17768403 Archives - Plumwood Mountain

Intersecting Energies: Location, Gender and Climate

edited by Anne Elvey

Bendigo, March 2016, photo by Anne Elvey

For the Wangan and Jangalingou Family Council, Adani and government are undermining native title. The Stop Adani campaign network has highlighted slogans such as ‘Coal versus Coral’. On the day this call for submissions opens, thousands upon thousands of school students and their supporters across Australia have marched to call for climate justice in the School Strike 4 Climate.

Marshall Islander, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, standing before the UN, summons her persona as mother to address her young child in ‘Dear Matafele Peinem’ [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJuRjy9k7GA%5D

Eunice Andrada evokes location and neglect due to distance in her poem ‘Pacific Salt’

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyBH9GtUVM8?start=70%5D

Is climate change the overarching challenge of our time?

How do location and gender intersect in climate change poetics?

In this issue, I invite poems that consider intersections of climate change with gender and location, both physical place and the way location refers to experiences of race, class, ability and sexuality. What might be anti-colonial, queer, feminist, counter-classist, embodied poetries of climate change? How might the intersecting and sometimes distancing locations of climate change experience and politics be reimagined in resistant and enlivening ecological poetries that recollect embodied locatedness?

I am interested not in didactic poems telling the reader what to think about climate change but in poems that potentially shift the reader’s perspective, that have the capacity to – in Paul Celan’s terms – ‘turn the breath’, in a world where atmosphere (another kind of breath) and much else that depends on it are at stake.

Submissions were open from 15 March 2019 to 1 May 2019

Anne Elvey is managing editor of Plumwood Mountain journal. She is editor of hope for whole: poets speak up to Adani (2018) and author of White on White (Cordite 2018) and Kin (FIP 2014). Her scholarly work spans ecological hermeneutics, ecological feminism, biblical literature, the material turn in cultural studies, and religious responses to climate change. See further: https://anneelvey.wordpress.com/

Submissions Guidelines (please follow these closely)

In one email, send up to 3 poems in Times New Roman 12pt font, 1.5 spacing with each poem as a separate attachment. Each poem should be no longer than 50 lines or 2 pages (where your poem is in a form such that line length is not relevant). Poems should not be previously published, but simultaneous submissions are allowed. Please let the managing editor know if your poem is accepted elsewhere. Poems should be submitted as .docx, .doc, or .rtf files (send visual poems as both .pdf and .jpg.) to: submissions.plumwoodmountain@gmail.com .

Submissions are read anonymously. Do not include your name or contact details on the poems themselves, and please delete personal information from your electronic file properties. Include email contact details and a brief (50 word) bio in the body of your email. Also include your postcode if you are resident in Australia. This will not be published.

Plumwood Mountain also publishes book reviews and photo essays.

Book reviews should be 800 – 1000 words in length unless otherwise agreed. We do not accept unsolicited book reviews. See our Notes for Reviewers, also the list of available books. To read previous reviews visit the Book Reviews page. If you would like to review one of the books listed or would like to suggest a book to review, please contact the managing editor
info.plumwoodmountain@gmail.com

Style for reviews: Times New Roman, left justified, 1.5 spacing, with endnotes, or author-date, and bibliography, following Chicago Manual of Style.

All reviews should be submitted as .docx, .doc, or .rtf files by email to
submissions.plumwoodmountain@gmail.com

For multimedia, photographic essays, sound recordings and visual art, please first discuss the submission process and formatting with the managing editor at
info.plumwoodmountain@gmail.com

From December 2017 Plumwood Mountain is no longer considering unsolicited scholarly essays or creative prose. From time to time, there may be calls for such genres.

Copyright of poems, artwork, articles and reviews remains with the contributor.

Payment

Australian-based poets whose work is selected for the August 2019 issue of Plumwood Mountain journal, from this general call for submissions, will be paid a minimum of $50 per poem.

We are grateful for the support of Copyright Agency Cultural Fund that enabled payment of Australian-based poets for the August 2018 and February 2019 issues of the journal. This funding has also enabled poetry editors in addition to commission a small number of poems for the February and August 2019 issues.

Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics

ISSN 2203-4404

Submissions are currently closed. Volume 7 Number 1 ‘Plant Poetics’ guest edited by John Ryan will be published in March 2020.

Submissions for Volume 7 Number 2 will open mid-year. Please check this page in May 2020 for details.

Plant Poetics

A novel area of science called plant cognition is showing us that plants are more than photosynthetic androids or the pleasant (read: agreeable) backdrops to human dramas. Green beings have the ability to communicate with each other and us; select from a range of life options then make decisions; and behave in a manner that suggests a complex interior world of emotions, memory, and feeling. Plants have their own kinds of sentience and intelligence, languages and thoughts. This contentious branch of biology has even pointed to the existence of intergenerational and selective forms of memory in which plants block recollections of traumatic experiences in order to ensure the positive adaptation of themselves and their future kin.

Notwithstanding these novel findings, many poets – from Rumi and Erasmus Darwin to Joy Harjo and Jack Davis – have known this intuitively about the botanical world all along. In this issue of Plumwood Mountain on the theme of plant poetics, I’m looking for poetry that offers fresh, unusual, and eccentric perspectives on the vegetal world. Try removing plants from the backgrounds of your poems. Place them front and centre as protagonists with their own mindfulness. If you want, allow the plants speak to the reader, other plants, other creatures, or themselves. They can be agitated or morbidly depressed, whimsical or tragically ironic (let’s just embrace anthropomorphism for once and see what happens). Of course, they don’t need to speak, but they can.

Plants are beautiful subjects for poems – yes, especially when in flower – but what else are they? Plants are visually appealing – for example, when the bark strips away from gum trees in the middle of summer in Australia – but how do they appeal through sound, touch, taste, smell, synaesthesia, and the spirit domain? What does the philodendron in your bedroom have to say about all this prattle?

John Charles Ryan is a poet, botanist, and environmental humanities scholar who holds appointments as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of New England in Australia and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Ryan is a board member of the New England Writers’ Centre, and since 2017 has facilitated environmental poetry workshops at the New England Regional Art Museum. His published poetry includes Katoomba Incantation (2011), Two With Nature (2012, with botanical artist Ellen Hickman), New Perspectives on Tablelands Flora (2017, with botanical artist David Mackay), The Earth Decides (2017) and Primavariants (2017, with Glen Phillips). His creative work has been published by Fremantle Press and Margaret River Press, and in the journals Arc Poetry Magazine, Australian Geographic, Axon, Cordite Poetry Review, Griffith Review and Philosophy Activism Nature. Reviews of his work have appeared in Australian Poetry, Sydney Morning Herald and Weekend Australian. His recent non-fiction book, The Language of Plants, is a collaboration with natural scientists and philosophers.

Please note: Submissions for the Plant Poetics issue are now closed. Submissions will not reopen until May or June 2020, at which time the next theme and guest editor will be announced.

Submissions Guidelines (please follow these closely)

Poetry

Scholarly essays

Essays should be between 3000 and 5000 words not including references and should follow MLA style. This link may prove more useful for MLA style: http://www.webster.edu/academic-resource-center/writingcenter/writing-tips/mla.html