ecology of poetry
Our mouths are contested…
o
no more nature poems
I saw it resting in the tidal mud. that wound is a tyre, a gross smile on the surface of the new river estuary. it fell off the rims of the nature poem. it’s another representation to match their itinerary. those poets are writing for subliminal restoration: mountains, hills, and bush. but who crave the poison peas so sweet it solidifies the poem. it’s a reclamation. but who can believe it. where’s the desire. the imperfection. look at the mashed rat at the side of the road. the yolk-faced possum. the feral cat. they’re a real nature experience. beautiful interpretations. can you separate the nature poem from the department of conservation. those verses are policies for resource management. and that tyre, preserved in the sand, is a clock for the city’s conduct. estuarine snails and amphipods colonise its interior. their kinship matches the longing. isn’t the nature poem another term for bioremediation. it elides the grief and yearning. the sehnsucht.
orchid tierney
o
DEPARTMENT OF CONVERSATION
Who hasn’t got a poem about driving through the dark and hitting a deer?
A likely inventory of roadkill: possum, hare, jumpscare wallaby.
Pre-teen me knelt over a crumpled hawk left on the summer highway and was myself reflected in its eyes.
Meant to write saw. But was.
Became myself, as I made it a hawk.
Only that: a syllable it wouldn’t ever utter for itself.
Lately I have been displaced. When I say my quite plain name, people repeat a completely different word.
Still identifying as a flightless bird, but also now a migratory animal. Airdropped.
What does it mean to be a nature poet somewhere you don’t know the names of things?
Some owl in the dark outside my room – all I can tell by its low croon is that it’s not a ruru.
Wrong bird. Derailed timeline. The hawk and I. Its eyes doubled in mine.
A hall of convex mirrors between our pupils, on and on, our gallery of shrinking selves under the patient sky.
Of course it died. And I wrote about it. Later? Now? The future? Timewarp of whenever eyes pass over this.
Your eyes on my eyes on the hawk’s, in the hawk’s, the hawk in mine, the eyes that make the Is of is.
I thought to inscribe witness was an act of love. Be-holding. Its feathers softer than you’d think, the body lighter.
It is hard to hold the world! It’s heavy.
It can’t be done alone.
Everything is the environment, actually. Every body.
A field of sleeping cranes, their long necks stark against the sky. Wind sighing through their frames of high strength low alloy steel so they sing to each other until heading off for the next big job.
The olive tree and the people tending to it – somewhere picturesque maybe, or somewhere ravaged. The nature poem grows even in war zones. To be earthed, the nature poem cannot abdicate location.
At home the nature poem lives in tyre tracks etched so we can scale our mountain passes so fast we hardly see the possum-stripped trees dotted skeletal down the escarpment.
Here we know what the landscape is for – it’s for driving through.
On the way to who we are and where we’re going: the scenery.
That can’t be right. Who’s driving this thing?
Who is a nature writer? Some ponderer, a panderer to a universal we? Doubling down on our so-called humanity by flogging a dead horse? Those poems – mine – a garland of jewel-toned flies at the corpse?
Silly goose. These days it’s not enough to look at a bird and feel beautiful about yourself all of the time.
Okay. You may be allowed a little beauty. As a treat. If you’re prepared to get sad about it.
Haven’t we savoured endangeredness? Surely we needn’t wait for grief to teach us how deeply we adore.
My teacher Dan said that to adore is to adorn – the urge to make something for this world, from that very world’s materials. A child decorating a tree with a wreath of its own leaves. Such things can be given gladly.
People used to find God just by going outside. It happens all the time.
Miracle the air we breathe the air the air we we we we we breathe breathe we breathe we breathe.
We alive with everything else, exchanging oxygen. Animal, vegetable… selected minerals in the deep deep sea apparently.
So far a closed system. No way out of it. The pale blue us. Our smallness in the stars.
Crouched in the mud at the vernal pool and holding my breath to see frogspawn… I am not going to talk about worship.
Kneeling to the tortured hawk, the birthing ewe, the trapped possum, the darling kitten, the bioluminescent plankton, the thieving weka, the slipper orchid, the dog vomit slime mold, the destroying angel, the neon pond scum, the videogame’s looping trail of leaf-cutter ants picking up the dutifully rendered sun.
The being is the being-with. Wouldn’t anyone want to be with it?
Some days I search for kinship anywhere but other people.
What kind of idiot looks for themselves in a dying animal’s eyes?
But is it worse not even to look – to run flat-tack over the fur or feathers, bones ka-thunking briefly under the wheels, then diminishing in the rearview mirror?
No longer shall the jeweled gecko and kakapō stay those other messengers about their task.
Gone are the days of the multicoloured skink, the kiwi, many other species that have been weaponised to deny regional New Zealand communities their right to a livelihood…
Is anyone writing this down?
My quill a bent and ragged kāhu feather.
rebecca hawkes
o
LANGUAGE DID THIS
Summer . . .
stretches out
like a coloured shirt
the beach shifts its sunspots
music plays its tricks
dialogues hatch
amongst the godwits
a brief explosion of wings
turns up the earth’s collar
I have always been fascinated by mysteries, enigmas, man’s place on earth and the interminable questions we keep asking, but I have not always been satisfied with the answers or convinced about our findings. In my poetry, I don’t really care about going on fact-finding missions. Truth is in the interpretation and the personal fulfilment a poem gives to the reader. Mystery provides an opportunity to go on an individual journey, to explore fantasies, to uncover new layers within the imagination. For me, a poem paints a picture and because we are inquisitive animals, it encourages us intellectually to delve deeper wherever we go. As a poet, I am part of this experience, this affiliation with the seasons, our whenua, our turangawaewae, our rohe. The Age of Discovery . . .
is a gull shitting on a stone’s cragginess
is mould creeping into cracks
time to feel the sun on stilts – stepping through roof-tops
i stare at this woman - taking in mouthfuls of sky
she erases aspects of a dream-time
she flicks a smile - she’s familiar with the circus
of her thinking
we run to the river - & plunge
into cushions of sunlight - we leap
through rhythmic colourful hoops
who says i shouldn’t try & enter the fern box of this green-lipped woman
who says i bloody shouldn’t
i revisit the age of discovery
she reacts swiftly
snapping shut her thighs
again we live through this cycle of flowers in the blood
& a child clings to her - clings to the sound
of a room
breathing
My poetry tends to be tapped out in short lines down the page. Impact is where my words are positioned, so a blank page becomes a huge challenge because the spaces between words are very important when I consider the overall visual effect. I read my poems aloud in my head and also to any walls that contain me. I am constantly reading them through, altering them to the sounds, to the voices that inhabit each poem. Breath pauses are an integral part of the composition and so these gaps and silences between words, lines, sometimes stanzas, appear. This is a deliberate ploy to assist with emphasis, delivery and understanding. I suppose other poets have similar reasons. The silences substitute what cannot be said, but sometimes can be said. The effect is audible and adds meaning to the poems. The sound of nature is everywhere and my job is to find that music, to capture it & if I can, listen to a seemingly empty shell and the songs of the sea which go on and on...
Yesterday’s Astral Consumption
yesterday’s astral consumption
isn’t lost the mountains
will cough it all up as regular as sun up
as fish leaping
the sea rubs against my skin
against the bodies of maimed fantasies
it uses me as a thoroughfare
i feel an intimacy a topsy-turvy of grief
& ecstasy
the sea is close is closer the sea
pounds at shells it guts itself
on jagged rocks on an island
sinking in mud
the sea is a carnivore
iain britton
o
The Green Language
The welcome swallows know a sky dialect;
the open vowels in their high song
are clear as south pacific blue
breathed between the consonants of cloud.
Whole passages in the italics of speed,
a flock shifts: now like mobile acrostics,
now a faithful synagogue shuckling,
every bone adoring air
until an unseasonal, possessed emperor of wind
hurls twigs, dirt, blossoms, laundry, hubcaps, pizza boxes and newspaper pages
like those that told us of how, across Greece,
thousands of swallows fell
on balconies, streets, a lake, islands,
small hearts beaten, tongues inert
as paper leaves.
The knowledge of how our wild losses gather
squats in the throat, rock salt
in a closing rose:
a grief clot, untranslatable.
Gingerbread Crumbs
Winter. I set out glazed bowls of flat fizz
and the stale baking we won’t eat;
spread windowsill picnics for flurries
of silver-eyes, korimako, greenfinch, tuī;
while in my earbuds
the small Cassandra
of a science podcast predicts
all soon-and-future hatchlings
will parch and starve
in the earth-oven
the Anthropocene
has stoked to scream.
Nibble, nibble, species niche
nibble, nibble at these sweets
and soar, soar, you dainties,
warble your way
to our inertia’s dark deletions.
Ginger-kiss witch,
witch of sugar-water,
luring hanselbird and gretelhen
to thicken at the wishbones,
feather-cosset small throats,
plump up strong shells
(in star-spire white
or globe-thistle blue)
to cradle the golden syrups
of their unborns —
I feel an aching in my thumbs
as when oblivion this way comes.
note
‘The Green Language’: Also known as la langue verte; in Jewish mysticism, Renaissance magic, and alchemy, this was a name for the language of birds; often thought to attain perfection and offer revelation. Also see ‘High winds kill thousands of migratory birds in disaster over Greece’, Guardian, April 2020.
emma neale
o
Every couple of months I walk 4-5km from my home and out along the Little Muddy Estuary, rebaiting pipe stations, and more importantly placing monitoring cards over two nights to see how the local pest-free strategy is progressing. Over time it’s become a poetic journey – walking, retracing my childhood tracks through the Waitākere Ranges, remembering, and processing a continuum of life stages. There are a series of poems and imprints from these excursions; 10 stations mapped, lines, ink imprints in time, but also as I’ve been meditating upon – ‘a line… track, path, journey as a crack’ – which opens up to a point of departure. Each step, figuratively and physically offers up a diagram for the imagination, breaking apart the poetic and visual impressions into koan-like utterances.
The ink imprints (#1–10) from the monitoring cards show marks left by rats, possums, mice, feral cats, hedgehogs and a variety of other pests. They are a mark in time, and by something which is to be exterminated, but somehow found a way to leave a time capsule, ‘a record of impermanence’. Each poetic fragment is linked and matched numerically to these abstract expressionist ink imprints.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Green ∞
A line is a crack
taken back A
after Shusaku Arakawa
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
‘Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetry’.
–Wittgenstein
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# 3 (A line is a death)
sam sampson