Poems from 'Ravine: An Urban Field Guide'

Abstract

These poems are from my most recent poetry manuscript, Ravine: An Urban Field Guide, which is a creative exploration of voice as it navigates the various perspectives of flora, fauna, weather and built environment that appear in an urban wilderness place. Ravine is written in the style of a field guide, where the left-hand margin poem writes to, for and in the voice of the many maligned culverts, weeds, grasses, small insects, elements of weather and of the built environment that populate urban ravine parks across Canada. My hope is that readers who have encountered ravine parks such as Mill Creek in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada – or one of many other such locales – might connect to the various contemporary dynamics at play in these places. In the right-hand margin, I’ve included poetic notes-to-self written in the manner of the marginalia many of us write in our own field guides. Three key quotations from disability scholars invested in the connection between disabled futures and urban ecologies introduce the three main sections gesturing to how rethinking what is ‘natural’ and desired versus ‘unnatural’ and maligned in these places creates a situation each of us might be invested in reimagining. The first draft of this project was funded by a literary grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for Professional Artists.