eco-poetics
DOROTHY ALEXANDER
Jennie Renton asked us to take over this website for a month and to do something with it; the best thing to do, we thought, would be to invite poets we know across lowland Scotland that we’ve either worked with, performed with, or whose work we like. over the next four weeks we’ll be posting the works of a Canadian ex-pat, a text artist, a performance poet and an extreme found poet, among others.
to launch this takeover, an impromptu night of readings, TROPIXTUALITIES, was held at Roxy Art House on Monday 16th August. for a hastily arranged event, it was a great and varied night.
we encourage the leaving of comments. nick-e melville and rodney relax.
our first poet is Dorothy Alexander.
Three poems from Final Warning
– an ongoing series in which techniques developed out of found poetry are applied to a contemporary newspaper clipping. Poems are constructed from within a word pool formed by searching along and down through the base text. Letters, words, lines are then ‘re’placed in direct relation to it.
Found is posited here as an ecopoetic, not only because of its inbuilt credentials as recycler, but, more pertinently, for the non-hierarchical and inclusive nature of its processes. It invites acts of multiple attention (down to the smallest detail). It encourages heightened responsibility, in both writer and audience, for engagement with the word as depository and potential manipulator of meaning. My hope is that this dynamic of paying particular attention and taking responsibility serves as exemplar for engagement with larger issues and strengthens resistance to notions of outside agency.
The text used was an extract from the front page of The Independent on Saturday 3rd February 2007 whose banner headline was ‘Final Warning’, and which had five purported scenarios for global temperature rise by 2100 from +2.4° up to +6.4°.
Click on the fllowing links to see the poems:
premonition from the plastic room
Poems from Final Warning have been published in How2 online journal, Black Box Manifold and in Product Magazine. A selection was exhibited at the Skylines Ecopoetics Exhibition / Language and L=A=N=D=S=C=A=P=E=S Forum at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Natural World (www.mediaalive.co.uk/ecopoetics/) in June 2009. Links to other examples can be found at www.dorothyalexander.co.uk
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