Julie Joosten, Light Light

Quanta of light move in waves over the sea, move the sea to the horizon.

Purple is a horizon extending the sky.

It seems not an earth-sky.

To think of attention as moving without trying to be moved to shadow, hepatica, sea, to purple or sky.

Rain falls on the sea and forms a night field of circles glittering idly in moonlight then dissolves into sea surface.

To give attention to what does not exist.

Here, there. (“Wind”)

Toronto poet and American expatriate Julie Joosten’s first trade poetry collection is Light Light (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), a collection of dense lyrics blended with the attention of essays. Joosten writes on spaces lost, forgotten and otherwise misplaced, or even deliberately obscured. “[S]ecrecy another form / of resistance,” she writes, in the poem “If light stabilizing / If to receive a bee.” The sixteen extended lyrics that make up Light Light sketch out a series of meditative studies on and around small moments, as she writes to open the poem “Ghost Species”: “Henry David Thoreau would describe the seasons, listing // the flowering times of wildflowers around Concord Massachusetts / (1851-1858). // It continues today: the data, the occasional field, the wildflowers, / declining.” The poems in Light Light are small studies in horticulture, sketches of ecologies and exploration of botany, and how any gaze changes both watcher and precisely what is being seen and studied. To describe her poems as “eco-poetry” would do the book a disservice, through reducing a more complex set of structures, ideas and perspectives to something far less. And yet, quite simply, her poems speak to a perspective that becomes irrevocably lost, once we lose sight of what is just outside our window, and the relationships we have with nature. By describing and discussing the world and natural histories, she becomes one of the natural world’s strongest advocates.

It began a field, grew valley. Light tipped grass scatters from pollen. Tree atoms gather in splints, divide to aster and cress.

Become a room of weather.

The sun coppers the ground. Its angles bring several seasons at once.

The accident of petals quarrying a winter field.

In a valley of wild hive, orange blossom, and honey the sun is silent. Is carried on the backs of horses.

Ferried against the wind.

By sympathy or suggestion I remember what I am. Walking beside a river humming with the dark. (“Once Sun”)

She certainly isn’t the first to work through ecological concerns and/or natural histories in poetry, and some recent examples of works that share Joosten’s ecological attentiveness, striking language and the book-length unit of composition include Robin Clarke’s Lines the Quarry (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013), Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), Ken Belford’s Internodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) and Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s collaborative re-issue Sybil Unrest (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2013). There have been poetic conversations going back decades about the pastoral, with more recent strains of eco-poetry and other ecological concerns added to the mix, which can’t help but fall deeper into the writing with every passing day. Light Light is a striking, subtle collection of sharp lyric movements that ebb and flow like water, alternately rushing, punching and as soothing as same. Not just light, but lighter, light or lighter than.

The green of the field felt so unforgettable winter could never again exist.

I’d have said in the absence of colour there thought was. The hills bringing the mind not to itself but to the idea of green. To the feeling of sunlight as expectation. The future opened from a circle of snow.

Stone, maple, daffodil, tadpole, skein.

When the valley came to be a valley I was watching winter grasses brown against the sky then green then suddenly in a startling smallness bud to pink. But it wasn’t as peaceful as that. Mud thickened the ground, made it grabby.

It gripped a finch, spit up feathers to write with, took an oak, four kittens, a thunderstorm, and a pair of woolen gloves. Grabbed a man and a woman whole, left imprints like swollen snow angels.

In a place of winter a field emerged, carving beauty’s furrows, entrenching muck-spattered beauty into the valley.

I was to guard the valley, name it, speak to it by name. (“Once Sun”)

Robin Clarke, Lines the Quarry

Everything wants to live, not

even Robocop. The difference

between human, employee

hired hand & the ocean—

simply the road gets blocked, so

Carnegie built a library

sixteen hours of work each

shift your life is mined

by one way & another

bake a cake between the days,

workers, dynamite, dripping

things you don’t want to forget

headlamp, feed dog tied to post.

A history of methane

explodes one thousand feet

in your face is a ceiling

coming down? burns ninety

percent of the woman’s

disaster porn at Big Branch

coal mine, twenty-nine Do Not

Resuscitate, Mr. Blank

Blankenship throws down a rope

I’ve got my head but three years

of citation brings the whole

sputtering to today, the

rules, or all Americans

deserve to? The company (“My Father or the Prisoner Before Him”)

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania poet, activist and teacher Robin Clarke’s first poetry collection, published as winner of the Omnidawn 1^st/2^nd Poetry Book Prize, is Lines the Quarry (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013). Selected for the award by Brenda Hillman, the book opens with Hillman’s “Judge’s Citation,” that begins:

            Robin Clarke’s inventive and brave first collection of poems is not a book that makes you feel better; it is a book that makes you feel. It does not necessarily bring comfort or spiritual discovery—though it could lead to those things. Using an approach that is both collective and personal, the poet meditates on mining culture, on the prison system, on the health care system, on corporate seizure of resources and on systematic economic failure, on attendant environment disasters; in so doing, she always keeps attention on the specifics of working people and their struggles. The three sequences here are full of detailed fragments of incidents—never completely spelled out—that allude to illness and injury, details of childhood, family history, showing humans and earth as victims of the mines and of both slow and sudden disasters, yet the result is somehow ultimately redemptive.

Hers is a collection of documentary poems built via collage, some composed using specifics directly from a series of documents, stretched out across three sections—“My Father or the Prisoner Before Him,” “In the Building Coming Down” and “Lines the Quarry.” In the first section, she writes: “The mine collapsed under the weight of its many / false documents.” These are poems composed out of striking lines pressed firmly into and against each other, all of which contain a brutal honesty, as well as a series of challenges: “The women of Harlan County used a cadillac / to stop the train. And began singing. Which side are you / on?” This book is comparable to Brian Teare’s recent title with Omnidawn, Companion Grasses (2013) [see my review of such here], for their meditative stretches, shared ecological attentiveness and their book-length units of composition, yet Clarke’s poems also seek discomfort, and almost demand the reader respond in some way. Honestly, it would be impossible not to respond to these poems. In terms of some of the structure of short phrases collaged into each other to produce a series of accumulative stretches, as well as for their shared exploration of environmentalism and personal-political responsibilities, one could even compare this to Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s recent collaborative re-issue Sybil Unrest (New Star Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Very much in the territory of “eco-poetry,” Clarke depicts, describes and laments needless destruction of the natural world through excessive mining, utilizing and lifting a language of nursery rhymes and song, implicating numerous structures in the physical destruction of the earth, all of which have been created by human hands. In terms of subject matter, her work is reminiscent of other works on disasters man-made, whether pieces on Frank Slide, Alberta, the bp oil spill or even Richard Brautigan’s infamous poem on Nova Scotia’s Springhill Mine Disaster (there were actually three mine disasters in Springhill, but who’s counting?). I wonder: there have been anthologies over the past couple of years exploring “eco-poetry,” but have there been any collections or critical explorations of poems that work through environmental disasters?

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones

What to do when yellow

fever, husband, child, child

child, child? She may have lived

100,000 years, a marriage

of action verbs & explosives—

the more I think the more rad

I get—mops & brooms used to

barricade the mine entrances

nobody wants a lady

to march one hundred child workers

from Philly textile mills to the

President’s house on Long Island

so she must become the most

dangerous America itself

Clarke describes those lost who, quite literally, “line the quarry,” and is not afraid to name names and list the dead, destroyed or lost, writing out the human and environmental costs of mining, oil drilling and other exploitations of natural resources. Through the first section, the American prison system is explored as well. In the first section, she writes: “dreams say it, together / who did nothing wrong [.]” The poems in this collection explore a series of causes and effects, some of which are quite disastrous, such as the list poem “2010 Workers’ Compensation Injuries, Illnesses, Fatalities,” the opening poem “2006 Workers’ Compensation Injury Data, United States” or the seven-stanza list poem “Mining Disasters in the Month of January, United States,” that includes:

1846 Delaware-Hudson, Roof Fall, Carbondale, PA, 14 killed

1883 Coulterville, Mine Explosion, Coulterville, IL, 10 killed

1884 Crested Butte, Mine Explosion, Crested Butte, CO, 59 killed

1886 Almy No. 4, Mine Explosion, Almy, WY, 13 killed

1886 Newburg, Mine Explosion, Newburg, PA, 39 killed

1891 Mammouth, Mine Explosion, Mt. Pleasant, PA, 109 killed

Through exploring various disasters, Clarke ends up exploring memory—“the worst disaster since the last one”—writing about people lost through the prison system, disasters man-made we don’t wish to think about, and just where the accumulation of disaster upon disaster might end up taking us. “What do you love about this / world? Without what is there nothing // else to say?”