Invisible Cities in there too - some points
her travel photographic journal - not like your regular holiday snaps, but you get a keen feeling for the things she selects through the camera lens
including her own works placed in situ and reinterpreted ( like the Herculaneum palimpsests - inspired by ancient Roman baths, stitched deconstructed, felted, lace, silk cotton, reconstructed embellished then photographed back in the Italian env. this time in the Baccioni Fountain in Prato. referencing Calvino - Kubler Kahn and Marco Polo -
also referencing Thailand artist Montein Boonma(dec) whose meditative drawings were hung like prayer flags
Hi susan,
I’ve noted these comments for the next article for the magazine, and also put some in this blog.
Were the Heculaneum Palimpsests in . . . the journey?
Sorry my memory fails me on these finer details.
. . . Have Brush, have Thread, will Travel
Journeys from the heroic or mythic to the geographically exploratory, imagined or virtual, usually have a purpose, a resolution, or a destination. Then there are journeys that are more elusive — better thought of as an approach to life or taking up a challenge; more a matter of discovery along the way rather than arriving - the kind of journey Bruce Chatwin wrote about in the final part of his controversial book Songlines for example. In spite of the criticism he attracted about the first section, describing his journey through Central Australia, the second part, consisting of his notes on nomadology make interesting reading on the elusive many-faceted art of journeying; sitting at my desk, or wherever I happen to find a space to write, brings to mind writer and teacher Natalie Goldberg, a follower of Zen Buddhism, who describes the writing process as the long quiet highway.
Ever since Odysseus/Ulysses set sail for home after the Battle of Troy, the concept of the journey has operated as a metaphor for artistic endeavours and Susan Fell McLean’s art practice is central to her journey through life.
Her camera and her journal are essential parts of her travelling kit. Thus, ancient Roman baths become the inspiration for the Herculaneum Palimpsests, stitched deconstructed, felted, lace, silk cotton, reconstructed embellished then photographed in the Baccioni Fountain in Prato, are just one example of how the visual inspiration of a particular place is translated into her practice. Her Italian works also reference the travellers Kubler Kahn and Marco Polo, referred to in Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities.
Equally, back in her studio, painting, putting a piece of cloth into a dye bath or any stage of the process of making one of her artworks are part of her journey. In . . . the journey at Mitchelton Winery Gallery during April and May of this year, she exhibited as documents of her experiences of places as different as Ernabella, a remote village in Sarawak and the lanes of the Italian cities Herculaneum and Prato. The exhibition, works on paper, canvas and textiles was also an implicit questioning and interpretation of the concept of the journey as well as the connected issues of place and identity.
“For me” she says, “travel is a way of seeing as well as learning, every journey brings new opportunities to learn and each place yields something new or unexpected to bring home.”
“ Contemporary textile arts are built on ancient traditions, so the artist remains connected to their culture while finding ways to express their individuality and response to their own times.”
“ For inspiration” Susan continues “ the artist must go beyond the studio, to understand how people respond to their landscape and how they incorporate their customs and history into their daily lives. All arts to some extent and textiles in particular engaging as they do tactile and visual senses rather than words, are part of a universal language.”
Gondwanan Dendrites two silk pieces 30 x30 cms each, and the installation Gondwanan Palimpsests, three wooden boxes each containing a piece of wool shibori, exhibited in the International Shibori Symposium in Paris last year, as well as at Mitchelton are another example of how Susan combines her experiences and art into her own vision. Dyed with Yellow Box (Eucalyptus Melliadora)and mudguts from Red Gum (see them at Susan’s website http://visibilityedge.blogspot.com/ ), these pieces could be pelts of some ancient life form from some other world, from some as yet unknown place.
The intallation The Amphora, five containers in felted wool around one metre high combines aspects of function and enchantment. The vessels, similar to ones which might have once carried precious spices and oils contain the spirit of a journey. From their corner in the gallery they look as though they may have been retrieved from an archaeological site, Pompeii for instance. They suggested to me that they might also be stored at the entrance to a yurt, or some other timeless and temporary shelter, ready to be taken through a desert when the next camel train departs.
I think of my own life as a journey between two places ⎯ my present retreat in the Black Range and the place where I was born, which still hovers at the edge of my dreams. The tensions and connections between these places, separated as they are by time and space have brought me to exploring how life and landscape intersect and this journey is the subject I hope to address in a later stage of the Black Range Project.
An article by Luke Slattery in the Weekend Australian Review, May 3-2 ’09 in which he quotes Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of Cavafy’s poem based on Homer’s advice to Ulysses on finally reaching his homeland after ten years of wandering brings us neatly, too neatly perhaps back to where this journey began:
Always in your mind keep Ithaca
To arrive there is your destiny.
Better not to hurry your trip in any way
Better that it lasts for many years;
That you drop anchor at the island an old man,
Rich with all you’ve gotten along the way,
Expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
Back at The Edge, with no end in sight, we’re continuing our travels into concepts and images of our landscape.
Post Script
Some of the detours mentioned on this journey, here are some of my references:
Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Colour. Travels through a Paintbox by Victoria Finlay Sceptre paperback 2002
This book is not directly referred to, but will be of particular interest to visual artists.
The Long Quiet Highway, (and other titles on writing) by Natalie Goldberg Bantam books 1997
Sixty Poems for the Journey, by Ruth Padel Vintage paperback, 2007
See Susan’s Blogspot http://visibilityedge.blogspot.com/ - for more images of her art, and excerpts from her visual journals.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
journeys through an Atlas
Journeys through an Atlas
Amongst my father’s books I inherited Newnes Pocket Atlas of the World and Gazetteer. I can’t find its publication date, anywhere, but I assume it must have been in the early nineteen twenties, when Father was at school. In his distinctive handwriting he wrote on the last page, Distance around Australia = 6992.02 miles, and that is probably one of the few ‘facts’ that remain unchanged.
Although most of us would recognise many of the countries because their shapes are familiar to us, even if the maps in the Atlas were the latest available and care had been taken to make sure they were to be accurate, they can at best only be estimations of reality. While maps appear to confirm the existence of spaces and places, to show topographical features, landmarks and directions from one place to another, the boundaries of countries, their names and many other details change from time to time as a result of conflict or some geological upheaval.
What is recorded may depend on the mapmaker.
For example, the tourist map I took with me to Costa Rica explained that the Coca Cola sign referred to as the central landmark in the city San Jose had been taken down many years ago. I read somewhere that a group of soldiers who got lost in the mountains found their way out using a map of some other place all together. The tragic Lasseter didn’t have an accurate map and tried to return to his reef of gold using his watch to get his bearings and got lost because his watch was wrong. To this day, no one knows whether the reef only ever existed as a figment of his imagination.
The subjectivity of maps is more easily understood when they are used to describe places where specific measurements don’t apply.
In an interview (Gerry Turcotte, ed, Writers in Action,Currency Press 1990) about his memoir 12 Edmonstone Street, novelist, poet and essayist David Malouf said, ‘If you grow up in the kind of wooden house that I grew up in, and if your first sense of dimensions is developed there, then that really is your first reading of the world and you go on to apply that to whatever else you look at.’
This is certainly so for me. At the centre of the map of the world of my childhood, lies a small white house built in two wings and it is surrounded by a verandah and in front of the house there is a lake where we used to swim on hot days. All of this was set in the midst of a wide flat plain which appeared to be held down by an enormous sky with a distant horizon. Neither the house, the shed or the lake are there any more, but they are still marked on local maps, and I could find where they used to be.
To the north west of my first home is The Outback, The Red Centre or The Never Never, created out of random snippets of Mary Grant Bruce, Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson. Right at the top of the map is England is that tiny country that Grandmother called Home. It was where they used to do things properly she said, and while she lived out her days in our colonial outpost, it remained at the centre of her world. Between the Outback and Grandmother’s home lie the fabled walled cities in the middle of uncharted deserts pictured in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Bible in Pictures. Camel trains and bands of barefoot travellers cross all the spaces in between.
Like Alice in Wonderland, I have moved through a world that continually shrinks and grows. The Atlas and its pastel coloured countries are now almost as fragile as my dreams.
Back in the present again, re-reading anthropologist Hugh Brody’s Maps and Dreams I have come across another reality. Originally I bought Brody’s book when I heard that it was about hunters who found their way to their quarry in their dreams.
On that earlier reading I didn’t take much notice of the fact that Brody wrote the book after he was given the job of mapping the lands of northwest British Colombia because it was the country where the Beaver Indian People lived and hunted, and it was directly in the path of a projected oil pipeline.
The epigraph, taken from Clarence Aspassin Blueberry River Indian Reserve Pubic Hearings December 1980 reads: ‘Are we supposed to be nice and give you our traplines so that you can put your pipeline and benefit other people . . . The traplines are for us, so we keep them. Why cannot you guys understand that? . . . I guess you don’t really understand that this is our way of life and always will be.’
Suddenly the Beaver People in British Colombia feel as though they are close neighbours. I’ll send Clarence Aspassin’s words to the Taungurong elders who are working with the contractors to keep a lookout for any Taungurong sacred sites or artefacts, along the proposed path of the pipeline which travels through their country and will take water from the Goulburn River for Melbourne. I’ll also keep in mind that water has become our oil of our time. The furthest away from ‘home’ my Father ever went was to the Channel Country. He also dreamt of finding one of those lost canyons where the water and never ran out. I’d love to know if he’d found it yet. Then I’ll read in the Gazetteer about the longest rivers, the populations of various countries, the areas of the largest islands and the deserts and the populations of countries, and ponder yet again the ever-changing nature of the world.
'In the pipeline' for next time - more on journeys - starting off this time at Mitchelton winery with Susan Fell-McLean's exhibition of paintings, textiles and sculptures inspired by her travels in recent years.
Amongst my father’s books I inherited Newnes Pocket Atlas of the World and Gazetteer. I can’t find its publication date, anywhere, but I assume it must have been in the early nineteen twenties, when Father was at school. In his distinctive handwriting he wrote on the last page, Distance around Australia = 6992.02 miles, and that is probably one of the few ‘facts’ that remain unchanged.
Although most of us would recognise many of the countries because their shapes are familiar to us, even if the maps in the Atlas were the latest available and care had been taken to make sure they were to be accurate, they can at best only be estimations of reality. While maps appear to confirm the existence of spaces and places, to show topographical features, landmarks and directions from one place to another, the boundaries of countries, their names and many other details change from time to time as a result of conflict or some geological upheaval.
What is recorded may depend on the mapmaker.
For example, the tourist map I took with me to Costa Rica explained that the Coca Cola sign referred to as the central landmark in the city San Jose had been taken down many years ago. I read somewhere that a group of soldiers who got lost in the mountains found their way out using a map of some other place all together. The tragic Lasseter didn’t have an accurate map and tried to return to his reef of gold using his watch to get his bearings and got lost because his watch was wrong. To this day, no one knows whether the reef only ever existed as a figment of his imagination.
The subjectivity of maps is more easily understood when they are used to describe places where specific measurements don’t apply.
In an interview (Gerry Turcotte, ed, Writers in Action,Currency Press 1990) about his memoir 12 Edmonstone Street, novelist, poet and essayist David Malouf said, ‘If you grow up in the kind of wooden house that I grew up in, and if your first sense of dimensions is developed there, then that really is your first reading of the world and you go on to apply that to whatever else you look at.’
This is certainly so for me. At the centre of the map of the world of my childhood, lies a small white house built in two wings and it is surrounded by a verandah and in front of the house there is a lake where we used to swim on hot days. All of this was set in the midst of a wide flat plain which appeared to be held down by an enormous sky with a distant horizon. Neither the house, the shed or the lake are there any more, but they are still marked on local maps, and I could find where they used to be.
To the north west of my first home is The Outback, The Red Centre or The Never Never, created out of random snippets of Mary Grant Bruce, Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson. Right at the top of the map is England is that tiny country that Grandmother called Home. It was where they used to do things properly she said, and while she lived out her days in our colonial outpost, it remained at the centre of her world. Between the Outback and Grandmother’s home lie the fabled walled cities in the middle of uncharted deserts pictured in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Bible in Pictures. Camel trains and bands of barefoot travellers cross all the spaces in between.
Like Alice in Wonderland, I have moved through a world that continually shrinks and grows. The Atlas and its pastel coloured countries are now almost as fragile as my dreams.
Back in the present again, re-reading anthropologist Hugh Brody’s Maps and Dreams I have come across another reality. Originally I bought Brody’s book when I heard that it was about hunters who found their way to their quarry in their dreams.
On that earlier reading I didn’t take much notice of the fact that Brody wrote the book after he was given the job of mapping the lands of northwest British Colombia because it was the country where the Beaver Indian People lived and hunted, and it was directly in the path of a projected oil pipeline.
The epigraph, taken from Clarence Aspassin Blueberry River Indian Reserve Pubic Hearings December 1980 reads: ‘Are we supposed to be nice and give you our traplines so that you can put your pipeline and benefit other people . . . The traplines are for us, so we keep them. Why cannot you guys understand that? . . . I guess you don’t really understand that this is our way of life and always will be.’
Suddenly the Beaver People in British Colombia feel as though they are close neighbours. I’ll send Clarence Aspassin’s words to the Taungurong elders who are working with the contractors to keep a lookout for any Taungurong sacred sites or artefacts, along the proposed path of the pipeline which travels through their country and will take water from the Goulburn River for Melbourne. I’ll also keep in mind that water has become our oil of our time. The furthest away from ‘home’ my Father ever went was to the Channel Country. He also dreamt of finding one of those lost canyons where the water and never ran out. I’d love to know if he’d found it yet. Then I’ll read in the Gazetteer about the longest rivers, the populations of various countries, the areas of the largest islands and the deserts and the populations of countries, and ponder yet again the ever-changing nature of the world.
'In the pipeline' for next time - more on journeys - starting off this time at Mitchelton winery with Susan Fell-McLean's exhibition of paintings, textiles and sculptures inspired by her travels in recent years.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Weathering Summer
Weathering Summer When I started my journal in earnest on December 21 1995, I wrote of summer as the time of the year when I would ‘let time spin out a little’, when all I had to do seemed to fit into the available space’. I also said that ‘flames licked at the edges of even the most benign of days’. These flames that I almost see out of the corner of my eye have been smouldering away ever since the day when I might have been about four when my father drove me along the road that ran past our property when flames were literally burning along either side of the road.
At first as this summer drifted by in a series of pleasant days filled with family get-togethers it was easy, too easy, to forget that we badly needed rain. Then in the early afternoon of January 22, dark clouds gathered, the wind blew and it rained. The power went out and it rained heavily for two hours. While I was waiting for it to clear, I went to visit cousin Jill. When I came outside to go home, the sky was no longer dark, but a dirty yellow – the color of smoke, or dust. It almost smelt like smoke too. I drove home along a road I know well, but the surrounding landscape had disappeared behind the sky and I felt like the last person left on an abandoned planet.
I was reminded of the trip Bernie Sophie and I made through the Painted Desert on our way to Monument Valley, in late April, sixteen years ago. That day the dust that veiled the desert delivered us a surreal landscape in blurred shapes of cream, sage green and faded rose – the palette of some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s landscapes.
(That trip led to several stories I am yet to publish. Now, since the blog offers me a space to do so, I must go back to it.)
In spite of the fierce winds there were no trees down. I arrived home safely and soon the sky cleared and the landscape returned. Over the next few days I began to anticipate the end of summer, and diminishing risk of bushfire.
Next came the heatwave and with it my anxiety. I started checking the CFA reports almost hourly, and I was back where I have been done in many other smoke- filled summers, like the one when Father was dying or the one when Canberra and much of the north East of the state burned.
What happened on Saturday February 7 is now a matter of public record and countless stories of loss and devastation. Although I have made long diary entries and written about fire quite often in the past, the more reports I hear in the media and from individuals who have since visited affected areas, the less appropriate it seems that I should add my recent experience of a worrying week to those I have heard or read. That the northern end of the Black Range didn’t burn, that our house is still standing and we are unscathed is a combination of luck and the work of CFA women and men who put in long hard hours to stop fire crossing the Goulburn River at Molesworth.
Now with the luxxxury of hindsight, the numbness that set in when that thick smoke came in with the wind change is only just receding and I am beginning to be able to think – first of all rethink our fire plan and our presence in a remote wooded area, since pumps, sprinklers and generators are not likely to save us from the serious forces of nature - and write again. .
. . . and so, on to poetry.
With a poetry reading Hiarts coming up I needed to get back to getting some poetry together for a reading.
Thank goodness for the arts, and the highlands community for pressing on during such a distracting difficult summer.
The mood at Hiarts may have been a little flatter than last year, but here’s to the arts – performers, painters photographers, storytellers, caterers, conversationalists and everyone else involved for keeping on going and playing a part in moving the community mood along. I enjoyed getting some poetry together, and after listening to David Kelly’s koala poems, Peter Bakowski’s evocation of travels and Peter Burns rural reflections, I was reminded yet again about the way quiet but persistent music of poetry play a vital role in our survival - as writers, readers and listeners.
On Friday, March 13 a storm finally washed the summer off the Black Range. When it struck, a continual roar of thunder shook the house. Tim, who set up my wireless router for me had just left and I was looking forward to testing my new up to the minute technology when the power went out and the whole house filled with a shimmering light. I could have been in the middle of an episode of the X files and about to join Mulder’s sister. For two hours the dogs and I huddled together on the sofa and watched the rain spilling out of all the gutters. That’s Mother and Father nature for you. We are never very far away from extinction, and according to that famous writer Anon, 'As God said no more fire – the rain next time. It was something like that, but I might have it the wrong way round.
For the next few months, don’t expect to find and blackened leaves at the back door. I’m hoping for fog instead of smoke. I might even finish the collecting up of leaves I hadn't got around to before last summer, and then, even do some writing.
At first as this summer drifted by in a series of pleasant days filled with family get-togethers it was easy, too easy, to forget that we badly needed rain. Then in the early afternoon of January 22, dark clouds gathered, the wind blew and it rained. The power went out and it rained heavily for two hours. While I was waiting for it to clear, I went to visit cousin Jill. When I came outside to go home, the sky was no longer dark, but a dirty yellow – the color of smoke, or dust. It almost smelt like smoke too. I drove home along a road I know well, but the surrounding landscape had disappeared behind the sky and I felt like the last person left on an abandoned planet.
I was reminded of the trip Bernie Sophie and I made through the Painted Desert on our way to Monument Valley, in late April, sixteen years ago. That day the dust that veiled the desert delivered us a surreal landscape in blurred shapes of cream, sage green and faded rose – the palette of some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s landscapes.
(That trip led to several stories I am yet to publish. Now, since the blog offers me a space to do so, I must go back to it.)
In spite of the fierce winds there were no trees down. I arrived home safely and soon the sky cleared and the landscape returned. Over the next few days I began to anticipate the end of summer, and diminishing risk of bushfire.
Next came the heatwave and with it my anxiety. I started checking the CFA reports almost hourly, and I was back where I have been done in many other smoke- filled summers, like the one when Father was dying or the one when Canberra and much of the north East of the state burned.
What happened on Saturday February 7 is now a matter of public record and countless stories of loss and devastation. Although I have made long diary entries and written about fire quite often in the past, the more reports I hear in the media and from individuals who have since visited affected areas, the less appropriate it seems that I should add my recent experience of a worrying week to those I have heard or read. That the northern end of the Black Range didn’t burn, that our house is still standing and we are unscathed is a combination of luck and the work of CFA women and men who put in long hard hours to stop fire crossing the Goulburn River at Molesworth.
Now with the luxxxury of hindsight, the numbness that set in when that thick smoke came in with the wind change is only just receding and I am beginning to be able to think – first of all rethink our fire plan and our presence in a remote wooded area, since pumps, sprinklers and generators are not likely to save us from the serious forces of nature - and write again. .
. . . and so, on to poetry.
With a poetry reading Hiarts coming up I needed to get back to getting some poetry together for a reading.
Thank goodness for the arts, and the highlands community for pressing on during such a distracting difficult summer.
The mood at Hiarts may have been a little flatter than last year, but here’s to the arts – performers, painters photographers, storytellers, caterers, conversationalists and everyone else involved for keeping on going and playing a part in moving the community mood along. I enjoyed getting some poetry together, and after listening to David Kelly’s koala poems, Peter Bakowski’s evocation of travels and Peter Burns rural reflections, I was reminded yet again about the way quiet but persistent music of poetry play a vital role in our survival - as writers, readers and listeners.
On Friday, March 13 a storm finally washed the summer off the Black Range. When it struck, a continual roar of thunder shook the house. Tim, who set up my wireless router for me had just left and I was looking forward to testing my new up to the minute technology when the power went out and the whole house filled with a shimmering light. I could have been in the middle of an episode of the X files and about to join Mulder’s sister. For two hours the dogs and I huddled together on the sofa and watched the rain spilling out of all the gutters. That’s Mother and Father nature for you. We are never very far away from extinction, and according to that famous writer Anon, 'As God said no more fire – the rain next time. It was something like that, but I might have it the wrong way round.
For the next few months, don’t expect to find and blackened leaves at the back door. I’m hoping for fog instead of smoke. I might even finish the collecting up of leaves I hadn't got around to before last summer, and then, even do some writing.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Stories from the edges of the earth
6/01/09 Stories from the edges of the earth
After a family wedding on New Year’s Eve, I took my grand daughters back to the hotel at about 10 o’clock, although they had been hoping to stay up to see in the New Year. Tired as they were, they insisted that they still needed a story or two, and I can’t imagine any grandmother ever refusing to take part in a story telling session.
Cassi started telling us one of her mouth stories, a very complicated story about (naturally) a princess who had lots of beautiful dresses. She ‘got in love’ with a prince and had a very busy social life. It was a long story, and she had another one waiting, but Pia was already asleep, no doubt dreaming of horses.
We all love listening to stories and find many different ways to tell them. My cousin Jill has made a handwritten and decorated journals filled with family stories for each of her grandchildren. Cassi and Pia’s other grandmother, a teacher and wonderful story teller, is well versed in Native American story traditions. To listen to her is to be transported in a magical world of talking animals.
Sitting on the shelf in my study I have a pottery figure called a storyteller made by a Native American potter. I found it in a gallery in Santa Monica when I was on my way home from the wedding of Cassia and Pia’s parents.
Before it even begins to tell other stories, the storyteller comes with a wonderful story of its own. Helen Cordero, a Cochiti Pueblo woman began making pottery nearly fifty years ago now. She took up making figurines because her bowls and jars ‘were crooked and didn’t look right’. In doing so, she was reviving the long standing but moribund Cochiti tradition of figurative pottery. As Helen made her ‘figures, she was representing and recreating images of family life, and of Pueblo ritual and mythology, she also reshaped her own life. At the time she had been trying to earn a little extra money by selling beads and she found that most of the profit went back to buying materials. Then her husband’s aunt suggested that she should try pottery. ‘You don’t have to buy anything. Mother Earth gives it all to you’ said the aunt.
Helen created the first figure for the International Museum of Folk Art in
New Mexico, in 1964, and from then on her reputation as an artist grew, bringing with it financial security for her family. But, ‘they are not just pretty things I make for money’ she said, ‘In an interview with Barbara Babcock, who wrote an essay on storytellers, Helen said, ‘All my potteries
The second storyteller you see here is a squat grandmotherly figure, about 12 cms high, was made by Martha Aquero, one of a group of less then 200 potters throughout the Rio Grande pueblos also making the figurines.
The earth is full of stories and task of the potter is to help the storyteller bring the story directly out of the earth. The figures are sometimes humans and sometimes other animals; they always have open mouths and they are always surrounded by children. They say that if you listen carefully, you will hear a story coming from the story teller’s mouth. If at first you only hear silence, you should listen again.
- and my friend, artist Judy Morecroft, made me the first storyteller.
She sits in the garden where I go with my morning coffee. The stories she tells me are always very powerful and full of earthly wisdom
While the children slept, I watched the fireworks from the sixth storey window of our hotel room and thought about getting home to the Range with all its stories – the underground streams, the intertwined life-cycles of microbes and mosses, even the enigmatic tracks made by grubs wriggling their way under the bark of trees. Hints of stories in bleached bones, the shivers sent down the spine by a gust of wind or an invisible creature scurrying through the undergrowth. The strange sounds of a still night. Stories dreamt up walking along the network of tracks, winding around fallen logs and rocks. There are the stories laid down with each footfall or reptilian slither These are the stories we try to catch in the webs of words, light and thread.
For all the pueblo peoples, clay is a living substance, and their pottery transforms the natural world into commodities of cultural value, and therefore represents the way we all become part of the continuing story.
*The information about Helen Cordero comes from Barbara A. Babcock’s essay, Modeled Selves: Helen Cordero’s “Little People” in The Anthropology of Experience edited by Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, University of Illinois Press 1986.
and if you're wondering why the storytellers are at the beginning of the post, it's because I still have a lot to learn about integrating images into their right places! my apologies. I aim to improve.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Reviewing Ecopoetry.
More on Ecopoetry and a call for a dialogue.
When Earth Shattering, a collection of Ecopoems edited by Neil Astley and often cited as a key reference in articles on ecopoetry, arrived in my mail box in late November, I had expectations. At last I would now find out which poems belonged to the canon of ecopoetry; and although I’m wary of labels, I might even understand the difference between a ‘nature’ poem an ‘eco’ poem and any other kind of poem.
Due to seasonal interruptions, and also the depth and scope of the anthology, it has taken me a long time to get around to collecting my thoughts on it
Here is the review I sent to Kris Hemensley at Collected Works Bookshop. I am posting this on Edge Collective website, because reading Earth Shattering has led me to think yet again about poetry and politics. By way of reply to this response, Kris referred me to his blogspot, collectedworks-poetryideas: THREE FUNERALS AND A BIRTHDAY An Open Letter to Corinne Cantrill, in the aftermath of her 80th Birthday Celebration, at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, November 9th, 2008.
My response to his letter follows as a kind of Post Script to the review, and I’m hoping some of the readers collecting on the edge will join in with some words on their views on the link between art and politics or action and their strategies for facing the current apocalypse.
First the review:
Editor Neil Astley writes in the introduction that he chose the poems ‘primarily from his own reading and spurred on by books and essays by well established ecopoetry critics including J.Scott Bryson, John Elder, Jonathan Bate’. Then he states his major purposes as being to
a - compile an overview of ecopoetry and b - complement other anthologies[1] and critical studies of environmental literature.
He also sets out to redress the negative image of nature poetry and remove the impression that it is irrelevant and old fashioned.
The net he casts is wide and deep. The first two of nine sections of the book cover the forerunners of eco poetry, beginning with the wilderness poetry of ancient China and what he calls ‘egocentric’ nature poetry. The other seven sections are thematic and include poems on ecological topics ranging from natural disasters to ‘the great web’ that ‘moves through and connects all people and things, both human and inhuman’ (2). In Astley’s own words, he wants to create ‘an ecopicture of the whole earth’ (3).
The result is a satisfying varied collection of poems supported by a sturdy framework that shows the progression from what he refers to as the egocentric nature poetry of earlier centuries to the ecologically aware poetry of today. Notes interspersed with the poems give an ecological and literary perspective on each poet. This material is also comprehensively cross-referenced so it is easy to follow any number of paths through the poems.
Poems from English speaking cultures and indigenous writers writing in English dominate the selection but a smattering of poems from elsewhere – always in translation – bring a global perspective to the collection. Also, Astley makes a plea that English and American ecopoetic writings widen their scope to include each other is timely and constructive. Further, he explains that the poemshave been chosen because they alert and alarm us, not just because they are written by poets familiar to most readers (4).
Astley’s catch includes prose as well as poetry, so Thoreau who of course should be in this company is included. James Lovelock, Al Gore and Chief Seattle are all represented in the opening section, Earth Views, which is kind of foreword.
The only thing that worries me is that the section on exploitation, contains a subsection labelled Dispossessing America singles out Native American poets. Although some of them appeat elsewhere, there is the unfortunate possibility that fine poets such as Harjo, Hogan and Gunn Allen will be relegated once again to that other, ‘natural’, world inhabited by indigenous and therefore different people. If that happens then the relevance of their poetry and their ecological philosophy may be lessened. Caroline Tisdall’s description of Joseph Beuys performance piece, in which Beuys was wrapped from head to foot in felt, loaded into an ambulance and then driven to a place where he was to spend a week with a coyote, which takes the concept of ecopoetry right into a post modern context would still have served as an impressive piece with which to end this section.
The world these poems inhabit is as destructive as it is beautiful. They alert or alarm readers of many disasters and losses, but they are never didactic. Their strength ineach instance is in their detail and the language they use to speak in detail of that world, not the message they deliver, does the effective ecological work.
As Joy Harjo writes in Perhaps the World Ends Here [5]
‘Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.’
Post Script:
Worth mentioning too is alarming touch of irony the image on the cover carries. It is a still from The Day after Tomorrow, a film made in 2004 - of people running across a crowded New York street before a huge wave. It is a reminder that until recently such scenes that have been portrayed as science ‘fiction’ have become current reality. In fact the plot concerns a climatologist who tries to figure out a way to save the world from abrupt global warming. The film is described as an action movie and a thriller. Earth Shattering Ecopoems is edited by Neil Astley and was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007
1 – Astley lists Peter Abbs Earth Songs, John Burnside and Maurice Riordan’s Wild Reckoning, Alice Oswald’s The Thunder Mutters.
2 – Bryson, quoted in earth shattering page 20
3 – Astley, Earth Shattering page 15
4 - Because I didn’t know anything about Neil Astley, I decided to google him. Within minutes I had before me on the screen the transcript of Bile, Guile and Dangerous to Poetry the 2005 StAnza Lecture in which NEIL ASTLEY, ‘The UK's leading anthologist’ founder of Bloodaxe Books in 1978, speaks his mind on poetry today.’ In this talk he makes it clear that his aim is to cater for readers of poetry rather than follow what he describes as academic elitist fashion.
5 – Earth Shattering, page 243.
And here’s the letter I sent to Kris:
Dear Kris,
In a first draft of my response to Earth Shattering, I wrote that I had come to ecopoetry via my close connection to all aspects of country rather than with a desire for expressing a burning ecological message – although I acknowledge that there is a pressing need for ecological information and messages to be broadcast and acted upon. .
Still the question remains for me: should I be out there saving the native grasses from another dose of Roundup so that the farmers can plant more ‘pasture’ on which they fatten their cattle? My giving up beef doesn’t really seem to be enough. Maybe with the help of landcare fencing off areas of old growth trees is only a gesture as well, but it’s something.. and
isn’t it indulgent to sit in a sheltered valley where eagles floating overhead and blue wrens hop around my feet while the world around me melts, swelters and then dries out?
When I drove through a dust storm last Thursday, keeping a careful watch for falling trees, I know that dust storms strip away that fertile soil, our scarce resource and deposit it as far away as other continents. I tried to find words to describe and contain the experience of being the only moving thing in a landscape shrunken by a dirty sky . . .
I feel more alive when I’m in direct and close contact with the elements, but often I am overwhelmed by the power of nature and my own powerlessness, so I welcomed your example of ‘cheerful fatalism’ and ‘amused wonderment at the miraculous place of human life within the deepest workings of geological time’ carries an important message for all creatives [I’m thinking of using creatives as my term for all artists from now on]
I am yet to come across any of John Barnie’s work and couldn’t find your response to Robyn Rowland’s piece in Zest. I’ll keep looking. I found it most therapeutic to fall back directly on my own experience in my response to your provocative and wise letter.
Best wishes and many thanks,
Sari
When Earth Shattering, a collection of Ecopoems edited by Neil Astley and often cited as a key reference in articles on ecopoetry, arrived in my mail box in late November, I had expectations. At last I would now find out which poems belonged to the canon of ecopoetry; and although I’m wary of labels, I might even understand the difference between a ‘nature’ poem an ‘eco’ poem and any other kind of poem.
Due to seasonal interruptions, and also the depth and scope of the anthology, it has taken me a long time to get around to collecting my thoughts on it
Here is the review I sent to Kris Hemensley at Collected Works Bookshop. I am posting this on Edge Collective website, because reading Earth Shattering has led me to think yet again about poetry and politics. By way of reply to this response, Kris referred me to his blogspot, collectedworks-poetryideas: THREE FUNERALS AND A BIRTHDAY An Open Letter to Corinne Cantrill, in the aftermath of her 80th Birthday Celebration, at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, November 9th, 2008.
My response to his letter follows as a kind of Post Script to the review, and I’m hoping some of the readers collecting on the edge will join in with some words on their views on the link between art and politics or action and their strategies for facing the current apocalypse.
First the review:
Editor Neil Astley writes in the introduction that he chose the poems ‘primarily from his own reading and spurred on by books and essays by well established ecopoetry critics including J.Scott Bryson, John Elder, Jonathan Bate’. Then he states his major purposes as being to
a - compile an overview of ecopoetry and b - complement other anthologies[1] and critical studies of environmental literature.
He also sets out to redress the negative image of nature poetry and remove the impression that it is irrelevant and old fashioned.
The net he casts is wide and deep. The first two of nine sections of the book cover the forerunners of eco poetry, beginning with the wilderness poetry of ancient China and what he calls ‘egocentric’ nature poetry. The other seven sections are thematic and include poems on ecological topics ranging from natural disasters to ‘the great web’ that ‘moves through and connects all people and things, both human and inhuman’ (2). In Astley’s own words, he wants to create ‘an ecopicture of the whole earth’ (3).
The result is a satisfying varied collection of poems supported by a sturdy framework that shows the progression from what he refers to as the egocentric nature poetry of earlier centuries to the ecologically aware poetry of today. Notes interspersed with the poems give an ecological and literary perspective on each poet. This material is also comprehensively cross-referenced so it is easy to follow any number of paths through the poems.
Poems from English speaking cultures and indigenous writers writing in English dominate the selection but a smattering of poems from elsewhere – always in translation – bring a global perspective to the collection. Also, Astley makes a plea that English and American ecopoetic writings widen their scope to include each other is timely and constructive. Further, he explains that the poemshave been chosen because they alert and alarm us, not just because they are written by poets familiar to most readers (4).
Astley’s catch includes prose as well as poetry, so Thoreau who of course should be in this company is included. James Lovelock, Al Gore and Chief Seattle are all represented in the opening section, Earth Views, which is kind of foreword.
The only thing that worries me is that the section on exploitation, contains a subsection labelled Dispossessing America singles out Native American poets. Although some of them appeat elsewhere, there is the unfortunate possibility that fine poets such as Harjo, Hogan and Gunn Allen will be relegated once again to that other, ‘natural’, world inhabited by indigenous and therefore different people. If that happens then the relevance of their poetry and their ecological philosophy may be lessened. Caroline Tisdall’s description of Joseph Beuys performance piece, in which Beuys was wrapped from head to foot in felt, loaded into an ambulance and then driven to a place where he was to spend a week with a coyote, which takes the concept of ecopoetry right into a post modern context would still have served as an impressive piece with which to end this section.
The world these poems inhabit is as destructive as it is beautiful. They alert or alarm readers of many disasters and losses, but they are never didactic. Their strength ineach instance is in their detail and the language they use to speak in detail of that world, not the message they deliver, does the effective ecological work.
As Joy Harjo writes in Perhaps the World Ends Here [5]
‘Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.’
Post Script:
Worth mentioning too is alarming touch of irony the image on the cover carries. It is a still from The Day after Tomorrow, a film made in 2004 - of people running across a crowded New York street before a huge wave. It is a reminder that until recently such scenes that have been portrayed as science ‘fiction’ have become current reality. In fact the plot concerns a climatologist who tries to figure out a way to save the world from abrupt global warming. The film is described as an action movie and a thriller. Earth Shattering Ecopoems is edited by Neil Astley and was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007
1 – Astley lists Peter Abbs Earth Songs, John Burnside and Maurice Riordan’s Wild Reckoning, Alice Oswald’s The Thunder Mutters.
2 – Bryson, quoted in earth shattering page 20
3 – Astley, Earth Shattering page 15
4 - Because I didn’t know anything about Neil Astley, I decided to google him. Within minutes I had before me on the screen the transcript of Bile, Guile and Dangerous to Poetry the 2005 StAnza Lecture in which NEIL ASTLEY, ‘The UK's leading anthologist’ founder of Bloodaxe Books in 1978, speaks his mind on poetry today.’ In this talk he makes it clear that his aim is to cater for readers of poetry rather than follow what he describes as academic elitist fashion.
5 – Earth Shattering, page 243.
And here’s the letter I sent to Kris:
Dear Kris,
In a first draft of my response to Earth Shattering, I wrote that I had come to ecopoetry via my close connection to all aspects of country rather than with a desire for expressing a burning ecological message – although I acknowledge that there is a pressing need for ecological information and messages to be broadcast and acted upon. .
Still the question remains for me: should I be out there saving the native grasses from another dose of Roundup so that the farmers can plant more ‘pasture’ on which they fatten their cattle? My giving up beef doesn’t really seem to be enough. Maybe with the help of landcare fencing off areas of old growth trees is only a gesture as well, but it’s something.. and
isn’t it indulgent to sit in a sheltered valley where eagles floating overhead and blue wrens hop around my feet while the world around me melts, swelters and then dries out?
When I drove through a dust storm last Thursday, keeping a careful watch for falling trees, I know that dust storms strip away that fertile soil, our scarce resource and deposit it as far away as other continents. I tried to find words to describe and contain the experience of being the only moving thing in a landscape shrunken by a dirty sky . . .
I feel more alive when I’m in direct and close contact with the elements, but often I am overwhelmed by the power of nature and my own powerlessness, so I welcomed your example of ‘cheerful fatalism’ and ‘amused wonderment at the miraculous place of human life within the deepest workings of geological time’ carries an important message for all creatives [I’m thinking of using creatives as my term for all artists from now on]
I am yet to come across any of John Barnie’s work and couldn’t find your response to Robyn Rowland’s piece in Zest. I’ll keep looking. I found it most therapeutic to fall back directly on my own experience in my response to your provocative and wise letter.
Best wishes and many thanks,
Sari
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