Tuesday, November 28, 2017

MARTHE REED after MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE

deposition | dispossession

climate change in the Sundarbans (excerpt)



Sundari
trees

Ganges
delta

drowned
and  t e n d r i l l e d   p r o f u s i o n

another
twilight Ganga’s

blessing
bad dreams

the least of it
Jowar

flood eats
everything

even the ebb
one hundred and two

islands consumed by
(( politics

sea and
salt     (( g  r  e  e  d ))

waxy
elliptical

leaves                        adrift
            over its water


: :


bhasha



f  l  o  o  d  e  d
   p  e  o  p  l  e 


: :


Mousuni Island
West
Bengal

480 people
      /mi2

far

beyond

eco
system
carrying

 capacity

: :


Every year, chunks of the 3,500 kilometre mud embankments collapse,
and every year they are repaired with fresh mud.[1]


: :


8300 acres 1969
7000 acres 2009

erratic monsoons
worsening cyclonic intensity
rising sea levels


5200 acres 2017


: :

what sound does the water make flooding in from the sea


expressed
as a carbon

dioxide equivalent

: :

dis
placed
women



sex

workers

feeding
their families


: :


a body

kept


safe


: :


a communal


what we might know

space


: :


stranded

in

silt




[1] “Between the Dark Seas and Living Hell,” Manon Verchot, Indrani Basu & Joanna Plucinska. http://projects.huffingtonpost.in/articles/sundarbans/





*****

The Poet’s Notes on Her Poem
Choosing to address the catastrophic effects of climate change in the Sundarbans of South Bangladesh and India, I intentionally adopted a collage technique from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Drawing on a diverse set of resources, I began by collecting notes on small pieces of paper (end cuts from chapbook-making, in this case), clipping notes from each source together. My sources ranged from scientific publications, the IPCC Synthesis Report, and research on native plant and animal species, to discussions of culture figures of the region, addresses to ethics and climate change, to literary texts such as The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, Travels In The Mugal Empire by François Bernier, and Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil. The final component were notes addressing my own responsibility and that of the U.S. in climate change. I laid out the text on our dining room table, 10’x3.5’, arranging by juxtaposition a conversation between the texts, “smoothing out grammar,” as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge writes, marrying fragments to one another.


Marthe Reed has published five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014); Pleth, with j hastain (Unlikely Books, 2013); (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books, 2013); Gaze (Black Radish Books, 2010); Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink, 2007). She lives in Syracuse, NY, and is co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books. Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene, edited with Linda Russo, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press (2018).




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