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What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series of Ecopoetry Now, poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
polypropylene, moss, human hair, pine needles, cardboard, sheepskin condoms, coffee grounds

This sculpture reveals the demand my transition has created for the plastics industry over time. By melting plastic syringes into a compressed form, I hope to create an anticlimax by showing all at once the slow accumulation of material. When you observe me and then the sculpture, is the volume of plastic more or less than what you would expect? Do you agree strongly, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree that certain plastics should remain single-use? By incorporating an assortment of organic elements, I wanted to create a sense of grief out of the cognitive dissonance. Plastikos, to form or mold, an art long before plastics were invented. Trans is a way of arranging the world through change, but plastic is durable, meaning it never goes away. Very light, gets blown along in gentle winds. It gets washed by rain into sewers, streams, rivers, and finally oceans. It burns forever in landfills, a sickening campfire around which we tell scary stories. It is pleasurable at times when a container fulfills the functions for which it has been designed. I hope to return to earth a little bit more every day, until I’m finally you again.

from the journal BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW
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Cover image of issue 48.1 of Black Warrior Review
What Sparks Poetry:
Oliver Baez Bendorf on "I Want Biodegradable Sex"


"I am often suggesting to students that when it comes to style, we each have a 'terroir'— a particular flavor made up of the unique places and vocabularies that we have absorbed....But the thing is that terroir is not only style. It is substance. It is not even quite right to say that it is also substance. It is exactly that, substance. It’s the matter we are made of. Terroir is what you write and how you write it. The goal is to write what only you could."
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Portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge reproduced in black-and-white
"Rare Anti-Slavery Poem by Coleridge"

"A rare anti-slavery poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is at risk of leaving the UK unless a domestic buyer can be found. The poem, a Greek Sapphic ode titled 'Ode On The West-Indian Slave Trade,' discusses the evils of slavery and laments the fate of slaves on the Middle Passage transportation route."

via IRVINE TIMES
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