Part autotheory, part activist manifesto, and part ode to the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen, this book about making poems in an age of ecological desperation is both heartbreaking and beautiful.
Blue thinks itself within me chronicles the poet Kim Trainor’s experiences as an activist at the Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek blockade to prevent logging of Vancouver Island old growth forests, where she woke at 4:00 a.m. to boil water on a camp stove and wait for the police to arrive at the standoff. The two-year blockade on logging roads and in tree-sits became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history—this multi-genre work brings the reader to the front lines of the fight for human and non-human survival in a climate catastrophe.
Trainor asks what, if anything, ecopoetry can do in the face of intensifying extraction of ecological capital. Can poems incorporate non-human species, like the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen that thrives in Fairy Creek, into their very form? How can poetry resist the urge to “capture” the non-human object and instead approach nature with sympathetic care? How might a poem offer an opportunity, like sunlight penetrating a clearing in the forest, to think about nature, to approach, and to be approached by the nonhuman? How might poetry contribute to a co-making of the world with more-than-human-species?
Table of Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1. The Dark Mountain
Fire Season
The dark depression
Kiaw, kiaw, kiaw
Toward the dark sweet
Chapter 2. Aperture
Openings
Aperture
Oldgrowth specklebelly lichen
Roadside, Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek
Cobalt / Supply chains
Radical attunement and the lyric poem
Chapter 3. Co-making
Nestwork
Snail shell
What is it like to be a tree?
Poem as made (of) thing(s)
Chapbook
Fascicules
Making
Introductions for co-making this world
Chapter 4. Vigilance
Ground of our being in the world
Grandmother Tree, Grandfather Tree
Tsawalk
La vide / emptying
Chapter 5. Poems like Miebach sculptures
The Burden of Every Drop
Fieldnotes
Poems like Miebach sculptures
What will I carry in my backpack?
Sympoiesis (making-with)
Oldgrowth specklebelly lichen—Lichenous forms
Chapter 6. Piiiiittuuu | Song kin
Umwelt
Songs of the humpback whale
Biosonification
Acousteme
What do they call themselves?
Eye yields at a distance, sound gathers within
What we do not perceive, we do not know
Qualia
Chapter 7. Blue thinks itself within me
Inchworm
Écart | Mind the gap
Descartes | Ghost in the machine
Kant | Das Ding an Sich (The Thing in Itself)
Heidegger | Das Ding an Sich (The Thing in Itself)
Merleau-Ponty | Le chiasme, la chair (Chiasm, flesh)
Levinas | Alterity of sound
OOO | Mutual darkness
Ortega y Gasset | La célula bella (The beautiful cell)
Panpsychism | Rainforest teaming with consciousness
Postscript: Some notes on an oldgrowth specklebelly lichen poem
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
About the Author :
Kim Trainor has won the Gustafson Prize, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, and The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry in English, Global Poetry Anthology, and Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees. She lives in Vancouver.
Review :
"Blue thinks itself within me mesmerized me. This isn’t only a book of experimental poetics, it is an urgent call for ethical witnessing.”
“Powerfully delicate and precise. Kim Trainor excavates personal and political history and takes an approach to narrative that crafts research as poetry. I couldn’t put it down.”
