#ecopoetry

[mezzopieno-news]

C’è una giostra che non inquina, non fa rumore, non consuma energia. Il CiclOtto gira con i pedali di Michele e porta i bambini in un viaggio tra elementi naturali, fiabe e bolle di sapone ✨🌿 Un atto poetico che trasforma il gioco in amore per la terra.

[mystical-forest-man]

I think, therefore I'm stardust

Matter formed compulsorily From laws beyond matter's hand Like I came into being Without being asked for Like Earth I just am And now that I'm here I found company in Earth I'm Gaia gone wild I'm humbled by matter Can't judge what simply is

[the-family-of-all-things]

Cover - Ice, by Gillian Clarke (Carcanet Press)

[magpine]

I've published a poetry chapbook! I'm so excited to share these poems, born from my own work as an ecologist and from my wanderings, too. From the blurb: "Natural Causes is a debut collection of 24 poems exploring ecological rhythms of masting, disturbance, molting, and migration. These poems move between elegy and resilient affirmation of life, populated by seeds, birds, wildflowers, and wetlands. Addressing climate grief, extinction, and illness, Natural Causes invites readers to let go of some of the world’s gifts, to embrace others, to wander away from the human world and (maybe) to come back again."

This chapbook is available at Bottlecap Press - you can purchase it here. They also have a buy-two-get-one-free chapbook deal with the code BTGO (in case you want to browse for another collection or share a copy with a friend). It's been my dream to share these poems for a long time. I'm so proud of this work and I hope you love it as much as I do. Please share this post to help me spread the word!

[inkliinng]

[robertjtiess]

My poem "Tree of Lives"

I'm grateful if you read this.

Poem text link: https://allpoetry.com/poem/16881798-Tree-of-Lives-by-Robert-J.-Tiess

[abrighterspark]

build your body up from the earth

ground your roots and feet in Gaia

lift and stretch and pull your strength

from eons of her power

[zinjanthropusboisei]

The Poetics of Deep Time:

“One of the defining statements on the Anthropocene within the humanities has been Dipesh Chakrabarty’s assertion that humans have become “geological agents,” partners with planetary systems in shaping Earth's deep future. Yet all living things are creatures of deep time, the inheritors of a legacy of infinitesimal slow change. Chapter 1 explores the intimacy that inheres within the deep time of geologic and evolutionary processes. Thick time refers to the lyric's capacity to put multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame, to “thicken” the present with an awareness of the other times and places. Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney demonstrate how the thick time of the lyric now allows us to imagine the complexity and richness of our enfolding with deep-time processes and explore the sensuous and uncanny aspects of how deep time is experienced in the present. 

Since the idea was first put forward by James Hutton, deep time has been encountered through textures and characterized by a sense of vertigo. The “geologic sublime” is almost a cliché; yet even in John Playfair’s famous, astonished remark on seeing Hutton’s unconformity at Siccar point in 1788 - “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time” - there is the intimation of something even more strange: “We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean.” The rock dissolves to sediments; as Playfair imagines himself witness to its formation, he also bears witness to rock’s fluidity. In this early vision of deep time, which has echoed ever since in the geologic imagination, a series of transformations and breaches takes place: the lithic becomes liquid; the weight of water replaces the weight of stone; the body is submerged by rock and sea. Sensuous, fascinated by texture and the possibilities of multiscalar perspective, Playfair’s vision is geophiliac in its attention to stone’s mutability.

...If Chakrabarty’s statement shows how the Anthropocene and its associated crises are a problem for the humanities, indicating a shift in what constitutes the human, the work of Yusoff and Nigel Clark offers the possibility that life, and what it means to be human, has always had a geologic aspect. From habitable landmasses shaped by volcanism to the origins of human culture in Neolithic art daubed in minerals onto cave walls, we have entered our inheritance as human via our relationship with the lithic.”

David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, 2019