Needleminer: a poem for/after C.D. Wright

George Murray runs a great online literary journal called NewPoetry.ca. It features a diverse range of different kind of poetry. I'm delighted that a section from my poem, "Needleminer" has just been posted.

This poem takes a section from the great and recently deceased American poet C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining and riffs off it. One technique is to replace nouns and verbs with human anatomical terminology and the names of species found in Hamilton, Ontario where I live. The species include the names of birds, wildflowers, trees, butterflies, moths, insects, fish, mammals, and reptiles. This is part of a larger piece (here's some other bits: 1, 2 ) where I repopulate poems with these species names in order to reconsider what it means to live in this post-industrial city, one that has many significant natural spaces that aren't usually part of the concept of the city. Further, using anatomical names explores the entanglement between human and nature, inside and outside, the invironment, the unviroment, and the exvirnoment. The entire piece will appear in my forthcoming book, No TV for Woodpeckers (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017)

Here's the poem.