In calling for poems for this issue of Plumwood Mountain Journal we asked poets to “rupture and unsettle hegemonic thinking about ‘Nature’ and ‘the natural’”, and for work that performed the “radical empathy of the queer and queered imagination”. In response, we received a diaphanous plenitude of voices situating queer subjectivities within the more-than-human world. Reading this richness of work, we gasped, we cried, we belly-laughed; we felt the privilege of bearing witness to such a joyous diversity of visibility. The poems that called to us most strongly were those whose forms sustained and stitched an active queering and ecopoetics, in which the aesthetic “render[ed] strange” (Sullivan) assumptions about language, history, and the place of the queer body, mind and desire in the natural world. Some of these poems looked back, some forward. All of them spoke urgently to the ethics of dwelling and care on this shared place we call Earth.
Queer and trans voices have always been speaking from and about nature, as queer and trans voices are, and have always been, in and of nature. To suggest otherwise is, as noted by Michael Walsh in Queer Nature, “a problem with the canon”, with the story it seeks to maintain, rather than with the voices themselves (xvi). And as ecologist and evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden reminds us in Evolution’s Rainbow, when a story implies “something is wrong with so many people” it is the story that must be “wrong, not the people” (18).
Diversity—of gender, of sexuality—is abundant throughout the natural world, and indeed as Roughgarden argues, “a necessary feature of evolution” (Morton: 278). The more-than-human world is, it seems, inherently queer. Drawing on the work of both Roughgarden and Darwin, Timothy Morton suggests in ‘Queer Ecology’ that there is in fact “no contradiction between straightforward biology and queer theory. If you want a queer monument” you simply have to “look around you” (276).
In this issue of Plumwood Mountain Journal, we have curated a microcosm of that diversity. The natural place of the queer body in the more-than-human world is made manifest in ‘Landscape with Two Hands’ where the body is “bird-songed” by pleasure “into an august sky”. In ‘The Trees Look Taller When Kneeling Beneath Them’, an outdoor beat is a “temple” for queer desire in which two lovers are “touched by who [they] pray to”. The speaker of ‘I like to shit in the woods’ finds themself unafraid in wild nature, free from the tyranny of the sign and grizzly bathroom confrontations.
In ‘tetris’, form reveals the binary as impossible restriction, and nonbinary experience is situated in the multiplicity of the breathing, pulsing world. Similarly, in ‘Self-Portrait as Cuttlefish’, a cephalopod struggles to camouflage themself as “a binary / as old as light” and a chessboard is revealed as the “dark side / of the moon”, while passion’s “black keys” and affection’s “lovestruck smile” are reflected in ‘Clair de Lune’ and ‘I am queer / and so is the moon’, respectively.
Look around. Language—its borders and constraints—is a focus of several poems. In ‘Linnaeus Begins Dividing’, we are reminded of the (arbitrary) origins of botanical nomenclature, which limits the human mind while “flowers [go] on kissing”. At the same time, the significance of naming and accuracy of language is driven home with velvet antlers in ‘My Students Try to Avoid Referring to Me in the Third Person’. Transformation unfurls among the “urbanatural” (Nichols) in the wonderfully self-reflexive ‘Incomplete Queer Aubade’. Language is queered, fecund and “tremble boned” in the lyric mini-essay ‘In Touch’.
Several poems reach across queer histories and futures. In ‘Dendrology’, traces of a secret queer code speak from the trees across the centuries, while ‘All Bambi Lesbians Were Once Called Dear’ reminds us of “[t]hirteen decades / of bambi history”. In ‘Ciggies and Bleach’ we witness “dhinawan / teaching us to pick up the pieces of our past” and “natural world orders” are queered in playful and futuristic legalese in ‘carbon footprint contortions: reference notes’.
Non-human animals make appearances in their varied and deeply queer forms. We meet the solar-powered Leaf Sheep Sea Slug in ‘Sacoglossa’, and what might be the ultimate queer ancestor in ‘Medusae’. As Michael Walsh notes, “in contrast [to Adam and Eve], the Medusa … is a better ancestor because her phallic snakes recombine the male and female and allow her to represent the human and more-than-human world. She is shameless” (xvi). Here we encounter both the medusa of myth and medusa in resilient, aquatic form. Elsewhere, pop culture is a poetic prompt: Barbie cameos in ‘A pond in Maui turned pink’, a neon meditation on heteronormativity and ecological crisis, and My Little Pony prances through ‘Homophobic Horses’, illuminating brumby impacts in Kosciuszko National Park and queering one of the Five Discourses of Matthew.
Look around. The ethics of care is a central meditation in several poems. “Deep time goes deeper than any lover can” in ‘I try to talk to gay men on first dates about Perth Canyon and Deep Time but they don’t care’. We are haunted by the devastating cruelty of ignorance in ‘Based on a true story’, but heartened by the prayer-like call of ‘Tender’ to “[g]ive up topiary”, to “loosen harm / from … body … garden, / the whole world’s yard”, the poem’s fluid mantra suggesting both decay and regeneration.
Disintegration and its role in transformation is embraced. In the suburban garden of ‘Attachments in the Very Ordinary: / 14 Positions in a Day’, “tree leaves take in pollutants from the air / use enzymes to break them down”. “Each dogwood blossom” of ‘Late Freeze’ is “smudged brown as if / burnt”, but “the redbuds”, with their heart-shaped leaves, “remain”. In ‘The Sand Reckoner’, the speaker still has mobile reception at the beach where “On Grindr …”, “[o]ne profile reads: Destroy me. / I will live again”. Conversely, in ‘Birthday Letter’, mobile reception “is erratic as the southern sea”, and “on a rotting log / … a fiddler beetle lays her eggs”. A fig tree underpins ‘burial’, in which notions of ceremony, queer kinship and the everlasting are interwoven.
Might the future of a queered ecopoetics be not green but blue? In ‘Plural Breathing: Contemporary Approaches to Queering Ecopoetics’, Em König guides us to Catriona Sandilands, who proposes that “feeling/thinking/reading blue … is part of a constellation of resistant queer practices that affectively and politically interrupt a homonormative futurity oriented toward a green optimism” (189). Sandilands’ interpretation of Derek Jarman’s Chroma: A Book of Color and his final film, Blue, and Betsy Warland’s Only This Blue: A Long Poem with an Essay, offers the “queer possibilities of blue” (189) as a lens for what Eileen Joy calls a more “deeply empathic enmeshment” with a suffering world (188). A “blue ecology is worth lingering with” argues Sandilands, “simply because it is not green, because it constellates and aspires to a different kind of living. [It] helps us understand a historical shift in queer ecological politics and queer ecopoetics—from green to blue affective orientations, from green to blue aesthetics and politics, from green to blue desires, attachments, and forms of living together” (190).
Certainly, green abounds in this issue’s poems, but when blue announces itself it is huge (a “blue whale” envisioned in a “forest”), enduring (the sky’s “gradation — a red/yellow / to blue”) and powerful (“veins blue thick pulsing up and out and along [that] show” a man “where he is going”).
We share a selection of queer voices in this issue with acknowledgement to the abundance of work taking place in the space of queer ecopoetics and nature writing. We encourage readers to continue to seek out such work. We also acknowledge the energy, care and generosity of Amanda Lucas-Frith and that of every poet who entrusted us with their poems. It was a pleasure to sit with them and to watch this issue bloom. For now, we invite you into this particular poetic garden, which includes work from Australia, the UK, the USA and India. Welcome. Please, look around.