Prints / Poems by Jane Burn

Dialogues of Environment / Nature Through Asemic / Dendritic Print / Poetry

Humans are not the only entity on this planet capable of language. Often, I think the assumption our mode of communication is the means by which all else must be translated, will be humanity’s downfall. Earth does not sing with a human tongue. Earth does not discuss aspects of its many lives in the way that we do. It is presumptuous to assume the infinite dialogues on Earth can be validated against ours. Could we “interact with them…more meaningfully, rather than attempting to test them for evidence of humanlike language?” (Mustill, 2023, p.103) This was much in my mind when producing these asemic/ dendritic poems. What use, I wondered, were human semantics, syntax or structure when attempting to get to the ‘heart’ of nature and environmental poetry?

Of course I do not mean that we ought not write, in our human way, about the environment. Our communications are vital if we are to continue addressing terrifying environmental crises. We are driven to express concerns, pleasures, astonishments, hopes and joys we find in nature. I wanted, in this case, to experiment with communication upon the page. If I surrendered my human words, could poems on ecological themes still be committed to it? How much of the human had I successfully removed?

These poems are a negotiation of these boundaries. I feel able to respond to the interpretational openness of asemic writing; am intrigued by its fusion of visual and textual elements. I have further fused this with the dendritic, natural shape forming behaviour of glass plate printing. The process is almost impossibly fragile – manipulations of two thin glass plates carries its own fine balance. How easy for the human hand to crack, crush, or ruin what it uses as its means for self-expression, for the human hand to attempt to influence the route the paint on the plate naturally wishes to take! A metaphor indeed.

Yet human interference was necessary if certain results in my work were to be achieved. In trying to conjure the voice of lichen (as in Lichen’s Ghost) I had to imagine how it must feel for lichen to spread and stain, to work in symbiosis – for lichen, fungus with algae or cyanobacteria, and for me, plate with paint and page. In Landslide, it was the directing of plate angles that produced the slippage effect. I had to do this all relatively quickly, due to the quick-drying nature of the paint, so I was much removed from human urges to self-edit work or to predict my ‘moves’. I let the poems grow as organically as it felt possible to do. In Fate, I found I had ‘written’ something akin to the human word without intending to do so. I felt I had achieved a new symbiosis – a mind attuned to nature with print and poetry practice. To read them is to spend time in creating a new inheritance – extended symbiotic environments of the reader’s own.

Sources

Mustill, Tom. How to Speak Whale. William Collins, 2023.

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Jane Burn is a hybrid writer. Her collection Be Feared is available from Nine Arches. The Apothecary of Flight is due in 2024. She lives off-grid in a Northumberland cottage. Jane is the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24, and her pamphlet A Thousand Miles from the Sea will shortly be available.