‘Fabric-ation: Slip back to source’ was the second of our Changing Everything Carefully* eco-poetics courses to take place at the social and environmental justice space, ONCA, in Brighton. We define eco-poetry as a poetry that aspires to be conscious of what we are doing when we describe, record, interact with or take from what we call ‘nature’. This six-week course was an attempt to re-wild wearing – imagining and writing about, through embodied and connective experiences, the return of six fabrics (silk, rubber, wool, polyester, linen and eider) from human use to their non-human source.

 

The poems here were all created during the ‘Fabric-ation’ sessions, arising from contact with the materials and a language-context that included an international range of eco-poetry together with factual information about the fabrics – the history and processes of their manufacture, and human and animal labour. One particular text we drew on throughout the course was Inger Christensen’s ‘Silk, The Universe, Language, the Heart.’ Edward Posnett’s Harvest on the subject of eider ducks in Iceland. We experimented with poetic form, using wild forms as well as adaptations of traditional forms, for example inventing the ‘Vanishing Elegy’ to represent the suffering of indigenous peoples in the Amazonian rubber plantations; the ‘Vertical Threnody’ to explore the extraordinary journey of plankton to polyester; and wrote the story of flax to linen in a collective haibun straight onto a sheet of linen.

 

Writers

Lucy Brennan Shiel

Jane Buckler

Lola Bunbury-Davies

Patrick Crawford

Sudakini Davies

Naomi Foyle

Alice Owen

Karen Smith

Vera Zakharov

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

40 pages

145 x 198mm

UK £10 + £3.50 P&P

 

ISBN 978-1-9162336-2-1

 

Published in 2020 by Elephant Press

Copyright remains with individual poets

All rights reserved

 

Printed by Elephant Print Ltd

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