Thank you, Juliana.
And I also want to thank Gail and Cybele and the Poetry
Center for having me.
It's great to be back in the Southwest
in this incredible space for poetry.
Thank you for coming out.
So I was asked to do two things tonight,
and it won't be easy to fit it into the time allotted.
One is to give a talk, and the other was to read some poetry.
And I'll try to do both.
And I think that editing this magazine
has created the misconception that I actually
have a theory of ecopoetics.
And I thought to confront that.
I pulled up the original call for submissions
to the magazine, which I put out in 2000.
And I'll just read that for you to start, "Ecopoetics,
Call for Submissions."
This still applies, by the way.
Now that the days are longer, consider
contributing to Ecopoetics/writing surrounds.
While honoring the long tradition of nature writing,
Ecopoetics finds pastoralism, art representing nature,
at an impasse.
At the same time, the writing edge
seems to offer no new take on surrounds,
mainly environmental silence or passive regrets.
Actually, I don't think that's true anymore, thankfully.
If there are exceptions, Ecopoetics
hopes to gather them.
Ecopoetics seeks responses to the question, where is writing?
Whose leaves are contiguous to body, street, yard, park
or waterfront, sky, lawn, brownfield, industry, farmland
or the wild, environs from the porch to the South Pole,
in every case peopled with more than humans?
If, as poet Frank O'Hara claims, quote,
"one never need leave the confines of New York
to get all the greenery one wishes," end quote.
Anywhere entails an extended sense
of people into other species and a greenery
subject to waste mismanagement flows and deposits of gases,
heavy metals and synthetic organic compounds,
economics and the growing map of environmental justice.
Might not discourses and practices of soil, water, air,
energy make poetics?
Responses from other languages, especially translated
along north-south lines are urgently sought.
Examples and discussion both are invited.
Poems, translations, essays, reviews, letters, journals,
investigations, lists, divination, prayers, riddles,
maps, documented acts, performances and installations,
unearthings, practical advice, et cetera will be considered.
So that's a mouthful, and maybe the journal
has lived up to about 10% of that so far.
But my idea was really to create a site,
not a theory or an idea but a site that writers and makers
in the broader sense of poet, you know someone who makes--
could be visually, could be in words--
could come to you and have a conversation
around the environment and some of the issues
that we're facing.
I also wanted it to be a field-ready journal, so
small-sized.
I include a blank page in the back
that I encourage contributors to take outside and do something
with and send in to the journal.
And it really was this idea of edge
that I was borrowing from ecology, edge effect.
I was learning environmental studies
that edge habitat between a meadow and forest for example
on the edge of a stream is where you find
increased diversity of species.
And so I thought, let's create an edge
within the literary field between different tendencies,
different practices, different languages, different modes,
handwriting as well as print and see what happens.
I've since learned edges are problematic,
and there's fragmentation that happens as well.
But I just wanted--
so that's really where the journal began.
Also, there was sort of a practice of recycled paper.
And the first cover was literally
the color of money, a paper made by Crayon Papers called
Old Money, cotton-based, recycled money paper.
The second one was denim blue jeans.
So one of them printed locally.
So all these things happen, and over time
as all this amazing work came in,
I started to look back and try to think about what
patterns I was seeing as I was being asked,
what is ecopoetics?
And I saw four things.
One was there were kinds of poems
that refer to the environment that you might call
topological, sort of the environment as a topos
or a topic, but also that are referring to.
Prose does this.
And then there were tropological poems.
There's a tropological motive of a metaphorical motive,
figurative motive.
The poet is trying to make a poem that is like an ecosystem
or trying to model or resemble some sort of natural process.
And semblance is great, but then there's
the third part, which I started calling anthropological
that I borrowed from the artist Robert Smithson, where
the poet is really engaging with the material of language
and with matter as something that we're all subject to,
namely decay and disturbance.
And this interested me, because I
think there are problems with semblance and with analogy.
And for example as Derrick Jensen says,
the Coho salmon don't really care
if we write beautiful poems about them.
They just want us to take the damn pumps out of the river.
So there's this critique of poetry
built into the environmental movement itself.
And I don't know if anthropology is a sufficient answer to that,
but I think it's maybe edging creativity closer
toward a sense of what it means to be material.
And what I'd like to do is now give you
a talk that is exploring this third category of making
that I've called the anthropological.
The other would be the ethnological.
And I think that one thing I've said
is that an ecopoetics is always already ethnopoetics.
And the multiplicity of languages
is part of the multiplicity of species on the planet.
But for now, there'll be a bit of that in this.
But for now, I wanted to talk to you
about the "Poetics of the Third Landscape, Thoughts on Things."
And I'm actually going to read this
in order to make this go a bit more smoothly.
So please apologize, the read format here.
"Thoughts on Things, Poetics of the Third Landscape."
Extinction.
If we are to believe the late political theorist Stephen
Meyer and the theory of island biogeography
as he sets it forth in his last book, The End of the Wild,
the battle for the biodiversity of the current geological
period is lost.
Quote, "Over the next 100 years or so as many as half
of the Earth's species representing
a quarter of the planet's genetic stock
will either completely or functionally disappear.
The land and the oceans will continue to teem with life,
but it will be a peculiarly homogenized assemblage
of organisms naturally and unnaturally selected
for their compatibility with one fundamental force, us."
Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's rival and collaborator,
theorized that the number of species on the planet today
is directly related to the number of what he called realms
or biogeographical regions.
And here, you can see Wallace's five realms.
Species that were related on the Pangaea supercontinent
have diverged genetically over the millennia
that they were separated by migration and continental
drift.
Today's globalized human activity
accelerates the process of encounter leading to Pangaea
diminishing the number of realms and consequently,
the number of species.
So the argument is that now we're
actually reversing this process as we transport species
around the planet.
The process of extension is accelerated by overharvesting
and by the fragmentation of biogeographic islands
as a result of human development,
leaving fewer options for species seeking a way out
of climatic cul de sacs.
So again, that a continent Pangaea--
let me go back--
breaking apart.
The weedy species, the species most
like us will inherit the Earth, reuniting Pangaea and reversing
65 million years of evolution.
This is a map devised by gardenist Gilles
Clement, French gardenist.
And he calls it The Global Garden.
And he's taken all the different kinds of biomes
and arranged them by proportion.
If you're on the sides by the way,
you might want to scoot your chair over.
It's going to be hard to follow this.
So down here, you have the temperate rainforest
at the very bottom and the boreal forest at the top.
In the middle, you have the tropical regions
and the equatorial forests, the desert steppes.
He calls this-- this is The Global Garden.
This is what we have to work with now.
OK.
Part 2, weeds.
In the scale of desirability, opposite threatened species,
we locate weeds, rabbit, Colorado potato
beetle, African mosquito, cactus moth, European starling, North
American muskrat, cord grass, giant African land snail, sea
lamprey, purple loosestrife, Chinese mitten
crab, buffelgrass, Asian tamarisk, garlic mustard, zebra
mussel, Africanized honeybee, Asian longhorn beetle,
European gypsy moth, fire ant, bighead carp,
northern snakehead, nutria, house sparrow, brown tree
snake, Japanese knotweed, marijuana, kudzu,
common reed, Norway Maple, ice plant, tree of heaven, datura,
giant salvinia, Russian olive, cane toad, cat,
Nile perch, goat, house mouse, Amur river clam, mesquite,
tumbleweed, red-vented bulbul, gray squirrel, fox,
empress tree, mallard, water chestnut, giant hogweed,
the list goes on.
Some of those are invasives, crossing the Atlantic
to the other side.
The Nature Conservancy pamphlet, "America's Least Wanted--
Alien Species Invasions of US Ecosystems"
exemplifies the hysteria regarding invasive species.
Quote, "An invasion is underway that is
undermining our nation's economy and endangering our most
precious natural treasures.
The intruders are alien species, non-native plants and animals
introduced into this country," end quote.
Obviously, this language participates
in the rhetorical hyperbole meant
to catalyze political change.
From a cultural standpoint, however, it
is troubling language, indeed, not to mention deeply ironic
coming from the most invasive culture
in the history of the species.
Migration.
The popular imagination of plants
divides them into two races, the native plants
and the invasive ones.
The first apparently stay put while the second
are on the move.
There may be some biological truth
to this with the distinction between rhizomic and rooting
plants.
But according to gardenist Gilles Clément,
we should think about all plants in terms of travel rather than
fixated.
His volume on weeds is titled In Praise of Vagabonds.
From a global perspective, the plant's essence
lies in movement.
The poet Charles Olson seems to agree writing in his epic work
The Maximus Poems, quote, "Migration,
in fact which is probably as constant in history
as any one thing, migration is the pursuit by animals, plants,
and men of a suitable and God's will and preferable
environment, and always leads to a new center."
"This," Olson added, "is the rose, is the rose,
is the rose of the world."
You'll see that print on the wall upstairs
in the Poetry Center, by the way.
At about the same time, that land artist
Robert Smithson was busting art out of the gallery.
Olson was chafing at the limits of the page
and wrote these lines in a spiral.
"An unfolded rose whose outermost petal is migration
and innermost petal finds the world."
In a city of brotherly love, the purple sweet blossoms
of the empress tree festooned a mile long stretch of fenced
off viaduct.
A wild oasis suspended above the decaying urban core,
an expressway border vacuum just opposite Chinatown.
Quote, "Never to alight till nations
sue for peace, seed pods for Excelsior,
stuffing crates of Cathay porcelain castaways
and ship hold broadcast over foreign soils,"
writes John Perlman in his poem "Royal Paulownia,
the Natural History of Trees."
Perlman's prose poem alludes to the Asian origin
of these fast-growing trees, whose seed pods came over
as packing for Chinese porcelain.
Traditionally, Chinese families plant on empress
tree at the birth of a daughter to be
harvested for dowry furniture when she is married.
Wherever we find plants, we find culture.
The empress trees seem to have known
where they were going when they chose this abandoned railway
bed convenient to Chinatown.
A recent visit to the site uncovered
evidence of selective cutting.
Invention.
Stephen Meyer advocates that we drop the haphazard strategy
of protecting some relic and ghost species,
and begin to think about trans-regional schemes
for the preservation and protection of huge swaths
of landscape and seascape selected
to protect broad ecosystem functions
and services in a dynamic environment
rather than species-specific needs.
Incremental forces such as sexual selection
no longer serve as the driving force behind species selection
and evolution.
The driving force is now us, human beings.
We cannot try to save everything,
and we'll have to make some tough choices.
That's Meyer's argument, anyways.
We will have to be inventive.
Quote, "What would happen if there were a terrific shortage
of goldenrod in the world?"
Grace Paley wonders in her Thetford poems.
We need and perhaps are beginning to find,
wrote Marxist critic Raymond Williams,
different ideas, different feelings
if we are to know nature is varied,
and variable nature is the changing
conditions of a human world.
Or as the other Williams, William Carlos, noted, quote,
"Without invention, nothing is well-spaced.
Unless there is a new mind, there cannot be a new line.
Without invention, nothing lies under the witch hazel bush.
The elder does not grow from among the hammocks,
margining the all but spent channel of the old soil."
In her essay on the blackberry, Rubus armeniacus,
a common architectural decorative motif
in the temperate mesophotic region,
poet Lisa Robertson looks to the illegitimate superfluous
bramble.
Nowadays considered a minor invasive alien,
though introduced to North America
deliberately in the 19th century for lessons in what she
calls soft architecture.
Quote, "Tracing a mortal palimpsest
of potential services and acutely compromised situations,
Rubus," she writes, "shows us how to invent."
So the third landscape.
All management generates abandoned landscapes.
Sorry, all management generates abandoned spaces.
The overgrown farm fields and grubbed-up orchards
spawned by EU tariff quota regimes, the vacant lots
of urban sprawl, the unvisited swamps
inside the motorway cloverleaf, all production entails neglect.
Clément sees spaces of neglect, those neither cultivated nor
preserved.
As acutely compromised situations,
post-industrial areas that are quickly taken over
by weedy ranging pioneer species,
he sees as a sites of potential relevant privation.
And he urges we recognize them with the term third landscape.
For Clément, the third landscape represents the biological
future.
And as the privileged site for biological intelligence,
the aptitude for constant self-reinvention.
Here, we begin to understand the long term survival
strategies of other species and the migrations that lead
to new centers of speciation.
Diversity takes refuge in these abandoned spaces.
Again, this is Clément's argument.
"I can begin to find refuge in change,"
wrote Terry Tempest Williams, "for Christopher Dewdney.
Nighthawks, crickets, bats and raccoons,
unbroken wild continuum into the centers of the Great Lakes
cities."
That's the Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney,
wonderful poet of the urban environment.
The third landscape can offer critical corridors
and buffer zones, ways out for species
seeking to escape shrinking fragments of island habitat.
Often, the wildness of such lands
is but a temporary state, reprieve
for a time by political, bureaucratic,
and financial delay.
So this is an image of what would
become Central Park in 1858.
And it was kind of a wild wasteland for a while, Upper
Central Manhattan.
"This wildness basically has the status
of grass growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk."
This is a piece by Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña entitled
"Sidewalk Forest."
Small altars on the streets of New York,
air vents for the Earth, pasture born in the gutters.
She calls these "Precarios."
And there she does these fragile ephemeral installations
that are lodged somewhere between prayer
and precariousness and sort of to highlight
this other life that's trying to thrive and come up
through the concrete.
In Gilles Clément's view, the politics of the third landscape
are revolutionary.
Quote, "Third landscape refers to Third Estate,
and not to Third World.
Space expressing neither power nor submission to power.
It refers to the pamphlet of CES in 1789.
What is the Third Estate?
Everything.
What has it accomplished up to now?
Nothing.
What does it aspire to become?
Something."
So now we move on to poetry.
Field poetics, "Thoughts on Things."
"Mergansers, fans on their heads.
Thoughts on things.
Fold, unfold above the riverbeds."
This is one of my favorite poems by the poet Lorine Niedecker,
Wisconsin poet.
And also a great modernist of international fame.
The unspoken emphasis I hear in Lorine Niedecker's poem
is thoughts on things in things.
As things in their own right, thoughts on things
fold, unfold above the river beds.
The very end of the poem has thoughts,
things-- thoughts, things, fold, unfold above the river beds.
Poetry for me is thoughts on things.
Poems fold, unfold their thoughts
with no determinate aim or intent above the riverbeds.
The instructions that carry out are often
as mysterious or plainly evident to the heads enjoying them
as a Mergansers fan must be to the head of the Merganser.
Poetry is thoughts on things, maybe a more succinct version
of Charles Olson's postmodern stance of composition by field.
Quote, "Getting rid of the lyrical interference
of the individual as ego that peculiar presumption
by which Western man has interposed himself
between what he is as a creature of nature
with certain instructions to carry out,
and those other creations of nature, which we
may, with no derogation, call objects.
For man is himself an object, whatever he
may take to be his advantages."
That was Olson's language, man.
For man is himself an object whatever he
may take to be his advantages.
The more we attend to the thinghood of the artifact we
are shaping as constituted in a field of relations,
the more we let ourselves be used as things in our own right
by the field in which the thing participates.
That is, the more we let the demands of the field
dictate our choices.
This is my understanding of composition
by field or invention in one post-modern sense.
Anthropology.
Artist Robert Smithson took note of the entropic landscapes
left in the wake of industrial production.
And after Claude Levi-Strauss called for the discipline
of anthropologie.
It's like a bad French pun, but anthropologie.
And he wrote, today's artist is beginning
to perceive this process of disintegrating
frameworks as a highly developed condition.
Claude Levi-Strauss has suggested
we develop a new discipline called anthropology.
The artist and the critic should develop something similar.
The buried cities of the Yucatan are
enormous and heterogeneous time capsules
full of lost abstractions and broken frameworks.
There, the wilderness and the city intermingle.
Nature spills into the abstract frames.
The containing narrative of an entire civilization
breaks apart to form another kind of order.
A film is capable of picking up the pieces.
The relationship between pollution and filmmaking
strikes me as a worthwhile area of investigation.
These are photographs from the Landschaftspark designed
by Peter Latz in Duisburg, North Germany.
It's an amazing sight, a reclaimed steel factory.
That was Robert Smithson on anthropology.
Production entails neglect.
As Clément puts it, all management generates
an abandoned area.
To paraphrase Smithson, the relationship
between pollution and poetry might bear some investigating.
In his study of urban development,
City Eclogue's poet Ed Roberson phrases it
in terms of the human cost.
Ed Roberson writes, "Their buildings raised they
ghosts, their color that haze of plaster dust,
their blocks of bulldozed air open to light.
People lived where it weren't open,
a people whose beginning is dispersed
by a vagrant progress whose settlement is overturned
for the better of a highway through to someone else's
possibility."
"The better of a highway through to someone else's possibility,"
that's from his poem, "The Open," Ed Robeson.
Here, as Peter Larkin notes in his study of urban woods,
the urban planner is opening up, closes down so much else,
alas an old story.
An anthropology on the other hand
seeks a better balance between production and neglect.
In the case of writing, between forcing the right conjunction
of sound, image, and idea, and somehow letting the words be.
In the case of conceptualization,
between developing and disintegrating frameworks.
And in the case of ethics, between someone else's
possibility.
And as Robeson might put it, someone--
sorry, in the case of ethics between someone's possibility
and, as Ed Roberson might put it, someone or something else's
possibility.
In an interview, Robert Smithson described his artworks
as quote, "entropic situations that hold themselves together.
It's like the Spiral Jetty is physical enough
to be able to withstand all these climate changes.
Yet it's intimately involved with those climate changes
and natural disturbances.
Somehow to have something physical that
generates ideas is more interesting to me
than just an idea that might generate something physical,"
end quote.
Smithson also said that my sense of language
is that it is matter and not ideas.
That is, printed matter.
This is his piece "Printed Matter," Robert Smithson.
Or as Lorine Niedecker has it in a variant
on her poem, thoughts, things.
Thoughts, things.
This is anthropology, different from the thoroughpin
or downright plain topicality of so much nature poetry.
Half breeds.
Oops.
I want this to be right there, just--
section from the talk that cut.
"Half Breeds."
James Thomas Stephens' A Half-Breed's Guide
to the Use of Native Plants negotiates settled,
unsettled survival strategies yet not of the landscape.
His scruffy peas that quote, "keep shallow roots
and break from base, dispersing in danger to flea infestation,"
end quote.
Or the false sunflower with a forked tongue, a fertile forked
pistol take note of his tendency to colonize.
The play with diagrams, Latin binomials,
and overall detournement of the field guide format
disperses the tilt of figuration with its romantic and erotic
subtext.
The poems seem wary of colonizing their referent,
looking to plants of the Midwest prairie
for a key to surviving this new old world,
a world that half my blood fought to obtain
and the other half struggled to hold, Stephens writes.
Stephens' series plays ironically
with the frame of the field guide, which
is a genre for going native, but also a taxonomic key that
can serve as shallow sense of ownership.
For Stephens, a poet of Mohawk descent, as for Roger Williams.
A key to the language of America fits no door
between self and other, opening rather
onto self-reflection and complex zones of negotiation.
Here, specific rather than token knowledge use rather than
possession offer the keys to survival.
Petalism, I'll explain what that is in a second.
The Mesostic Herbarium curated by Alec Finlay, quote,
"A phytological anthology by various amateurs of botany
being a partial heterodox collection
of mesostic poems on the names of flora arranged according
to habitat," end quote.
Founds the movement in arts and letters,
Finlay cheekily dubs Petalism.
And mesostic is-- an acrostic is when
you write to say someone's name down vertically,
and you write lines beginning with the letters of the name
horizontally.
Here, there's a bit more freedom to use any letter in the word.
There are some exploration of third landscape as places
of succession, transition, invasion, with entries on flora
of the meadow, flora of the hedgerow, flora of the ashes,
exotics, and so on.
It is a wonderful instance of anthropology
and as the play between letter, name, and properties
leaps out with the reading eye down the page.
So here we have dandelion.
Piss the bed, airhead, transient, meadow, parachute,
milky, tick, tocked, perennial.
The letters in the name turned on its axis
become something physical that generates
ideas with their aleatory suggestions
very positioning of words along the stem
and a vertical display of what poet
Anne Carson has called alphabetic edge,
that pictorial outline of the invisible edges of sound.
Additionally, the concrete dimension of the work
foregrounds the fact that writing takes place in space.
Letters draw attention to the eloquence of what they are not.
It is an ambient poetry that could easily
become setting in its own right for a field
of dandelions, recalling the garden work of Finlay's father
who might have set these poems outside in glass, stone,
or wood.
Kinship with animals.
Not all weeds are plants.
Consider the electric contortions
of Maggie O'Sullivan's "Starlings."
I'm going to play a little bit of history here.
Should be playing.
"Starlings."
"Lived daily or both, daily the living structuring bone seed.
Pelage aqueous, yonderly lazy bed of need.
Cloud, sand, tipsy, bubbles down deep wonder hoped upon,
grinned, cheers, jeans, note, sermons
in the leading of small and the pitch meander ears,
tune me gold, Dulthie pots, leper, ocher, hauled,
electric contortions clashes perforate, all fall down,
scabbed faulty pedals moaning gether gather.
So it's just a bit of a-- you can hear the whole thing
on PennSound, wonderful archive of poetry recordings online.
Considered as pests in America ever since they escaped
Central Park where they were introduced from England,
O'Sullivan restores starlings their Shakespearean legacy.
As sound, the pitch meander ears,
tune me gold, Dulthie pods.
As site, they are ochre harled.
Charles Bernstein calls O'Sullivan's poems
a species of collidering and notes
that they lend themselves to recitation
while resisting thematization.
In addition to the changes of font, part of the physical
here is the page, often an active part of the composition
rather than neutral support.
It is one of the things in which O'Sullivan
pursues her thoughts on things.
To carry out the instructions fixed on the page
is a transformative way of discovering
one's objective nature as the breath, the tongue,
and the lips performing Dulthie pods
undergo kinship with animals.
It's a really fun poem to read aloud.
You just feel it in your mouth.
O'Sullivan's book works and assemblages
emerged from her concern, after shaman artists Kurt Schwitters
and Joseph Beuys, for the retrieval
of potentials within materials.
Her starlings are promiscuous creatures,
shapeshifting mingling, not taxonomic isolates slated
for preservation or extinction.
With them, we move plundering, blundering,
sounding over the castoff materials of English,
our electric contortions colonizing the places
of dialect abandoned by literature,
including many retrievals from James Joyce's own word
hoard "Finnegan's Wake."
The landscape her assemblages engage
is accordingly one of colliding and transformation
rather than separation and preservation,
a weedy cosmopolitan place.
Just about done here.
"Slug Art."
One might wonder whether the participation of other species
is not more invoked than assured here.
And this is a piece I did with Julie Patton for Ecopoetics.
Can thoughts on things really occur in things
by way of much more than a kind of ventriloquism?
It was perhaps an attempt to push the possibilities
in the face of such skepticism that led to my collaboration
with Julie Patton, some hungry slugs, fallen leaves,
and a silicone information processing machine
in the cyber text "Slug Art."
Lung sludge, slugs love to give me some skin on the fly.
Glues slug art into make bee leaf
then book the worm slit oral performance space or A, art
of a body moving in B, the space in between intention
to chew lines, save energy, stomach pots.
Lick envelopes, tongue bite words, hours dragging wound.
Not so blunt instrument etching to take scissors to paper.
Attention to qualities within the physical
to intervals between things becomes performance
as space or A, art of a body moving
in B, the space in between.
Between the petals of the rows of the world
move in vertebrates just as the word slug
itself vibrates in Patton's writing
between the registers of garden, print shop, and street.
So there's the invertebrate slug.
There's the printer's slug setting bits of text apart.
And there's also the slug of bang, bang.
She's done a lot of great gardening work in the sort
of inner city in Cleveland.
So to wrap up here, the Third Landscape in the end,
maybe a little more than this in-between space,
this interstitial zone found everywhere life is found
and indeed enabling further life.
The specialist of such a zone, the anthropological decay
givers are also a species of communication, good at shape
shifting, crossing borders and sliding in between.
It is perfectly natural for a poet
as attuned to the present moment of writing
as Joanne Kyger to notice a gray squirrel descending
nose-down tall eucalyptus and to migrate after squirrel
and eucalyptus toward a generational and hemispheric
thought.
She writes, "It is Allen Ginsberg's mesentery squirrel.
Followed me here from Boulder's Naropa campus.
Here to eat the neighbor's introduced Mexican oak,
acorns from Chamula and Chiapas, where
they boycotted the vote in recent elections defying
the ruling PRI party which holds power by deception, repression,
and fraud.
If poetry can resist the institutionalized profit
is loss of capital, deception, repression, and fraud,
it may be through its special capacity
for attending to the untended as the untended,
essentially leaving it alone."
Thoughts on things that minimize what poet Louis Zukofsky called
the predatory intent of predication.
We might use poetry's care for language
to renew the ancient customs of the Third Landscape.
Let's strike the word weed from our vocabulary,
and begin to attend to all the species
we are binding into our planetary future with whom we
want to travel into the future.
Even Ofelia Zepeda's tumbleweeds that quote,
"roll early into the village dance, semi invited guests."
So that's thoughts on things.