activist form, it comes out of the recognition of its limitations as much as its power to alter a textual landscape.”[10]

As Pyke highlights in her review of Outcrop, its editors, Wakeling and Balius, are interested in poetry that opens a space for, and attends to, the land as subject. In “Australia”, Meredith Wattison’s speaker encounters the land as a wild dog, in a poem where personal and political histories interweave with a frightening embeddedness/estrangement in country. This question of subjecthood pertains not only to country, but to species perhaps and certainly to individuals of a species (where we need to read “individuals” non-individualistically). Lucy Dougan’s “The Cat”, for example, plays with the question of a cat as subject, along the way answering Jacques Derrida with the cat “building an argument of its own”.

Harriet Tarlo in her introductory essay for a special issue of How2 discusses a variety of ecopoetics which include: an attention to the visual and spatial, and to place; a refusal to reinscribe an urban/rural divide; a concern with the “body polluted”; collaborative work destabilising “the single sovereign speaker”; and working with found text, including recycling text and engaging, through recycling, with oppressive texts subversively. [11] Working with found text is of particular interest to Tarlo, and in this issue we have an example in Kristin Hannaford’s use of text from old letterheads and advertisements in her “‘The Queerest Shop in Sydney’”.

Gander and Kinsella’s Redstart is an example of collaborative work where the poems from two continents responding to their places of habitation speak back and forward to each other. Stuart Cooke performs a different collaboration when he acknowledges the poems in his Departure into Cloud as written with particular places. Reviews of both works will appear in Plumwood Mountain in coming months. It strikes me that all our work, even that done temporarily devoid of human company at our desks, is already collaborative, in that, as Jane Bennett points out, it is already part of a network of material coagencies acting with and on us as we write.[12] Part of an ecopoetic process, then, is not to speak this as if it is new, but to speak what has been unspoken or elided. Humans have not suddenly become interconnected in ecological networks of kind, otherkind, country, air, sea and cosmos; rather some humans have enacted a dangerous lie, as if they/we were not already enmeshed in their/our more than human worlds. Each in their own ways, the poems in this collection resist the lie of individual human and species isolation.

While the majority of poems in the issue come from poets living in Australia, several are from overseas. Attending to the spatial, Peter Larkin speaks into a supposed urban/rural divide in “Arch the Apartness / \ Proffering Trees, 3 (Pollard)” when, at least for this reader, the poem evokes the forests of stone holding up the great cathedrals and abbeys of Europe, with sacred forest groves displaced and recalled in the branches of stone that decorate their ceilings. The poem repays multiple readings as it weaves the reader into its coppices and pollards. Tim Shaner’s “Thirty-Fourth Material Confession” details the complex more than human world of a backyard, again calling into question urban/rural or urban/wild oppositions.

The lyric voice of Mary Cresswell’s “Field Trip with Acid Rain” stands in contrast to the threat of the “body polluted” it evokes. Matthew Hall’s beautiful lines “from Sparrow” weave a more than human story of connection and loss. There remains a question of the “use” of other than human imagery and symbols to describe human experience; while this is inevitable in some ways, an ecopoetry sets up multiple points of conversation and comparison between the experience of humans and otherkind, inhabiting a space between using metaphor instrumentally and anthropomorphising the other than human. In such a space, Matt Howard’s “Tower Hide, Strumpshaw Fen” brings a plurality of migrations into a kind of tender seeing and hearing.

There is room, too, for litanies, such as Louise Crisp’s “from Wild Succession”, that traverses a terrain through cataloguing its flora, giving their common English and Latin names; this is at once a recollection of a colonial imprint on country, a journal of a practice of attentiveness to otherkind, and a celebration of their survival and diversity. Philip Hall, in another peripatetic poem, takes the reader on a long bushwalk with a bunch of irreverent kids, in the suitably rambling “Learning on the Line”. “To write is to open up a plurality of actions, heading off into the future”, says Harrison.[13] Patrick Jones experiments with form and font in “Dwell” as part of his project to develop a permapoeisis interwoven with his personal, familial action for change, a kind of creative resistance-adaptation to ecological destruction. John Reid’s artwork Performance for 25 Passing Vehicles is another mode of resistance which forms our spotlight in this issue, on roadkill, with the invitation to act by undertaking a voluntary curfew especially on country roads, or at least slowing down (what some have called “tootling”) when driving at dusk and into the night.

This ecopoetic collection, therefore, is not one thing. I like to think that Plumwood Mountain the journal, like the mountain of that name—where a garden and an off-the-grid mud-brick house cohabit in the midst of bush most of it rugged, where Val Plumwood learned and wrote her critiques of logics of colonisation, domination and centrism—has a place for a variety of styles and forms of being and co-being, as poems, poets, artists and audience mutually engaging in multiple ways of thinking with country, in grief and in hope. Harrison writes: “In the current moment it is clear that we must listen to what is other than human and how it is speaking to us and that the act of attention between self and the environment is intertwined and interdependent and completely mutual”.[14] Harrison’s evocation of a mutuality, whether it can be complete or otherwise, is a good place to close. I am grateful to all the contributors (poets, book reviewers and artists) who have given their work to this inaugural issue, particularly to Kit Kelen for the cover art from his forthcoming exhibition in Macau, and to the editorial board, in particular Martin Harrison and Tricia Dearborn who offered advice on the shortlist of poems, though I take responsibility for the selection as it appears here. It is, I hope, part of the fresh conversation in Australian poetry and poetics that sees ecopoetry not as a fixed genre but as a process of engagement, a responsive poetry-in-becoming, a poetry-to-come.

Bibliography

Alizadeh, Ali. “Transgressive Lyric: Teaching Ecopoetry in a Transcultural Space.” Ecopoetics and Pedagogies special issue of Angelaki 14.2 (2009): 51–61.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222.

Code, Lorraine L. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Collom, Jack. “An Evolution of Writing Ideas, and Vice Versa: A Personal Essay.” ecopoetics 4/5 (2004–2005): 3–60.

Fagan, Kate, John Kinsella, and Peter Minter. “Editorial Introduction.” Ecopoetics and Pedagogies special issue of Angelaki 14.2 (2009): 1–4.

Harrison, Martin. “The act of writing and the act of attention.” TEXT Special Issue 20: Writing Creates Ecology and Ecology Creates Writing, edited by Martin Harrison, Deborah Bird Rose, Lorraine Shannon and Kim Satchell (October 2013): http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue20/Harrison.pdf

Kinsella, John. “The School of Environmental Poetics and Creativity.” Ecopoetics and Pedagogies special issue of Angelaki 14.2 (2009): 143–48.

Oppermann, Serpil. “Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of Storied Matter.” Frame 26.2 (November 2013): 55–69.

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.

—. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2002.

Tarlo, Harriet. “Women and ecopoetics: an introduction in context.” How2 3.2 (Summer 2008): http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/ecopoetics/introstatements/tarlo_intro.html

Notes

[1] Harrison, “The act of writing and the act of attention”.
[2] Fagan, Kinsella and Minter, “Editorial Introduction”, 4.
[3] Fagan, Kinsella and Minter, “Editorial Introduction”, 2.
[4] Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, esp. 212.
[5] Alizadeh, “Transgressive Lyric”, 55.
[6] Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of Storied Matter”.
[7] Collom, “An Evolution of Writing Ideas, and Vice Versa”, 7.
[8] Collom, “An Evolution of Writing Ideas, and Vice Versa”, 12.
[9] Kinsella, “The School of Environmental Poetics and Creativity”, 147.
[10] Kinsella, “The School of Environmental Poetics and Creativity”, 148.
[11] Tarlo, “Women and ecopoetics”.
[12] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23.
[13] Harrison, “The act of writing and the act of attention”.
[14] Harrison, “The act of writing and the act of attention”.
Published: January 2014
Anne Elvey

lives and works on BoonWurrung Country in Seaford, a bayside suburb of Melbourne (Naarm). She is outgoing managing editor of Plumwood Mountain journal. Her recent poetry publications include On arrivals of breath (Poetica Christi, 2019) and White on White (Cordite Books, 2018). Obligations of Voice is forthcoming from Recent Work Press in 2021. Anne holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity, Melbourne.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Being Puggle

by Ross Donlon

               After Lorraine le Plastrier’s wood carving, Platypus with Puggles and Nest

 

               The name for a young platypus is a platypus.
               Wikianswers.com

 
 

I was discovered covered in Latin.

Enlightenment scientists thought me a hoax,

others a joke God made when he was stoned.
 

The tribes had me product of wayward duck

and rat – names numerous as eucalypts:

booraburra, mallangong, tambreet, dulaiwarrung…
 

The English explored me for signs of trickery

sewn by foreigners – Oriental stitchers

trying to fool the rule of Britannia.
 

Forced to admit me to the study of fauna

Europeans gave me spasms of names,

a trail of words leading back to the Garden;
 

steropodon galmani begat obduron insignis

begat platypus anatinus begat ornithorhynchus paradoxus

begat ornithorhynchus anatinus.
 

‘Platypus’,

already bagged by a beetle, shouldn’t have stayed.

But did. Now it’s a tag that won’t go away.

Puggle  jumped on me like a christening flea
 

with a mania for naming. So we’re a soft toy, beagle/

pug and baby echidna all with the same handle.

I can lap milk from pools on my mother’s belly.
 

It’s impossible, but I do it anyhow

and laugh like Puck at all I see, thinking,

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Published: January 2014
Ross Donlon

lives in Castlemaine where he convenes poetry events, including a monthly reading. He is publisher of Mark Time Books. Widely published in Australia and Ireland, he is winner of international poetry competitions and the Launceston Cup, premier spoken word event of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival. A sequence from his recent book, The Blue Dressing Gown, was a program on Radio National’s Poetica in 2013.

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Arch the Apartnesses / \ Proffering Trees, 3 (Pollard)

by Anne Elvey

Peter Larkin  

Slit under aptness a turn through portal      inverse arches of the pollard bowl whose V  coppices out of cup or a trenchant stump invariant to radiant      cut multiple uni-verses at the bolling’s occupied blain

 
 

a remnant of set-before hollowing but clothing the slash through a neat scarcity at its inexhaustible      in no lassitude of renewable arbouring but according a complicity of single-notched intermoulding

 
 

every arch pre-dominantly pluralizes the shadow integration between pillars      dia-verting sacrosanct codification of chosen hump to vertical community at the rehealed over-reach

 

tumbling of what trees
have most in stock
across a craning of their
cut towards
rebodiable

 
 
 

Inverse arch of the pollard tusk’s branch cup      spidering across the cure towards least fallible curve of outlet      or the hollow fork which tries for cup but whose only whole tallness is re-enclosure at this maimed selection fist

 
 

though jaunty access will spring to a finesse of passing beneath the disappearances of strap into arch      from the severable to the tip-evidence of severalling these unpurged margins—however cleanly turnable in cup that scours round these departures

 
 

leaning companions foaming a contrast of rest      all it doesn’t forearm at its elbow of retention, though let presage be diverted here until forming a net of it as sheer linear threading of loft

 

coppice howl that cups
its alarm, surpassed bulge
still shafted on an
ample pump of holding

 
 
 

Two perfect vaultings wronging the way up of a lime pollard      can rotate laterally as each limb gets trans-paired from arch-frame to arch-frame or leaps diagonally across the regular indentations of its random symmetry      structurally precise cause-wires crossing as they will

 
 

perhaps the arch layer begins at the defeat slippage of an underling branch leaning out prematurely      can’t yet be proffered of lapse reaching a caplike unbisected

 
 

near-vertical arch-play is not the cure of its pollard wound but a trans-thinning with scarcely diverted twins of the exception      cresting is coupled on poor lean by the vertical subsidy itself

 
 

the cut becomes its apartness share-out minus frozen precisions of shedding, a meta-gathering among the poking beaks of cup

 

the bolling doesn’t pine
for its candelabra but pruned
to elaborate cull
re-quickens the wick of it

explore within-tree
lance (launches) compression
recapped at a hub
of coppice effort

 
 
 

Post-fracture zones to expand at the pulse of pollard carping for countenance      whose slenderness is primed out of hulk at the resorting knop of inverted apex      knack of an intransient index      let the retrieval be on call, along whichever wound it solidifies the intersect

 

Peter Larkin’s three collections of poetry are Terrain Seed Scarcity, (2001), Leaves of Field (2006) and Lessways Least Scarce Among (2012).  Give Forest Its Next Portent is due in 2014. He has contributed to The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011).

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Arch the Apartnesses / \ Proffering Trees, 3 (Pollard)

by Peter Larkin

 

Slit under aptness a turn through portal      inverse arches of the pollard bowl whose V  coppices out of cup or a trenchant stump invariant to radiant      cut multiple uni-verses at the bolling’s occupied blain

 

a remnant of set-before hollowing but clothing the slash through a neat scarcity at its inexhaustible      in no lassitude of renewable arbouring but according a complicity of single-notched intermoulding

 

every arch pre-dominantly pluralizes the shadow integration between pillars      dia-verting sacrosanct codification of chosen hump to vertical community at the rehealed over-reach

 

tumbling of what trees
have most in stock
across a craning of their
cut towards
rebodiable

 

 

Inverse arch of the pollard tusk’s branch cup      spidering across the cure towards least fallible curve of outlet      or the hollow fork which tries for cup but whose only whole tallness is re-enclosure at this maimed selection fist

 

 

though jaunty access will spring to a finesse of passing beneath the disappearances of strap into arch      from the severable to the tip-evidence of severalling these unpurged margins—however cleanly turnable in cup that scours round these departures

 

 

leaning companions foaming a contrast of rest      all it doesn’t forearm at its elbow of retention, though let presage be diverted here until forming a net of it as sheer linear threading of loft

 

coppice howl that cups
its alarm, surpassed bulge
still shafted on an
ample pump of holding

 

 

Two perfect vaultings wronging the way up of a lime pollard      can rotate laterally as each limb gets trans-paired from arch-frame to arch-frame or leaps diagonally across the regular indentations of its random symmetry      structurally precise cause-wires crossing as they will

 

 

 

perhaps the arch layer begins at the defeat slippage of an underling branch leaning out prematurely      can’t yet be proffered of lapse reaching a caplike unbisected

 

 

 

near-vertical arch-play is not the cure of its pollard wound but a trans-thinning with scarcely diverted twins of the exception      cresting is coupled on poor lean by the vertical subsidy itself

 

 

 

the cut becomes its apartness share-out minus frozen precisions of shedding, a meta-gathering among the poking beaks of cup

 

the bolling doesn’t pine
for its candelabra but pruned
to elaborate cull
re-quickens the wick of it

 

explore within-tree
lance (launches) compression
recapped at a hub
of coppice effort

 

 

 

Post-fracture zones to expand at the pulse of pollard carping for countenance      whose slenderness is primed out of hulk at the resorting knop of inverted apex      knack of an intransient index      let the retrieval be on call, along whichever wound it solidifies the intersect

Published: January 2014
Peter Larkin

Peter Larkin’s three collections of poetry are Terrain Seed Scarcity, (2001), Leaves of Field (2006) and Lessways Least Scarce Among (2012).  Give Forest Its Next Portent is due in 2014. He has contributed to The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011).

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

‘The Queerest Shop in Sydney’

by Kristin Hannaford

In 1923, bookshop owner James Tyrrell purchased the premises of ‘Tost & Rohu: Taxidermists, Furriers, Tanners and Island Curio Dealers’ – it was known at the time as ‘The Queerest Shop in Sydney’.*

 

Welcome to Tost & Rohu’s carnival of the unusual!

naturalists, articulators Purvey the shelves, cabinets

and shop-front façade. sea-shells in large variety Wonder open- mouthed entomological specimens and

requisites at what you do not know, what you do not have:  bric-a-brac,

 
 

fancy work and flower making  gewgaws, marvellous birds,

beasts and reptiles oddities prepared and mounted to order that are the queer

and strange discharge of a continent. Minutiae of curiosities furs, tanned revealed –

an assortment of mixed lollies: snakes, frogs, sharks’ teeth, black cats and Pyrmont rock,

 

jellied substances instruments for Oologists

and jars of white spirit floating preserves. Go closer, Lyre bird tails

gawk at creatures reassembled, enjoy the pantomime ladies’ muffs, circlets,

bags of nature re-enacted, exotic ornamentations, implements, woomera the dark stained

 

patinas boomerangs of clubs and shields –

invent your narratives of possession, snake skin tobacco

pouches romance and loss, stop and choose Emu cameos enchantment or terror,

mounted in life-like style by Mrs. Tost.

 

* use of italics denote fragments from Tost & Rohu letterheads and advertisements

Published: January 2014
Kristin Hannaford

is a Queensland based poet. Her writing has recently appeared in Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Filling Station (CAN) and Trace (Creative Capricorn, 2013) a chapbook of commissioned poems exploring histories of Rockhampton. Kristin is writing a new collection of poems thanks to an Australia Council new work grant.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Boxing Day poem

by Sarah Wreford

The things we put away go quietly as if they never had voices to begin with. Empty spaces breathing out and our little tree liberated as we wind back in all our dreaming, a ball of lights connected briefly to the circuit. He is still thirsty and I give it to him, little alive thing. So are we, but there goes something that leaked like relief, packed away with ornaments and aired only sometimes, heavy like pudding. These days are real days, carved into finer points. He is so quiet standing it unnerves me. I water him a glass a day, struck with a commitment like rapture. Little alive thing. My hope for hope dries in the roof, pressed against ageless baubles. Betrayal blooms on my tongue tasting of pine.

Published: January 2014
Sarah Wreford

is a creative writing graduate from the University of Melbourne, currently completing a Master of Teaching. She is a co-founder of Gargouille Literary Journal and has had work published in places like The Rag and Bone Man Press and The Maximillian. You can find her on Twitter at @WrefordPoet

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Australia

by Meredith Wattison

Taken from the long autobiographical sequence, terra bravura.

 

It slowly slunk towards me, weaving low,

eyes at a distance, fixed.

 

I have seen it before,

it has stood at a distance,

 

now it sits at my feet rocking, squinting,

 

leaning its shoulders into my legs,

throwing its head into my hands.

 

(What to do with such threat?

I am painfully awkward;

what to do?

 

It smells of grassfire and soil.

Its eyes running, closed.

It demands intimacy.)

 

I sink my hand into its long throat fur;

it catches a pouch’s cul-de-sac.

 

It does not move like my dog; I do not know it.

 

Its head is bear-like,

thylacine-like,

marsupial.

 

I trust my hand

to this striped, strange dog,

its silence;

its mouth the kind

that could tear my hand,

my fingers,

my arm,

my leg.

Its jaw all throat.

 

It shakes out brown pollen.

Its eyes like my dog’s,

its slack brow the colour of honey.

 

(I suspect, dread, wild bees deep in its ears,

see clear nectar in its nose.)

 

Its soul is looking for another,

it follows like a stolen child.

 

Its heart is full.

I have fed it my self,

it wants no more,

but again

 

I offer my hand to it.

 

I am sorry it is lost.

 

My hand doesn’t know of its other.

It intimately knows its own lost demand.

 

It was lost in a grassfire,

it was the colour of the soil,

its tail was edible, its skin made waistcoats.

 

It was as loathed as a two-legged dingo,

the infinite, expelling ocean.

 

(Martha’s grandmother

flapping in black taffeta, landed in the desert,

competed with ants for grains of wheat,

left her shoes in Ptolemy’s Poland,

walked like me.

We have missed the sympathy of snow

and the shoe collectors of Belsen.)

 

A dark fleece of sky,

its edge gold leaf,

rested upon it

like an inordinate sphere.

Published: January 2014
Meredith Wattison

Born in 1963, Meredith Wattison’s 5 books of poetry are Psyche’s Circus (Poetry Australia, 1989), Judith’s Do (Penguin Australia, 1996), Fishwife (Five Islands Press, 2001), The Nihilist Line (Five Islands Press, 2003) and Basket of Sunlight (Puncher & Wattmann, 2007). ‘terra bravura’ is due to be published by Puncher & Wattmann.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Forest

by Rob Wallis

If you stray off the track

in pursuit of the lyrebird you heard,

segue of magpie/kookaburra/parrot,

brushing fronds from your face,

finding the bird’s call

behind you instead of ahead,

black globular eyes

tracking you down,

you may experience a shudder

of panic as the forest

closes in. Mountain ash,

tree ferns, cockatoos sweeping

the sky inhale your presence.

Wind slaps strips of bark

against the trunks, tapping out

resined silence. Move into this stillness,

into this rhythm with your own song.

You are not lost, you have

found a part of yourself

as ancient as trees,

as luminous as words.

Published: January 2014
Rob Wallis

Rob Wallis’ third volume of poetry, Man In A Glass Suit (Mark Time Books) was published in 2011. His poems have appeared in Woorilla, The Mozzie, Poetry Monash, Wet Ink, Blue Dog and Westerly. His awards include the FAW John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award and the MPU Martin Downey Urban Realism Prize.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Eeda’s Monkey Aria

by Patricia Sykes

Sings the preservation of her death

the recovery of her

from the Eocene’s Messel Pit

has become science’s opera

the palaeontologist bending over her

is a devoted tenor

smitten and tender as he forages in her

for clues to the hominid tree

naming her for his own small daughter, Ida

(Eeda in his melodic Norwegian lilt)

who matches the small monkey’s one year

of life

the primate’s fragile exposure

also the child’s

each breath a fossil in the making

Breathe in experience, Breathe out poetry*

everything learnt is brilliant or stupid

the mind insinuates itself

everywhere      like a muscle

prehensile as Eeda

and wildly a-metronomic

as it swings above chasms

whose game is perish

*Muriel Rukeyser

Published: January 2014
Patricia Sykes

is a poet and librettist. Her works in collaboration with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Australia, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and the UK. She has published three collections and a chapbook. Her most recent poetry collection is The Abbotsford Mysteries (Spinifex Press, 2011). She lives in Melbourne.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

The Budawangs

by Dorothy Swoope

The shape of the mountains shift

through the day’s changing light

 

to the last silhouette

inked against the magenta sky.

 

Poised at the portal

between the final bird song

 

and the nocturnal chorus,

the mountains stand alone

 

elemental, pared down

to pure definition

 

and in a breath

they are absorbed into the night.

Published: January 2014
Dorothy Swoope

is a poet and long-time resident of the South Coast, New South Wales. Her writings have been published in newspapers, anthologies and literary magazines in Australia and the USA. A collection of poems, The touch of a word, was published in 2000. Inspiration is everywhere.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Hold open the sky

by Sasha Shtargot

Let whatever comes from below

have its place

honestly and cleanly

cleanly honestly,

like the shrill call

of a blackbird

in the early morning dark

 

Let it be present

and seen,

its sharp claws

tearing tomorrow.

Let the explosive breath

break it into light

 

Somewhere a distant

ancient continent

is coming to life

 

Hold open the sky

and let it pass through.

Published: January 2014
Sasha Shtargot

is a writer from Melbourne whose paid work is in public relations for an environmental not-for-profit organisation. He has been published in The Age newspaper, Wet Ink and Eureka Street. He dreams of the ecocentric age and pens his thoughts on the new paradigm in his blog, Sash Rap (sashrap.blogspot.com.au/)

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Let Loose

by Leah Shelleda

In Africa

the Sukuma shaman

wears a crisscross of cowries

a bandolier of prayershells

for the souls of the slaves

dead on the ships

I imagine myself in a harness of shells

driven    to pray for the souls

of the recently extinct

Reader    we are going down

In the deeps you see

the Moon shell’s spiral

and isn’t it a symbol

of somebody’s faith?

The moon snail is larger than its shell

no mystery when it slithers out    puddles

white   like egg whites  fried to a solid ruffle

translucent above the whorl of its shell

so it’s visible to nonbelievers

I dreamed that a friend took me to a lake

and there were mollusks  like moon snails

chinawhite  impermeably solid

and my friend wanted me to see

they could swim free   of their shells

float just fine   and I was      gladdened

yes that’s the word   gladdened

Published: January 2014
Leah Shelleda

is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the College of Marin in Northern California. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her chapbook, A Flash of Angel, won the Blue Light Press prize. Her book of poems, After the Jug Was Broken, and her newly edited anthology, The Book of Now: Poetry for the Rising Tide, are published by Fisher King Press.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Thirty-Fourth Material Confession

by Tim Shaner

We have three Douglas Firs in our backyard.

 

A messy tree. We have three of them. Two out front.

 

We have two apple trees. One we thought dead but now

 

Is bearing fruit. Sour apples that make you sick, though

 

The deer do just fine. They know just when to stop by,

 

A face there suddenly in the window. Imagine a young buck

 

Startled, hopping through thorny blackberries. Rising

 

Out from under the English ivy, a major invasive villain

 

In the Pacific Northwest, berries for the taking, one & all.

 

Messy when the wind blows and everything starts falling,

 

Including sometimes large, heavy branches, one of which

 

Stabbed itself into our roof, causing us to have to get it fixed.

 

Insurance paid for that one and didn’t drop us this time.

 

We have a plum tree. And a fig. And holly gone all gangly

 

As if confused. But plants are never confused, which is why

 

We love them over humans. The fig bears no fruit

 

And the plums are like cherries in size. We have azaleas

 

Where the white picket might be—like a natural fence.

 

They come in four colors: red, pink, white and purple.

 

I see everyday beauty out the windows, when I see it, front

 

And back—none on the sides to view our neighbors,

 

Whose houses are just like ours, variations on a theme

 

Called suburban development, circa the 60s, the ceilings

 

Uniformly popcorned with asbestos.  Off through some branches

 

I can see the blue shapes of the Cascades. Imagine

 

The Butte itself covered in houses. They go up to a

 

Certain border and stop before the commons. Imagine

 

Manhattan without Central Park. “Your mountain

 

Needs you.” We have four large rhododendrons. We have

 

Weeds, mosses, & lichens. We have ferns. Stellar jays & crows

 

Squawking back and forth. The crows after the eggs, I guess.

 

The breeze drowns out the sound of traffic below and

 

Above. We have finches. Wrens. An alder, laced sock-like

 

In lichens and mosses, arced like a desk light

 

Over our roof and chimney. Sometimes wild turkeys

 

Will migrate to the roof after pecking about

 

In our backyard, in what passes for a lawn—but clearly

 

There’s plenty of stuff there for the critters. Then one,

 

By one, they’ll fly off, nervously coasting down

 

Into the neighbor’s yard across the street. Douglas firs

 

Taking over, shoving out the native habitat, thanks

 

To the humans, particularly Europeans. We have squirrels,

 

Of course. One day a raccoon waddled into the backyard

 

When I was on the phone with my sister, going over the plans

 

For her treatment. It backed itself up against one of the bushes

 

For a good scratching. Telephone wires cut through

 

The backyard, several wires, each with their function,

 

Are strung from pole to house. We have ants, flies, bees, wasps,

 

Caterpillars, worms, silk and earth. The alder’s actually

 

The neighbor’s. We have a Japanese maple, under which

 

A fledgling rhododendron, with purple flowers. That makes

 

Five, not four. White, pink, red. But the bulk of it hangs

 

Over our house, save the roots, which are invisible.

Published: January 2014
Tim Shaner

Tim Shaner’s work has appeared in The Long Poem Library, Colorado Review, The Claudius App, Jacket and elsewhere. He curates A-New Poetry Series in Eugene, Oregon and teaches at Lane Community College. Picture X, his first collection of poetry, will be published by Airlie Press in the fall of 2014.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Flexibility

by Andrew Sant

Bay of Islands
 

Not a catastrophe, this,

since no-one, as it was happening,

was then available, sedentary, local –
 

rocks scattered, cataclysmically,

as here only forces of wind

and water can shift;
 

or else some guy does, a re-assembler,

with a mind to take an excursion

back through geologic time, stop
 

in the cold late Pleistocene

where the coastline now

is not. Locked once into rock,
 

the photographed arch that abuts

the sunny cliff – those

who pass under it relying
 

on the firm fact that today

its inherent collapse

remains held in play. Everything
 

recommends implied

signs for work-in-progress

or in-regress – flexibility
 

any way. So, a fine location

for bipeds to clamber about

lightly, as it is for a flock
 

of pied cormorants, atop

a remainder, sentinel rock,

to digest their catch. Flexibility
 

also of tilted and uplifted strata

in the stacked sequence

of epochal seasons worth
 

considering slowly so to wonder,

in effect – at a flexible stretch –

what a needle sampling
 

the geologic record here might

make of this impressive,

windswept collection.
 

As if for the paleontologist

who to me confessed

he was deeply into prized fossil
 

pollen, its music, trapped in layers

beneath Lake Tanganyika; made refined

assertions about proto-bees,
 

surely those making that low note

a bow might extract from a cello.

Though what aeolian sediments here
 

might express I’m only equipped

to know hearing closely,

via a flexibly cocked ear, the sea clash
 

with rock in this irresistible epoch.

Published: January 2014
Andrew Sant

Andrew Sant’s most recent collections of poetry are Tremors – New and Selected Poems (Black Pepper, Melbourne, 2004), Speed & Other Liberties (Salt Publishing, Cambridge UK, 2008)  Fuel (Black Pepper, Melbourne, 2009) and the Bicycle Thief & Other Poems (Black Pepper, Melbourne, 2013). He lives in Melbourne.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

‘Let my words be bright with animals’

by Susan Richardson

‘Let my words be bright with animals’
from ‘Prayer’ by Joseph Bruchac

 
Let my verbs be studded with Glow Worms.

Let Painted Ladies flit from each vowel I sound.

Let my prose be overwritten with Purple Frogs.

Let Baboons moon at my proper nouns.

Let Flamingoes paddle in the shallows of my gossip.

Let Clownfish swim in memories’ depths.

Let Satin Bower Birds use my blue language

to decorate their nests.

Let Bonobos get personal with my pronouns.

Let Impalas graze the great plain of my tongue.

Whenever I sing, from the roof of my mouth

let Orange Fruit Bats hang.

And at night, as darkness peaks,

let a Two-toed Sloth creep upside-down

through my mumbling canopy of sleep.

Let Wildebeest migrate with my yelling.

Let my softer speech be beached with Natterjack Toads.

Let Pygmy Hippos tinge my whispers.

Let my winter breath make Baiji-wraithes

and Dodo-ghosts.

Published: January 2014
Susan Richardson

is a poet, performer and educator based in Wales. Her latest collection, Where the Air is Rarefied, a collaboration with visual artist Pat Gregory, focuses on mythological and environmental themes relating to the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Her third collection, themed around human-animal metamorphosis and exploring our dys/functional relationship with the wild, will be published in 2015. www.susanrichardsonwriter.co.uk

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Twilight

by Brian Purcell

 

The words, you couldn’t say, were put together particularly well, but because we sang them – well, flowers all around, buds in our mouths, electricity, harmony, nobility, any other ‘ee’ you can think of. We walked on the banks, or drifted down in the canoes, our songs a barrier against the darkness, for twilight was no more than a strip of oil on black mud. Then, reluctantly – especially the younger children – all of us took to the water, screaming and crying, the mullet jumping before us and the dark current gripping our boats. To add to the terror, flying foxes skimmed and splashed the waters about – were they drinking, trying to fish? – and we were just agile enough to avoid hitting a rock wall at the river’s jagged turn. Frightening, but it is always that way, we leave ourselves open to it, so that the thing we love, the river, will never become overly familiar, but what we have to grope through, unable to see the snags, the shallows, the rocks, sure we can be led to grief, overturned, clambering to the shore in darkness, shivering – yet we want it, or think we do, except – when we saw him, immobile, looming above us from the high bank, the arabesque of his horns, by that time there was the merest silver wash above the bank to see his outline, yet we felt he could see us more clearly, the angle of remaining light, the unknowable power of his eyes, how helpless you feel when you are seen and cannot see. And what we saw of him, the inarguable mass of him, the slow shift of weight as he refined his view, the weight of the law, always the law, and in that second we saw and knew that we were judged.

 

Published: January 2014
Brian Purcell

Brian Purcell’s poems have appeared in Meanjin, Southerly, and recently in Notes for the Translator (ASM/Cerberus Press), Australian Love Poems and the Red Room’s Disappearing project. For ten years he was the singer/lyricist for Distant Locust, touring Europe in 1991. In 2010 he founded the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

If the earth was

by Jennifer Mackenzie

1.

 

If the earth was

cooling

rather than

warming

would we become more

alarmed

as ice forms on every

idea we throw up

in your direction

on every palm oil plantation

fronds dissolving into

permafrost

on every beach umbrella

spinning colour-wheel

suntan ice where are

your furry mittens?

 

11. PixCell Red Deer (Kohei Nawa)*

 

when waking

in the cage of ice

insane igloo

do I at last glimpse you,

moose?

*National Gallery of Victoria

Published: January 2014
Jennifer Mackenzie

is the author of Borobudur (Transit Lounge, 2009) which was republished in Indonesia as Borobudur and Other Poems (Lontar, 2012). Borobudur was highly commended in the Australian Arts in Asia Awards, and has been presented at festivals and conferences at venues in the Asian region and in Australia. One of Jennifer’s current projects is called New Energy, a series of poems about China’s western deserts.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Unexpected Fall

by Rose Lucas

Barn doors are latched against the snow

and a slash of red roof slants across winter’s pale, oncoming frame:

when a grouse,

flecked and surprisingly elegant

sails low through the yard,    hitting

doors with crunch of bone,

the rupturing sac –

so that an angularity of feathers slides

slow toward the still exposed gravel of the drive,

trailing bloodied tracks to answer

gravity’s dark urgings,

the density of this clotted earth;

even as the honeyed light of lamps

springs up in human windows –

the silken weave of feather and warm body,

the airiness of skeleton,  acuity of eye,

flight’s bold trajectory –

all fall askew,

broken and

cooling already as evening

floods the wide and darkening fields of death’s wilderness –

its blackening grasses,

its blank interruption.

Published: January 2014
Rose Lucas

is a Melbourne poet, critic and academic. Her collection of poems, Even in the Dark, was published by University of West Australia Press, July 2013. She is currently teaching Poetry and Poetics at Victoria University.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

Feast

by Tim Lilburn

Scrape of moon on maple leaves and

on blue cliff stone,

full moon, so far away as to be the moon

of some future life, bright, gelid glow

around 5:30 am, feast of Therese

(Martin) of Liseux, mother dead at five,

four sisters not making adulthood,

her small, boxed-in, black-wimpled face, that moon, tuberculosis.

The tomatoes we’ve hauled out of the garden

in sacks these last weeks, seven inches, some, across,

none split. Bag after bag.

Cat food sodden in the dish at the back door after rain.

Next night  a demon wind licks through

and in the morning, before dawn,

a giant maple leaf sways just above the deck

in a torn spider web. This is the Feast

of the Guardian Angels, whose mouths

are wound over our minds,

warming individual letters of their alphabet

and ours, which then wake in us and move.

Published: January 2014
Tim Lilburn

is the author of nine books of poetry, including Orphic Politics and Kill-site and two essay collections, Living in the World as if It Were Home and Going Home. He teaches at the University of Victoria, Canada.

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From: Vol.01 N.01 – Ecopoetic Ruminations

take names from places

by Kit Kelen

1

 

the light that sits on the water

the sky belonging to these lungs

 

these connect the dark

 

the finger pointing

has itself to say

this touching for far

all one of a kind

seen in the said

 

a bell

which days will chime

a bowl to pass

 

ring hill tumbled

timbered in cast off rays

slant hours

 

in bed imagined

the cartwheel comes to its rest

that’s us asleep

so blessed

 

2

 

possums climb down

from the stars

through these branches

 

steps further

made of not a thing

get roots deep with

secret dark down

 

something will be lost with me

that’s the sacred thing

 

like leaves of late summer prepared to fall

 

or a child absconding

 

a cloud come clean

 

the foreignness of every language

gets the tongue

around

 

sun say

or moon come round

its several ways

and always facing us

 

homes of objects so delicate

they show the gentleness required

to which we all are strangers

Published: January 2014
Kit Kelen

Kit Kelen’s next volume of poems Scavenger’s Season will be published by Puncher and Wattman in 2014. Kelen’s ‘Shed’ won the local award in the Newcastle Poetry Prize for 2013.

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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