12/3/2019 poetry: jonathan skinnerTENUOUS RELATION "This year, for or the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn’t come . . . Last year’s low of 60 million seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far." / NY Times, Nov. 22, 2013 terrific millionfold monarch migration in the forest of my youth in the filtered light of a morning I did not know was morning amidst populations I did not know would instruct me sexualized in the coupling force beyond mammal selection an electrical transmission below the level of sunlight filtered through towers of living monarch forests spinning cathedral glass exploded from axis a diagram of surfaces, light refracted into flocks of autonomous magnetic sensors spinning away and toward meridional centers hundreds of millions of representations each caught in the eco-swirl of its own sexual metabolic foraging exploratory hungers the task is not to become cinematic for the screen here is exploded the data streams points of light humans waving their cells network engines humming data servers grounding the flock in some undisclosed location each click an ear of corn burning off the potential in massed hives of inequality the city humming with its "own" light that is not its own burning out the fields the wilderness of flowering medicinal intelligences shrinking the margin of attainability the growth gross surplus punishes straggling monarchs only seem weak until they are collapse of the network no more visible than its rise in the shadow of swarms who crowd source explore cycling inward but what do we counter the task is not to become elegiac yet to remember clearly when there was light brought by other intelligences when the economic relations were already fucked nothing primary to experience but the orientation of the objects in this field of ontological relations massed evidence available to travelers catching the updraft of laboring hungering heat at colonial borders a boy could still hound me into those woods wanting a bit of change that wasn't in my pocket I could still be left alone with the flaming alien masses finally to catch a ride atop a load of resinous timber back of a truck loaded with logger exhaustion in the slow economic violence not yet the terror of cartels the task is to breathe in as well as out catching a bit of monarch fire in a gentle swarm in a Clear Creek Canyon above the Colorado below the towers of Zoroaster Temple, in the early light of a love whose extinction seemed impossible impossible as the solitary roving fluttering monarchs each minding its own tenuous relation minding me to care for the buried threads of now to then the spots of time and spaces stitched by migratory desires, memory, all will power the free-fall struggles down and up economical topographies of relation yet actual bodies blinking across the fossil landscape migratory swarming intelligences only dimly aware of their own orogenic and plate tectonic powers the task is to honor the contact and the fire not the program, to be methodical in action doing our thing, basking in microclimates, longing for the heart of the heat of the sun of the swarm massed in genetic code, memories stored as images impulses, without which the sprayers roll in silence across fields of shining corn bundled and sheathed in cash-clad towers only seeming to be seeds the deadly vertical updraft of minerals and nutrients exhausting the soil in row after row of green desire unmixed by memory, an engineer's paradise in name only, behind every drone a man and paymaster, behind every monarch a million who have always been relation the wing-clad boughs only seeming to be leaves but who notices when a network goes offline a constellation extinguished in the penumbra of failing telescopes Founder and editor of the influential journal ecopoetics, Jonathan Skinner is the author of Political Cactus Poems (2005), Warblers (2010), Birds of Tifft (2011), and Chip Calls (2014), and his essays have been anthologized widely. He teaches at the University of Warwick.
9/17/2019 POETRY: STEPHEN COLLISFUTURE IMPERFECT Mostly I look quickly at the latest reports, through the cracks between my fingers, out the corner of my eye, look away quickly, calculate years to collapse. A—grass dies; B—human beings die; C—human beings are grass. It’s years right? Rolling fields of us, all relative, the wind bending the blades back before the dawn, all in the same direction, rippling, wave and particle, dying in drought, coming back green in the spring, the colours—we forget—the colours of the grasses, their flowers, led purple pewter scarlet—like a fever, so small yet so very many—the detail is lost in the collective sheen. Intercalary meristem. Spiralate movement. We’re all relative. Relatives. That was then. This is now. The plough is in the sky. The earth is tilled by no one. A—all civilizations collapse; B—you call this a civilization? What will have been the case in the future I read will depend upon possible pasts that will also have been the case at least one of them that is. Do you have any possible pasts I could trade for some uncertain futures at the going rate? / I found them by the dumpster out back beside a thrown away planet a bit flat or even concave like a crushed and stained mattress / I want change I want not this pathway but that presently unknown one we know too much and too little I am convinced or can infer? The possible is simply what either is or will be true. If it will be that p will never be the case, then p—right now—will never be the case. I am skeptical. Wander through truisms like trees making potential sounds if they are potentially cut then they are housing. Birds bugs and the precariat. I have no time for this. Then there will be no time for this at some point in the future. Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (Talon Books 2008), Once in Blockadia (Talon Books 2016) and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Talon Books 2018). Current research on the climate emergency and human and other displacements is involved in two in-process projects: Future Imperfect (poetry) and A Sestina for Max Sebald (prose). He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
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