Jan 2011
Mon 31 Jan I pressed the button, nothing happened.
I am faced with a dead monitor - no words, no images, no communications, no news, no music, just the forest through the window, the trees shifting their weights in the breeze, the two young dazzling-white-hair-brushed-back kookaburras on their favourite perch, a Monarch butterfly sailing on the light, a Whip bird calling from the creek.
We rely on devices, technics, technology, losing techne, skill, touch. I must be addicted.
News from Cairo
"After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast "Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe," — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself." Thoreau from Walden.
I was teaching my students this not two weeks ago, what a hypocrite! I have just turned on the BBC to find out the latest from Egypt.
After my second successful visit (the first time I tried I failed, landlocked in Morocco by the Polisario war ) I wanted to write a long poem about the past and the present in this fascinating country, it remains in shards. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt was with soldiers and 167 wise men, ‘a legion of culture’, top French scientists, academics, artists, writers. The legion was to provide Egypt with Enlightenment knowledge and methods (and at the same time discover and ransack the relics of this ancient civilisation, including the Rosetta Stone). What Egypt needs now is not an import of poets, scientists, engineers and artists, but a common imagination to envisage a future - getting rid of the current regime is the easy step.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there. W.C. Williams
Nile Songs - poems
30 Jan - Just back from a swim, saw our first brown antichinus in Jagun, climbing a tree (away from us but towards a Brahminy Kite, which would have dined on it if the opportunity arose).
Brown Antechinus. Courtesy The University of Queensland.
On the way noticed more invasive grasses and lantana in one of the least weedy reserves on the East coast. The richness of our environment is in danger, whether we are here or not.
Nicki Markus (Chief Conservation Officer, Bush Heritage) pointed out in a second order argument, during a debate on a statement by Sir David Attenborough: "If humans disappeared overnight, would the planet be better off without us?" - that “We have made ourselves all but indispensable as managers of the natural environment.”
10% of the 28,000 plants introduced to feed stock and adorn gardens would take over;
our ancient rainforest repositories of biodiversity would be choked by rubber vine from ground to canopy;
woodlands would be impenetrable to ground mammals by blackberry and lantana;
dunes would disappear below Bitou bush and Boneseed;
wetlands and floodplains would be invaded Prickly acacia and Parkinsonia;
Alligator weed (Alternanthera philoxeroides) and Cabomba caroliniana, an aquarium plant that spreads from broken stem pieces would choke waterways; and
that without human management, cats and foxes, horses, goats, rabbits camels, sheep, and cattle would decimate the vegetation and small fauna and destroy ourt fragile topsoil and foul watersources.
“It is our fate to keep in check what we have unleashed.” She remarked.
It is a terrible legacy, a fight with no end.
(Cafe Scientific Biodiversity debate, Big Ideas, ABC RN, 16 January 2011)
Jagun alarmclock on our bedroom balcony
Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae)
The world’s largest kingfisher, named after its call, usually a growl that ratchets up into hysterical laughter, courtesy of Wiradjuri guuguubarra. Ours produced two chicks over Christmas and they won’t go too far. Once established, a kookaburra lives in a territory the calls loudly demarcate. They mate for life, and usually the dominant pair in a family group breed (semi-monogamously). Others help to feed the chicks, probably older siblings. There are now up to seven individuals around Blue Poles at any one time.
You may have heard them call loudly while watching a scene:
in the Amazon rainforest (Raiders of the Lost Ark);
in the East Indies (of the Swiss Family Robinson, wrecked on their way to Sydney, but filmed on the island of Tobago, West Indies);
in the Himalayas around the Palace of Mopu, near Darjeeling, (Black Narcissus);
on the Borgo mountain pass, Transylvania, still the main route today through the eastern range of the Carpathian Mountains (Jesus Franco's Count Dracula); and most famously,
in the thick jungles of Africa's dark interior as Tarzan swung into the 20th century from his estate in British East-Africa.
‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree / with a toothache bad as can be.’
29 Jan - A daily bushwalk - the sweet scent of gum blossom is back, and the cicadas have quietened, families of White-cheeked Honeyeaters, a posse of Treecreepers, wrens and crowds of lorikeets.
Many theorists have suggested that a natural aesthetics is impoverished on an intellectual level, lacking multiple levels of conceptual analysis, and artistic intentionality. However, both nature and art can provide rich sensual and intellectual nutrition, and both can (if really needed) refine our aesthetic sensibilities and stimulate learning opportunities.
Male Orchard Swallowtail
A sponge duck (if the form outlined a religious icon it could have fetched a fortune on E-Bay).
To John, at this his special time
A poet whose verses do not rhyme
A man whose friendship grows and grows
Enthusiastic eco-prose
composing lines that do not scan
making him a unique man.
He loves his jokes, his birds, his Bron
So all the best from Pete & Mon.
This poem, written in a birthday card from a friend, on the spur of the moment, (which I really appreciated) asks a common? Rather than ask ‘What is Poetry?’ It is easier to ask – What is a Poem? Though this question is not straightforward given the sheer diversity of forms, types and approaches. See What is a poem.
Language serves two interrelated functions: communication (social), and thought (egocentric), which originate relatively simultaneously. The uses to which language can be put are as varied as forms of life and human action and behaviours. Poetry shares both these origins, as a practice and discourse - as poets we think though a poem, and the act of writing itself is a factor. There is a wide range of poetries - poets write propaganda, occasional poems (such as Pete's above), private love poems intended for only the addressee and public epithalamiums, all with varied motives.
However the public role of poetry has diminished. What was commonplace and taken for granted as a major artform is now rare (and generally ignored), but found in private facebook pages of teenage angst, or public affairs like weddings and funerals.[i] It shoudl be remembered that poetry’s popularity before the Enlightenment was due to its use as a pedagogical tool.
As I have written before, 'Poem’ is a word with so much baggage. The romantic lyric is problematic suggesting individual genius and sensitivity (via Sturm und Drang); it is not a question of contemporary irony but of what one wants to say and how one wants to sing. Poetry is natural , a normal use of language usually in the form of embodied knowledge.
"Poetry, through metaphor, exercises our minds so that we can extend our normal powers of comprehension beyond the range of the metaphors we are brought up to see the world through." (Lakoff & Turner) Ture, but poems are more than boxes of metaphor - poems are processes, which energise people, performances, and memories over time.
[i] "The more comprehensively a medium fulfils its socio-cultural function, the more it is taken for granted, as literature once used to be. It did indeed fulfill several such functions, ranging from entertainment through information and documentation to pastime, but these have now been distributed among many independent institutions . . ." Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993, px.
25 jan - visited Mary White who will be a guest at BRWF. She has invested in our future, buying a valley with a waterfall and river for posterity. Falls Forest Retreat is a rainforest conference centre - a marvellous site available for groups or individuals to stay.
We were welcomed by a mob of Red-necked Wallabies and Mary who has opened our eyes to so much through her key books: ‘The Greening of Gondwana’; ‘After the Greening, The Browning of Australia’; ‘Listen ... Our Land is Crying’, and ‘Running Down - Water in a Changing Land’ and most recently ‘Earth Alive, From Microbes to a Living Planet’ on the bacterial origins of life and Australian ecosystems.
I quoted her in my PhD: “Here I am, my cellular endosymbionts performing their housekeeping duties within every individual bacterial cell of eth 100 billion, of more than 200 different types, that contain my DNA; knowing what to do and when to do it; enabling the metabolism that keeps me alive; providing the neurones that enable me to think and begin to understand a little of the meaning of life.”
– An approach I used for an eco-love poem ‘Real Love’.
Mary showing the height of an old friend, 2.5 MYO (a recently unearthed fourth metatarsal from Australopithecus afarensis, shows that they had a permanently arched foot and had left the trees).
Colours in the rainforest at Falls Forest Retreat
23 jan
A midday bird sails towards us, submerges, reappears, wheeling
widening the circle, skimming the landscape of leaves and twigs,
curious for feathers, flesh and blood, bones, anything on the edge,
and not a yaw, not a pitch on his appetite. In this ceremony, he yawns,
our excitement stretches a first, the white head, a Square-tailed Kite,
coherence in the fingertips, for effortless balance, explicit,
like Vasari’s story of Giotto drawing a perfect circle in red
for an envoy to take back to the Pope in Rome . . .
21 jan
Long early morning walk, so many birds, and with a storm circling, the light was alive for photography. My current photographic project is called Natural Sculptures. An essai, in process, accompanies it:
My first sense of a photographic series, long lost (and undistinguished as photographs), began 30 years ago in New Zealand with images of steps leading nowhere. I was attracted to the idea of human terraforming being impermanent. My current series brings attentions to the human need for form and how form reveals past human activity, including indigenous, relict everywhere on this continent. Many of the photographs show tree stumps, stumps regrowing, and disintegrating back into the forest floor, or in apparent stasis. We have to face up to our interventions and impact on natural environments, but at the same time realise the resiliency of nature.
20 jan
Full moon rises over Jagun, a bat shrieks - we haven't heard an owl yet:
This time last year, friends couldn't believe we were serious about leaving Sydney, but we have enjoyed the unexpected 'tree/seachange'. This afternoon after coming back from lunch by the river and this morning's rain storm we could smell the forest, hear the black cockatoos, and see the ocean's inflationary blue, that turned dark and bloody towards sunset.
And though the Highway is dangerous (see Nov-Dec 2010 archive) we are very happy here, a shame we have to own a car.
Road transport costs the city of Sydney $1.4 billion a year in greenhouse gas and other air pollutants. The city's heavy congestion exacerbating ill health and climate change accounting for four out of 10 of the Australian deaths and illnesses caused by vehicle pollution each year. In 2006 a report calculated that the damage to health costs Sydney $1.223 billion a year and that that figure is rising. (Report by the Centre for International Economics, quoted by Wendy Frew, ‘Heavy road congestion is killing us, study finds’, Sydney Morning Herald, January 23, 2006.)
Quote of the week: “But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is - I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" Thoreau[i]
[i] From Walking, began as a lecture called ‘The Wild’ delivered (as a talk poem) at the Concord Lyceum, April 23, 1851. He developed it into the essay finally published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly.
Late yesterday, Jagun was alive with red darts of light. In the forest margins, catching the late sun were red dragonflies - Such manouvrability, with fore- and hind-wings they can fly with each wing working differently and use different methods to generate thrust. "They can adjust wing shape, stroke length, angle of attack, move a wing forward (or backwards) of its "usual" position, stop one or two wings, adjust relationships between any two wings on either side of the body ... the list goes on. . . . Dragonfly wings are very dynamic structures. They are not simple planar objects. The corrugations in the wing hold an aerofoil of air around the physical wing, lowering friction, and the wings flex around several axes, responding both to muscle actions and to inertia effects." (See Rowe)
Probably the Fiery Skimmer Dragonfly - Orthetrum villosovittatum, or Red Arrow - Rhodothemis lieftincki? Here are two mating:
We are lucky to have a couple of sculptures by Hamish Malcolm, a local artist/ marine biologist - a bricoleur with a great eye. In his words, "I look at a piece of wood and an image jumps into my head of what it is (usually an animal but not always) and then I try and make it - I do try and capture the character of the animal rather than the actual likeness. I enjoy creating things from wood (driftwood especially), and ceramics and steel gives me flexibility to what I can create."
Meanwhile, I have been taking photographs of natural sculptures:
Jagun's colours at dawn and sunset are wonderful exaggerations.
Poetry News
The Poets Union has done so much for contemporary poets and audiences for contemporary poetry – I was president for two terms and initiated funding from the NSW government (with the help of Neil James), and initiated the POW! Poets on Wheels tours. Since then the Union has gone on to bigger and better things to a marvellous team, in particular Brook Emery and Martin Langford, holding the Australian Poetry Festival, awarding young poets with mentorships, and much more. I’d like to thank all those who helped in its work, 99% unpaid of course. The Union has now merged with the Australian Poetry Centre to form a new national organisation, Australian Poetry Ltd with healthy ambitions for the future of poetry in this country.
Closer to home, the BRWF in April has a Poetry Slam with a $500 cash prize, The Living Poem (one on one, 10 minutes speed dating with a poem or two), Paddling with a Poet (down the Bellinger), poets in schools and libraries and of course poets reading at the main event. I am reading at the Dorrigo rainforest centre with Mary White, the extraordinary author who has written so beautifully about this continent.
Last week, I veered off writing to representations of the natural world, got
the class to look at Andy Goldsworthy - a class act of patience using local materials, in local sites with natural processes to extraordinary effect.
Andy Goldsworthy comments that his pieces: "are alive with the variety of the places that they come from, and it is in their nature to accept further variation." Ice and Snow Drawings, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 1992, p10.
Have just remembered - I wrote a poem about his retrospective, Edinburgh Festival 1990 - and here it is (thanks to Copernicus):
Stalks and Thorns
They take turns to bounce the machine,
try leaning on it but the earth resists,
the jackhammer leaves no impression.
Leaves on leaves
pressed flat with spit
windy
held to ground with stalks and thorns
streak
line to explore colour in Horse Chestnut
The workmen stand around scratching their heads
then rivet muscular hands to muscle-bound hips,
eventually wandering off following a piece of string.
Leaf patch edge made by finding leaves the same size
tearing one in two
spitting underneath and pressing flat onto another
Sycamore
One of them retruns and wields a sledge-hammer
starts knocking an iron pin into the distance,
a marquee rises beside the cone of balanced slate.
Crack line through leaves
each leaf torn in two
secured to the ground with a ball of mud
leaving a gap
We're discussing the show over afternoon tea.
Edinburgh appears catching cloud on the hill's edge,
the wrong work takes over our lives, is what I'm saying.
A blaze of Rowan leaves
laid around a hole
nearly finished
collecting the last few leaves
a dog ran into it
had to start again
windy
“But what will happen to me when I'm 65?” Mal asks.
Starlings appear like spitfires. There's no answer.
The impatient wind blows leaves out of the trees.
Birding in Bello, Sun 16 Jan, (after the rains, played leach tag. I caught 14 about to suck me, but two got through (4 hours later I'm still bleeding). Plenty of birds though and the cicadas have quietened down: male Regent Bowerbirds, Yellow-eyed Cuckoo Shrike, many Black-Faced Monarch Flycatchers, and many more.
Yesterday a robber fly (Ommatius mackayi) was waiting for me.
Teaching ecopoetry - the first surprise was that nearly all the students had not read the brochure, and did not realise that this intensive course was about nature poetry, let alone ecopoetry. But by the end they were all converted to a new way of understanding the world, to eco-philosophy (Thoreau, Leopold, Val Plumwood), to ecopoets, as well as developing their writing in interesting ways in this direction.
I was lucky to have a great group ranging from a 15 year old girl (with a beautiful singing voice) to a bushie in his mid-seventies. They performed live and we recorded poems for the local radio station.
We looked and listened closely - photographs from our excursions >
Blue Triangle, Graphium sarpedon
A smaller splash, The Never Never
Here's one effort (of mine)
11 sheep eating, 1 asleep -
is this the why of mathematics?
To separate the hungry from the fed?
The young from old?
Today from tommorrow?
Lamb chops from legal currency?
Bleating Tree Frog, they somehow squeeze inside our house too.
Everything you wanted to know about ecopoetry but were afraid to ask.
('Writing nature poetry - renewing the tradition').
Looking forward to teaching at Camp Creative, Bellingen, second week of January - five intensive days.
Birdwatching in Jagun is more difficult with the cicadas going off, just back from a walk with scarlet honeyeaters, rufous and grey fantails, scaly-breasted lorikeets and kookas - oh and many species of butterflies. Looks like the spinneret has just released the glue to attach this caterpillar to the leaf, pior to spinning the coocoon that hardens to the protective chrysalis.
Guess what's been hanging around since New Year's Day, half the time being mobbed?
Pacific Bronwyn