Call for Eco-Justice Poems

Split This Rock cofounder Melissa Tuckey seeks poems for Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology to be published by University of Georgia Press. She will consider both previously published and unpublished work. Deadline is July 30th.  

The anthology will include poems at the intersection of social justice and the environment, poems that recognize our human impact on the natural world as well as the political and cultural dimensions of our relationship to the environment.

I’m looking for nature poems on topics such as migration, exile, gentrification, war, food justice, farming, resource extraction, privatization, environmental health, relations with the nonhuman world, climate change, as well as poems that celebrate our connections to the natural world and to each other, new roots and paradigms: community building, urban gardens, farmer’s markets, healthy foods, homesteading (urban, suburban, and rural), protest, resistance, peace-making.   Other topics that fit within the theme are welcome.

The anthology will be multi-cultural, international, and will include both contemporary poetry and poems of our fore-bearers.

To submit poems send them by email to melissa.dcpaw@gmail.com as a word attachment with your name & contact info on the poems.  Please note on your submission, any publication or copyright info on the poems.  Submit up to 5 poems.

Poem of the Week: Jaime Lee Jarvis

Aral

"Forty years ago, Muynak was a busy fishing port ... Today the waters have receded so much that there is not a drop as far as the eye can see. ... Cancers, lung disease and infant mortality are 30 times higher than they used to be ... The children of Muynak have made a playground out of the wrecks of ships ..." -BBC News, March 16, 2000

Was it the rush of words in that language
we understood only when we cocked our heads,
speaking on the slant, slurring our way
through the grammar of another way of life?

Was it the whirr of metal shards the ragged
children hucked at our heads
the way they delivered their greeting

hellofuckyou

obscenity blunted by effervescence but
still bearing that cutting edge?

Was it the slow groan of the abandoned barges
that sheltered them, crumbling through
geologic time, salted and sharp-jointed
like the people living among them --their desiccated hope?

Or the whoosh of power as we hurled
words back at them in their own language,
mouths stretching and puckering to make
the sounds they sang? Our speech waxed formal
and the children

armed to their rotten teeth with the remnants
of a fishing industry--brandishing scythes torn
from the rotten hulls--laughed at the village accents
we'd worked so hard to own.

Maybe it was knowing
they were doomed

to die from the inside out,
that their empty sea was brimming with
what had already killed them.

Maybe it was the shimmer in the distance,
the heat shining like water, mocking us
with what we had come to see, mocking us
with what we would never learn to see.

-Jaime Lee Jarvis

Used by permission.

Jaime Lee Jarvis is a professional editor, trained technical writer, and environmental activist. She visited the ship graveyard in the town of Muynak in 1999, when she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan. A decade later, news about the ongoing ecological disaster and human tragedy surrounding the shrinking Aral Sea has largely disappeared from public view.
Jarvis was volunteer coordinator for the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2008, and now serves on Split This Rock's board.

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