Hi friends,
It’s been a minute, hasn’t it! I’m still planning to resuscitate Cold Brew one of these days, but in the meantime I’ve started a new project that I’d love to share with you.
Introducing Field Guide, a newsletter on ecopoetry. You can subscribe to it at the following link:
Poetry is the felt distance between two points. Given that, how can we perform a close reading—a geography, botany, anthropology, theology, philosophy lesson—on the landscapes that lie between and beyond those points? That’s what Field Guide will tackle. (For the poetry-pilled among you: the name Field Guide is an homage to Tony Hoagland’s eponymous poem.)
In each month’s newsletter, I will focus on some element of the natural world—soil, air, outer space, ocean, a plant or animal, etc—and perform a close reading of 1-2 poems which I feel exist in conversation with that topic. The column will veer personal: looking to my own life and my interactions with the environments around me as they relate back to the poetry at hand. At times this will be lyrical - but never maudlin or flowery. I hope it additionally will come across as keenly observed, thought-provoking, and occasionally (if I’m lucky!) a bit funny. Always, I hope that the column will be a sensitive yet audacious foray into parts unknown. A line of further exploration that will inform Field Guide: how is our awareness and understanding of the connectivity between the human world, the natural world, the spiritual world, the scientific world, coloured by cultural relativism?
I believe our understanding of human identity is deeply rooted in our understanding of the ecologies in which we live, and our relationships with them. And so this is a column about ecopoetics; that is to say, this is a column about what it means to live on, in, and amongst Earth, and what that looks like on the page. I’ll be sending out the first essay next week, which will look at poems by James Wright and Steve Scafidi, animals in repose, and (not to be corny buuut) the tenderness of being alive.
I’m offering the option to subscribe for free, or optionally commit to a monthly subscription fee which will function as a sort of ‘tip jar’ to support my research and writing. Whether paid or free, you’ll receive the same columns.
Thinking and writing about poetry is one of my longtime favourite pastimes, and some of the essays I’m proudest of writing for Cold Brew (and for my gig as a columnist with Where the Leaves Fall Magazine) have been on poetry. With Field Guide, I’m excited to marry this deep love for poetry analysis with my interest in spiritual ecology and the environment.
Join me!
Maddy x
intriguing!!