Between the forest and the sea

Jen Webb, Andrew Melrose

Research output: Textual Creative WorksOther contribution

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Abstract

‘Poetry,’ said Simon Critchley (2005: 12), ‘describes life as it is, but in all the intricate evasions of as’. The world that separates us ‘is a world both seen and unseen until seen with the poet’s eye.’ The world that separates us is ten thousand miles long, yet we cross waves and continents, hemispheres, south to north, north to south daily, to converse like neighbours over the garden fence. Swapping words and poems, borrowing lines and phrases, sleight-of-hand light-as-air-asides, lost lines, found lines; traces of thoughts and inter-reliance come together in an eco-poetry exercise that blurs the lines between borders, gender, race and sexuality; our days and nights never meet and yet our words collide. His are hers, hers are his, which become ours as words from two old, northern and southern hemisphere worlds, collide.
These poems are an eco-collaboration between two writers who live in separate time zones, hemispheres and continents where, to quote Charles Taylor in ‘Overcoming Epistemology’:

What you get underlying our representations of the world – the kind of thing we formulate, for instance, in declarative sentences – is not further representations but rather a certain grasp of the world we have as agents in it. (Taylor 1995: 12)

As members of a prose poetry collective, who trade ideas, bounce off each other’s poems and ideas and allow their writing to collide and collapse into poems whose origins have become so blurred they unsuppose a source and momentarily focus on the world in bewilderment. Here is a sample of what lies between the forest and the sea.
Original languageEnglish
TypeCollaborative poem
Media of outputtext
PublisherDispatches from the Poetry Wars
Number of pages3
Place of PublicationUSA and online
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2020

Publication series

NamePoetics for the More-than-Human World: an anthology of poetry and commentary
PublisherDispatches

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