“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer (104).
My postman knocks on the window, fishing out parcels for us from his saddlebag. I meet him at the door, still holding, for some reason, Antonia Pont’s new book, Plain Life: On thinking, feeling and deciding (2025), which I have been reading on the couch. Seems like I can’t put it down. “What’s that you’re reading, Lucy?” he asks, and I tell him that this is the wonderful new philosophy book by the Melbourne writer, Pont. He looks at the cover. He smiles. “I deliver to her, too!”
It is a coincidence, but what is coincidence if not a name for some deeper, hidden principle for how things move through the world? Could we call it a gift? Or is the gift of it in our perception? How did our friend, Jake, perceive the kangaroo grass at the foot of Geboor/Mt Macedon when he gazed at their stems, their spikelets turning grey-green in anticipation of the winter months, when he stepped out for the day to search, on foot, for the photograph that would become the cover image for this issue? This day spent photographing in the field was the gift we never asked for and were honoured to receive. The pursuit of the image was generously perceived and freely given—an offering borne in no small part for the love of what Pont names practising in Jake’s interwoven activities—walking in the bush and taking photographs.
On the day I set aside to write what I tell Shari will be the beginning of this introduction, I have a weird few hours. Suddenly, all those ‘great ideas’ I’d had for it abandon me. I am blocked, or perhaps, more precisely, being overly cautious and stingy with my words. A few disconnected paragraphs eventually stagger across my screen. What part of the gift is this stinginess, my withholding from the act? Is my textual non-generosity a symptom of the environment I’m writing in (reverberating the uptight, extractive and hoarding vibes of the central business district)? Or could it be an essential negativity, constitutive of the capacity to give? Shari and I have discussed this question during our time editing this issue together, delighted by the possibility that a generous and capacious definition of the gift might include its antithesis.
The postman-Pont coincidence, Jake’s photograph, my resistance to writing on command, are expressions of the gifts Kimmerer says are showering us every day. Their life is not lived in our grasp, but in ‘their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath’. I pass these strands around one another, thinking of the uneven, flyaway braids I sometimes give my young daughter when she allows me to brush her hair. I might get better eventually, or maybe I won’t. They still bear the “tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love” (Kimmerer 5). Where is the gift? I think, too, of Shari asking me to edit this issue of Plumwood Mountain Journal with her—and my immediate sense that I had not as much to offer ecopoetics as many other people might. I said yes, giving my not-as-much-as-many-others, freely. I deliver to her, too.
We might think of giving in the way a tree gives, so that it might stay standing, and so that it might make a sound. Listen to the noise the bamboo gives the wind in Vuong Pham’s ‘Immigrant Haiku’:
bamboo wilderness
the wind makes
a long deep sigh
***
To listen with, to breathe with, to think-and-feel with all that has flowed our way since saying yes to the ever-rippling-outward invitation to curate this edition of Plumwood Mountain Journal continues to be a gift-in-the-making as I reflect with Lucy on how to braid this introduction in honour of the plenitude of the field we have been privileged to read. I don’t know how it started, but it seems to me now, looking back, that kinship was always already at work when a dear poet-friend and verse-novel researcher, Dr. Linda Weste, agreed to accompany me to a Driveway reading at KINGS where Lucy and Autumn Royal were re-sharing a collaborative long-form-poem-essay Breaking Lines, whose luminous poetics jolted us both into recognising, once again, what poetry can do, internally and materially, when done well.
While walking back to Linda’s place afterwards, I recall that upswell in delight (from feet to sternum to throat-&-third-eye-centre) coursing along the footpath between the lights, partly to do with Linda’s company, and partly to do with the tumbling cadence and imagery and affect acknowledged by both of us in listening to Lucy and Autumn’s poem, and what this listening brought forth in conversation regarding the buoyancy and power felt inside and under the darkness of the subject matter itself (illness, opacity, imprisonment, maternal fracture), moving in a sensate wave, a block before Linda’s door, toward something inarticulate, yet having to do with a certain uncertain, collective, emancipatory risking of vulnerability in meeting with poetic truth and verve, the ongoing unravelling and aporia connecting us all.
I’m glad Lucy trusted herself (and me) enough to say yes. To my mind, we fell easily into what was always already an ongoing ecopoetic conversation, which has meandered over these many months in capacious loops and threads nurtured by mutual wellsprings of humour, intellectual vigour, appreciation and trust. To read and to think-with, together, has been a pure joy, and one that I cherish all the more for its rarity in kind. Synchronicity has also played its own, mysterious part. I take to heart Antonia Pont’s suggestion in Plain Life, happily handed to her early in life via chords of friendship, of applying the principle of checking in with how you feel after spending time in someone’s company, and, along with Spinoza via Deleuze, to consider that slide in affect towards joy or towards sadness in noticing what is good in the mixture of the company for yourself.
In sitting down to write this loose beginning-of-the-final-stage of our current braiding, I find myself at my kitchen table on a blustery Saturday afternoon encountering, once again, an abundance I hardly know what to do with. As Lou Smith’s ‘Teaism (a Pantoum of communing and sharing)’ suggests, in sitting down to write, “the cup breathes its own life, I turn the pot three times for luck”.
The messiness and liveliness of doubt: “I’ve had near kisses / cupped in submarines / lows in unusable mental states” in D. Perez-McVie’s ‘Adding Days to July’; of negative capability: “i can’t write about anything, really / apart from here” in Aries Gacutan’s ‘a bit more than a year on’; of anxiety, working with and within practising’s multiple forms, as, for example in Jem Rice’s poem ‘After gardening’:
here we meet our minds
through soil in fingernails
removing oxalis from strawberries
like anxious neural circuits
Also the coercive neo-liberal capitalist function of overwhelm, captured in remarkable fashion in Radoslav Rochallyi’s concrete poem ‘Letter and Antidote’, whose opening equation divides against the injunction “I’m dying quietly inside myself”. Rather than polarised or opposite strands, such discoveries in the submission list gave sway and ballast to our ongoing musings on practice, and on the nuanced inflection practising brings to bear, such as Antonia Pont has theorised in her earlier tract, A Philosophy of Practicing with Deleueze’s Difference and Repetition (2021).
Reading poems both separately and aloud together, listening and being moved by the breathing poems themselves, has underscored the looping, honking, lovely meanderings of our months-long conversation in myriad forms. Crossing multiple platforms, including phone-calls while driving, reading on trains and planes, gasps of appreciative laughter while stopping mid-line to text: “Lucy, can a parasite be a gift, what do you reckon?!” and Lucy’s wild reply … These and other moments accrue in visceral memory score, like the scudding clouds outside my kitchen window and the spatter of rain calling me to rush outside to fetch my whipped-fresh sheets and pillowcases. In the wild unpegging between, I think of Leni Shilton’s poem ‘After rain’ and the precision of the quietude it embodies
where a cormorant
sits high in the gum.She dries her stretched black wings
Amanda Lucas-Frith has supported both Lucy and I in the slowness and flexibility we needed to meet a triad of sickness and winter and heatwaves in motion, threading care and labour and plain life in with the reading-with and the thinking-with delight and rigor and wonder at what we had to choose from. She has also brought to the table her acumen and generosity in allowing us the fullness of our selection at the maximum quota. How to do justice to the many tendernesses, the grief and rage, the mountains of mourning, the sheer liveliness of the poems themselves as gifts? Despite everything, poems continue to be made. It has been heart-warming and encouraging throughout to stop and reflect on the living fact that at any given moment, so many poets everywhere, from all over the world, sung and unsung, of all ages, and of all backgrounds, care and dare enough to sit down with a pen or keyboard and give attention to the difficulty of the wordless, of the preverbal, of the ground itself.
In terms of practising, the poems we read gave witness to many modes: from parenting to prayer, to driving and to ambivalence (see Svetlana Sterlin’s ‘Return Trip’), to diving, to hook ups and dating and the subject of love (including one by Luoyong Chen titled exactly that, ‘Subject of Love’), to growing or thinking about food, including the ongoing significance felt in rituals of preparation (“Corn, once more!” in Elena Gomez’s cosmic exclamation), to making, practicing, listening to, singing, writing, and playing music of all kinds and in a diversity of forms (see Felicity Plunkett’s riveting poem ‘Bound’, Angela Costi’s ‘Re-learning Mana’s Dialect’ and Sam Sax’s ‘Threnody for X’, among others), to walking and wondering, birdwatching, meditating, dancing, grieving and mourning, to all kinds of handiwork, including knitting (as in Colleen Harris’ ‘The Trick is to Ignore Your Hands’) and rinsing rice (as in Sreyash Sakar’s ‘I Am The Quiet I Keep’), the gesture implicit in giving a haircut akin to the raising of an instrument to the receiver’s chin (as in Jo Bear’s ‘Butch4Butch’).
Love in all its minutiae feels as alive and active as the networked mycelium in the soil of the poems we had to say no to as much as those celebrated here. I felt the courage and stamina of Natalie Harkin’s work alongside this colloquium, noting her kindness in wishing us luck. I am reminded of one of her Elder sources of wisdom in “Weaving the Colonial Archive: A Basket to Lighten the Load”. As Aunty Ellen Trevorrow explains:
You keep going round and round creating the loops
and once [you] do those stages [you’re] talking, actually having a conversation, just like our old people.
(qtd. in Harkin 158)
In attending to the fierce, the tender, the frayed and furious, as well as the nuanced daily shadowing of the ‘subtle objects’ across the field entire of the poems we have encountered, I am struck by the subtle ways in which practicing creates, as Antonia Pont’s poem, ‘subtle objects’ suggests,
still
drifts of knotted feelings, some so immemorial
small, subtle objects
which aren’t really objects
One such subtle object shimmering otherhow across the page unfurls in Tim Urgano’s poem ‘Safekeeping’, in which the speaker finds
an inscription on the page
of an old book signed ‘Pa’and a flower you had
tucked away for
safe keeping
That flower floats alongside the furling of a father seahorse’s tail as, in similar slow-brain-beauty, Sean West grants us with a poem written in the plural voice of one-among-many baby seahorses in honour of the parental fold:
The ampersands of our bodies
flume our father’s story off the page
where we’ll pass as blades of seagrass & & &
By contrast, in L. Noelle McLaughlin’s ‘Staurolite Crux’, the mysterious ‘small, subtle object’ is carried ‘[i]n the left hand’, such that
When I walk to
Town without you
I clutch one so
If I have to
I can disappear.
In Jemma Borg’s ‘The gift of grief’, a true, and truly moving, proposition is made: “If the twin of grief / is praise, then praise the sea which makes // our bones ache, even in summer. […] Time is a growing thing, roaming to seed. / Then, somewhere else, the sun is blinding.” I blink and read again; feel goosebumps rising along my arms. “[L]ook”’ writes Eartha Davis in ‘sìn air fighe’,
the river unravels reasons snagged stories
silty palace
pulse prancing towards shore
To be released from stories that no longer serve, while remembering, as the child seems to, in Jennifer Eadie’s poem, that “everything is happening at once” and “only then do you realise there is no boundary”:
to draw/
to abrase/
is to begin again to
build oneself again
she is rebuilding a world here and then offering it to us
as a gift that is saying:
do not give in- to the grief but give- over to it.
allow it to form lines
“I wanted to remember / not just the good times, so perfect and fleeting, // but the messiness around them” confesses the speaker in Leah Browning’s poem ‘Slippage’, knowing at the same time that “like a firefly, something ephemeral, / […] can never truly be / preserved.”
And yet the ephemeral is constantly approached and appealed to in practices as diverse as they are precise. In Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s ‘A Prayer for Sylvia’, “Nothing is the same as it was / Before the prayer was said”,
Before even the thought of the prayer
Was an unformed cell of thought
In an uncertain minute of time.
In Sholto Buck’s ekphrastic ‘Watching Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice In Your Room While You Are Not In It’, the ephemeral might be satirically mirrored in jump cuts that are swift, surprising and layered with irony (“I love everything I don’t know / about you, asleep in the next room” ), whereas in Michael Farrell’s ‘From This Perspective, Old Guys, But If Transposed, Gold Eyes’ the humour ups the ante to an absurdity that also turns on tenderness.
Throughout, Lucy and I shared lively anecdotes that accidentally—or not, think: synchronicity—led to reflections on the unexpected gift, both in terms of own experience and those we found in poems such as Dave Drayton’s ‘The Landscape Has Absorbed me [Centocartography: Franklin], a concrete collage poem in which a peripatetic literary map becomes an unexpected “square of light // in streets that gleam”. Likewise, in the brilliantly anagrammatic poem ‘Odd Wren’s End-Words’ by Stuart Barnes, we considered the shadow adhering to the gift of mis-directed rage (“His rage gift / was utterly unasked // for, but I don’t feel exposed, / as if on stage, // don’t imagine him modelling Milo x Speedo / briefs” ), as distinct from the grief-struck, clarifying anger channelled so movingly in Jo Langdon’s ‘Art Objects, or, Live Document’.
We talked about what might constitute both care and flow at work in modest gift economies; questions of whether and in what ways we might have met with such already, as Jo Bear writes in ‘Butch4Butch’:
I used to hold an instrument
up to my chin like this—to cradle it—as you cradle my jaw
to keep my head from following.
This beautiful poem reminded me of something in Lucy’s voice when she said, “It’s also true that we look after each other”—this, as we were rounding out a conversation, as I recall, on the all-too-implied version of the gift as an unpaid, unseen, exploitative entity linked with precarious and/or gendered labour in market economies.
With endearing frankness, Lucy and I swapped anecdotes on the failed or backfired/attempted gift, or the refused or minimised, or somehow miserable gift. Who hasn’t got some story to tell of a gift gone awry, or terribly, if not hilariously, wrong? Surely everyone knows someone in their extended circle who says they don’t want a birthday present but then sulks theatrically as the day slides by, or others who expect month-long birthday periods but who yet seem miserable despite the raining down of merchandise upon them! Anecdotes like these threaded the ways in which we realised, early on, that we were onto something, not only as an idea, but in relation to opposing lines of capitalist complicity that superimpose narratives of scarcity and competition against the possibility of abundance, and the intersectional, socio-historic, cultural conditions in which female ‘giftedness’ has been punished or suppressed, or risked, and at what cost: as A. Frances Johnson’s poem ‘Artemisia’s Knife’ vividly explores.
We thought, too, about how a gift requires of the giver both a vulnerability (as in, for example, Colleen Harris’ poem ‘The Trick Is to Ignore Your Hands’, which knits fibres of warmth for an aging mother, whose “bones // are always chilled”) as well as an openness to the other (as in Angela Costi’s ‘Re-Learning Mana’s Dialect’: “When I sing her voice returns”) which in itself invokes trust in the other’s capacity to receive (as, for example, in Emma Crook’s deeply moving ‘Kindling baby’:
the hollow body of swamp mahogany shines
in a flash of forgotten sun and with skin ignited by rain
I am making a kindling baby.
“salt is salt is salt” Crook’s speaker repeats; Hodge’s first-person speaker, grappling with how “[d]isease is all loss and labour” risks imagining what it took to get those “Salted words down” in the poem ‘Your Own Words’.
Undoing “a certain grip,” as Pont suggests in ‘subtle objects’, takes an ongoing practising in mundane, messy, courage-to-decide otherhow in multiple, micro-momentous ways, as these poems amply attest. So many ways in which it becomes possible to
rest it, see its white, gelatinous tip and heavy-duty
muscle unclench, withdraw silently, like a dancer
turning away—
turning away just often and minimally enough to counter, or even counteract, at least in the pause in which capacity is gathered or noticed, that “great hunger / running the machinery of it all” (Plunkett, ‘Bound’). What a privilege it has been to witness the ongoing poetic capacity, capaciousness, and cunning at work in this braiding of a sample set of tenderness with living ground.