Field notes can be descriptive or reflective, some may contain factual accounts, notes on settings and times; they may contain questions or feelings and come in fragments, sketches or diagrams. At Black Iris, we wanted our themed edition to be broadly interpreted, with the underlying premise that poetry emerges from a space that increasingly feels under siege, whether that’s because it’s teetering on the edge of ecological collapse, riven with political and social instability or because of the precarious position of the arts itself. In a world where attention seems to be continually diverted, we were interested in dedicating an issue to reporting and documenting.
We had many submissions concerning the ecological, and some of the poems we chose asked what we can learn from the natural world as a form of archive, such as The Ice Core Section in Jane Lovell’s work or Tamar Yoseloff’s Field, where history is also held in the landscape. In Sarah Westcott’s Four Fox Portraits Led by the Fox, the actual process of recording is examined. The poem asks if form, syntax and the mammal body can co-create notes formed by the processes of decomposition. It is a fascinating exploration of whether something from the more than human world can take a more active role in the creation of a text, even though, in this case, it is dead.
Issue 6 itself is, perhaps unsurprisingly, teeming with wild creatures. Morag Anderson’s Roadkill touches on the entanglement of the human and the more than human world by quietly placing the wilderness alongside the domestic. As she points out, ‘skinning is a dark art’, and through their field notes, our poets also pare back human experiences of exile, displacement or relocation, as seen in the work of Barbara Barnes and Miriam Swales. They also explore the human body itself as a location of testimony and display, as seen in Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s Skin and Nina Parmenter’s wry protest in I am Taking the Minutes Again.
We are left with the sense, through these deftly crafted pieces, that both bodies and landscapes are sites that bear witness and carry histories. In all cases of recorded history and experience, it’s important to consider who is doing the recording, where they are standing in terms of their observations and ultimately how we respond.
