Practicing slow poetry

Laura Elrick's essay "Poetry, Ecology, and the Production of Lived Space" provides the conceptual framework for a poetic consciousness I am slowly embracing as a means to confront the radical shifts of the present ecological, social, political, personal, and ideological catastrophe.

She writes:

• Perhaps Charles Olson meant to suggest just such a shift when he wrote that "what we [poets] have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and it's reproducer, the voice." But by this I don't mean to propose a return to speech or a poetics of breath per se, but rather to suggest a possible grounding of poetics in spatial practices that challenge the "nature" of capitalist space, a practice that rejects the separation of our bodies from the spaces we inhabit.

As an artist / writer I can't stop producing (images, words, ideas) because producing is what keeps me alive, connected to other people, and present. I join the ecological and political movement to restore the planet and save humanity from the doomsday forces of capital -- and in the process, feel the conscious need to shift my own habits of production and consumption.

But how do I begin? How can my poems work to illuminate the shift?

The poetry reading is a good place to start because it is a site where active engagement with audience has the potential to build much more than my ego. Taking Elrick's idea, I've begun to spacially inhabit the poems I read out loud. This means opening the space of the poetry reading to an experience that takes language to a new level -- off the page, into the body, beyond the breath. I think of it as an offering.

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Naropa University, July 1, 2008:

I read from the book I recently published about my father's suicide; but what I really wanted to do is shift audience reception away from my personal suffering, into an awareness of the larger political and ideological suffering we are incurring because of the war in Iraq. What I hoped is that shifting gears on the audience disrupted the passivity of their expectations of a "poetry reading" and allowed them to inhabit their own suffering simultaneously with the larger suffering that is incurring because of war. I wanted to create a space for public mourning.

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Silent mourning.


Mourning scream.

The memorial, set up under a sycamore tree.

The numbers:
500,000 = the estimated number dead from depleted uranium (which they stopped counting in 2002).
93,067 = the Iraqi death count, July 1 2008
4,650 = U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, July 1, 2008

Naropa University asked that I write an artist's statement to accompany the "installation":

• This is a memorial created by a citizen. It is a memorial to the dead, and a memorial to the flag which has been desecrated not by me, but by the war in Iraq. The flag is being buried along with the dead because I want the symbol of the flag to hold mourning as fiercely as it does patriotism.

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Dale Smith has theorized "slow poetry" as the momentum guiding poetic production as we face what Rick Doblin calls "the tipping point."

Smith writes:

• Production is not limited to texts, but is viewed as a socio-spiritual practice that helps prepare audiences for ways of looking at poetry and the context of the world(s) in which texts may eventually arrive. SP also stresses the necessity of slower consumer practices, preferring close readings to quantitative ones. SP values individuals as key motivating forces of poetic agency. That is, while systems or networks may influence how power is distributed, at each point, poets make rhetorical decisions about their work, determining the context and means of engagement.

I take this to mean the necessity for me to "show up" as a writer -- to lay bare my thought -- make present my connections -- establish conversation with audience -- make context real. It's what Ethan Nichtern of the Interdependence Project calls "the psychology of ecology." There are the "outside" things we think we can do to save the world: recycle, eat raw food, build solar houses, renew energy, etc. But there is an internal shift that must happen as well:

• But what about the internal landscape of consumption—the subtleties of our state of mind as we attempt to change our patterns? ... Interdependence invites us to expand our awareness and to bear witness to the complex network of conditioning that produces each of our habitual actions, as well as the larger context of outcomes produced by our lifestyle choices. As ignorant participants in complicated processes of global production and consumption, we have had precisely this contextual awareness stripped from us.

This is what I think Elrick and Smith are on to: questioning the extent to which poets are exempt from changing our patterns; seeing how the work we do is dependent on cycles of consumption and production. Isn't the work we produce and produce, publish and publish, linked to the same treadmills of production that are ruining the planet? Can we lay bare the subtleties of our state of mind? Make it known? Show up in contextual awareness of what we're doing, and why?

I'm just speaking for myself here. Anyone listening?