More from the Editor’s Statement. (Eventually, I will get past the Editor’s Statement.)

Perhaps we will begin to revalue the “nature walk,” and to venerate the humble, empirical tasks of “natural history,” in ways that were lost to the technological hubris of the last century; but with radically different senses of “nature” and of “history,” from those with which the Victorian era charged this discipline.

This is intriguing. What would radically different senses of nature and history look like? When I imagine renovating natural history, I can only think of applying imagination. The details of scientific classification, collection, observation, and study seem so done.

I remember reading “Little Men” by Louisa May Alcott and being fascinated by the homemade museum of natural history. Little trail museums – “interpretive centers” – who is doing this interpretation? Is this familiar oldstyle natural history a way of separating from the environment – an environment that needs interpretation to be part of it?

In any case, transparent narratives of self-discovery, or solipsistic, self-expressive displays, seem ill-suited to the current crisis; art alive to the differentiating nature of its own materials may be better equipped.

I read this sentence over and over, but it doesn’t come clean. What are its own materials? How can the self be exempt?

It seems like you have to take an anti-solipsism oath to join this club. My philosophy – solipsism will take care of itself, we don’t need to worry. When the wind ripples the surface, the reflection is disturbed. Also, I am suspicious that these narratives or self-expressive displays are 1) always there and 2) undervalued. If you seek to examine the natural history of the human, there is probably no better place to look.

To be continued, looking for these themes in the work.

JS speaking of the absence of “walks” in today’s best poetry:

Whether this is because poetry has turned the bulk of its energies toward accomodating, or resisting, capitalist “schizophrenia” (symptom in part of the enormous time done, by knowledge workers, at desks) or whether “nature” is more deliberately edited out by writers alert to ideological and historical trappings, is hard to say.

JS, ecopoetics 01, page 5

This asks for some unpacking. Speaking as a knowledge worker, I am very curious about this statement, but not sure I can decipher it. As a knowledge worker, I’m very distracted by the missing m in accommodating. I learned “two c’s and two m’s on a date” back in my early career as a knowledge worker doing Word Processing for the City of Eugene. Okay, deep breath, I can let go of that.

Poetry turning its energies – poets turning their energies –
poets forced or choosing to turn their energies – or mindlessly turning their energies –

toward accommodating or resisting –
either or both – kind of what you do with the elephant in the living room –
some might try to push it out
others to move the furniture and rugs into attractive arrangements around it
And don’t forget – “what you resist persists” (which turns out to be a quote by Carl Jung)

Capitalist schizophrenia. I think I know what this is. I think he’s saying the poets adopt the mental habits of life that are “symptoms” of the knowledge worker economy we live in here in the (where). I acknowledge that I live in it anyway, and this is a concern. I know there is an impact. It is hard to articulate what it is when you are inside your own life. I guess he’s guessing.

Attempt: There is a weird, “they’re playing hooky” sensation that you cannot get around when reading Ted Berrigan on his train rides, or Frank O’Hara during his lunch breaks, or the Beats during their anything, especially as they grew into adults. And you read any poet under a cloud of awareness that one has to make a living somehow. I can’t get over the paradigm of poets who teach. Should this matter? I think yes.

Moving on to the second statement after the “or” – there is such an echo here of the feminist concern that poetry excluded reference to women’s experience, birth, bodies, babies, blood. I came into poetry through the “No More Masks!” anthology. Interesting to find JS making this same complaint, but this time around, with respect to Mother Nature.

Who knows the answer. Yes, it’s hard to say.

conditions for outside discoveries, in human language arts at the turn the millenium, feel narrow: generally, walks do not make it into the embattled environment of today’s best poetry.

JS, ecopoetics 01, page 5

The first thing I ask is – is it true?

Also getting caught up in aversion to any speech that claims to be general. Wittgenstein writes about the craving for generality. It would seem anti-eco-poetic, this craving for generality. In poetic-speak, this may also be called “universality.”

I like the term “outside discoveries.” Outside what? He’s talking about out of doors. Why not outside of my skin, my head, my waking hours?

“human language arts at the turn of the millennium” – feels way too broad.

When I read the word narrow, I think of a crack between boulders that has grown wider over years. That narrow crack attracts – you want to see what grows in there. If it’s wet, if you could fit your body into it, your hand, how far down, if it’s mossy, what is at the bottom, if you can see how the parts joined way back when.

Embattled environment, no doubt. If one participates in that.

Today’s best poetry? A quest for the best, a best guess, a best guest, a better guest, a good guest, a good guess, a beast. Best is no good, there’s a fracture here. So here we are, walking through a fractured crack into the embattled environment of someone’s quest for the best

poetry.

I want to engage with ecopoetics journal.

As an audience, as an amateur.

I read through Issue 1. I have a lot of comments. Why not put it on the blog?

We skiied on the rail trail – gray line above the road marked on this map.

View Rail Trail area outside Cards Crossing in a larger map