The Art of Planting Poems
DIRT’s editor, Alice Willitts, invites you to plant ‘Chapel,’ the poem she and JLM Morton co-authored to pilot DIRT.
Spring is here and it’s time to start planting… poems. Yup, that's right, poems! Or more precisely ‘Chapel’ which is the first in Dialect’s new carbon neutral ecopoetry publishing imprint DIRT. Our aim is to bring together pairs of poets to collaborate and produce poems printed on plantable broadsheets to persuade, beguile and enchant.
Let’s make the first week of April the week you carry ‘Chapel’ cheerfully to a garden / wasteland / window box / wherever there is soil near you and say, dear earthworms please accept my precious gift.
Or is it time? Maybe it feels tricky to let the poem go, to never read it again, maybe a tinge of the eeeuww can’t I keep it and just sow the seeds might creep in… I mean it’s only natural, right:
“Not a forever object” — that has to be the best description of the ideas at the heart of DIRT. Our radical, communal project asks: can we bear to touch the life/death cycle of creation and return these papers with their precious, poetic words to the soil where they will rot down and feed new life? Juliette and I believe we can, believe we must.
I make of myself a ritual,
a sacred currency of generosity
In asking you to buy and plant ‘Chapel’, we’re inviting you to bring forward your own ‘sacred currency of generosity’. Individually you’ll be surrendering an object that has value, and it might sting a little or bring you joy. Collectively we’ll be raising our voices. Imagine what new freedoms will become ours as we act FOR the Earth, as we carry out a little mischievous disruption to the ‘normal’ way of things. Let’s imagine a kinder, more abundant future than our impoverished present.
As Rebecca Solnit writes in this week's Washington Post: "the knowledge that we are not separate from nature but dependent on it is already far more present than it was a few decades ago. Everywhere, I see people rethinking how they work and live, turning this knowledge into reality… What if we were to think of wealth as security in our environments and societies, and as confidence in a viable future?”
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p.s. We think copies of ‘Chapel’ might make rather fine Easter gifts — a thank you for having me gift, a wish we could have been together gift, a hope and happiness gift, a you really didn’t want chocolate gift!
Buy ‘Chapel' and support DIRT!
Once you’ve planted Chapel, why not sit back and treat yourself to listening to this beautiful album:
Image credit: Mercury KX
