Dark Mountain Poetics: An Invitation to Contribute to Issue 10

Inspired as it is by an equality of logos and mythos, poetry challenges the kind of empirical knowledge valued by post-industrial capitalism. Poetry is expressive language. It confidently asserts that intuitive knowing, metaphorical and non-critical language, have the power to subvert, amongst other things, the hegemony of rationalism. Poetry, at least the kind I imagine making up a Dark Mountain poetics, has a deep resistance to any reductive system.

And yet poetry is also part of post-industrial capitalism, whether it likes it or not. It has to find a voice to communicate in spite of being sidelined and (willfully) misunderstood by a culture fixated on individualism and shopping. It needs to continue to stick its neck out and be heard, something which Dark Mountain has been committed to supporting since its first publication in 2010.

It’s been fascinating reading submissions and thinking about the kind of contemporary poetry Dark Mountain has published these past six years. There has been a good sprinkling of ecological and mythopoetic work, as well as one or two more overtly political pieces, and we’ve also published work by deceased poets, notably Robinson Jeffers. Much of the poetry has been submitted from English-speaking countries in the West, where physical hardship from social and economic collapse has only been deeply felt by some, not (yet) by all of us. In the UK, for example, the number of homeless people in our cities continues to rise, while the majority of us are still able to put a meal on the table and keep a roof over our heads. Few submissions have come from poets who have first-hand experience of life in the wake of collapse, or from those like Mourid Barghouti from Palestine, who deeply feels the hardship of inequality and oppression:

It’s interesting that notions of collapse – social, political, economic, ecological – are so much more discussed in mainstream media these days, but that a great many Western poets have shied away from responding. It reminds me of something American poet, Jorie Graham, once said in relation to poetry and cultural awareness: we may profess to knowing about a particular crisis, but we, in the Western world at least, are not feeling it.

This blogpost is an invitation to feel it, to respond in particular, to the myriad ways in which the 21st century consumer capitalist world is unraveling and being forced to change; an invitation to respond to the myths of progress and human supremacy; to what on earth it means to be human in a world where refugee children are washed up on beaches while others queue up for the latest smartphone. What does poetry have to say about these inequalities and fallacies? What role does poetry play in a world that is scrabbling blindly to hold on to business as usual, while all around the chaos of political and religious wars, resource depletion and climate change hold sway?

Dark Mountain: Issue 10 will be our first book themed entirely around poetry, and will include poems, essays on poetry, and poetry-related art, all of which will in some way speak to a Dark Mountain poetics. This book will be our second foray into themed publications (our first one was Dark Mountain: Issue 8 (Technê)) and we are very much looking forward to seeing it take shape. In addition to the book, we’re commissioning a CD of spoken word/performance poetry/soundings, to honour the importance of the oral tradition not only as the origin of contemporary written poetry, but also as vessel for the embodiment of language, human and nonhuman. What happens to poetry when it moves away from the printed page?