'This special double issue of PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature invited authors to curate an essay on the theme of place. The aim was to open up a dialogue between contributors from a multitude of disciplines, making space for analytical, creative, structured, argumentative, open, discursive and ruminative reflections fuelled by creativity and lived experiences. To curate is to take care (L. curare). In our view, the coming together of the manifold kinds of biotic and abiotic existence that are familiar through the medium of subjective human experience—and its literary and essayistic modes of representation—collectively produces notions of the ever-unfolding and plural becomings of 'place'. Place is both the site of and active agent in diverse subjective experience of space, which we have brought into conversation in PAN12. Locating residual ethical contours in the essayistic, photographic, lyrical and narrative modes, and disclosing affective insights in their analysis and critique, these essays of caring can be understood as forms of emotional practice, which we have brought together into three loose clusters, named 'dialogue', 'response' and 'exegesis'. ' (Introduction)
'I have a poem in mind. A 'late' Jam Tree Gully poem. It will be called 'Agora' and I will get to its first lines shortly.
'Why late? I haven't ceased being connected with Jam Tree Gully, nor have I ceased writing it. Maybe because I am thinking about its spaces in different ways now, from afar. I often write from 'afar', and as Tom Bristow has highlighted, I write poetry of 'in situ' and also 'at a distance', but as I have said to him, this is a complex equation with no binaries; they are both elements of the 'cloud' that makes up 'International Regionalism'. And I am not simply co-opting a techno-fetish by saying 'cloud', though I might be ironizing it. In essence, the ecologies I construct around the lens to biosphere collapse, the 'damage done' as I wrote in The New Arcadia (WW Norton, 2005), are silhouetted through the costs of technologizing. I have written 'neo-Luddite' texts in the past, deploring what I see as unnecessary technologies-especially those where 'product' takes precedence over 'necessity'. Under the rubric 'necessity' I would put certain medical advances, the basic technologies of sustaining human life (from the shovel, scissors, through to-maybe- comparatively low-impact modes of transport that don't exploit animals). Advances in computer technology are largely driven by corporate capitalism, and change is interminably linked to sales and profit. All advances, all product developments, cost the biosphere. My aim is constantly to reduce the ironies of consumption-to own less, to 'change' product less, to resists the sales pitch. For me, place is entirely contiguous with how it is or isn't 'sold'.' (Introduction)
'Let us conceive of the grassroots community becoming the intermediate micro-social space between the private and the public, macro-social spaces. What are the barriers to constructing sustainable communities, in your experience, and how does your place-based poetry address or represent the private-public dynamic? What happens when we take these questions to the more-than-human world?
'I believe in real outcomes. Poetry needs real outcomes. Activist poetry certainly needs real outcomes. Place is layered with real outcomes. Sustainable communities are those that are self-aware on the level of the individual and in terms of consensus. Awareness comes about through access to knowledge and data, but also through listening to the 'environment' itself. Data only tell us what is already evident. Communities with a 'spiritual' sensitivity to the place they occupy are inevitably aware of its needs, vulnerabilities, and characteristics of 'intactness'. A dialogue of respect allows for longevity.' (Publication abstract)
