The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: trees

  • A Weekend on Mars

    A Weekend on Mars

        This Moment In Time Just when the crescent moon appeared. When the ailanthus shivered. When a heron shook its feathery crown and the little wheel turned inside the big wheel. While the palmist sighed, old and alone. At this juncture. At this moment in time, Winter putting on its walking boots, Autumn reflecting…

  • Editorial: Radical Landscapes

    Editorial: Radical Landscapes

    Radical Landscapes takes its title from Harriet Tarlo’s seminal collection of British ecopoetries The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011) – a collection that came out in the penultimate year of my PhD devoted to Reading and Writing with a Tree: Practising “Nature Writing” as Enquiry, which was itself a radical,…

  • INN I DE DYPE SKOGERS FAVN

    INN I DE DYPE SKOGERS FAVN

    Epigenetic Memory in the Spruce Tree Foresti covers 37% of Norway’s combined area, almost half of which is made up by the tree species called Norway spruce. The rest consists of mostly pine and birch. It is therefore only natural that spruce forests should feature so heavily on black metal album covers and lyrics. The…

  • Apples & Other Languages

    Apples & Other Languages

    Camilla Nelson’s words bring things to life. ‘Stir this miracle to waking,’ she says, in the first poem in Apples & Other Languages, a signal of the alchemy of ideas to follow. Here, the intangible and the inanimate take on new form: windpipes ‘sound themselves furiously’, a song ‘breaks the ice we stand on’. But…

  • almost like almost

    almost like almost

      almost like almost . . . . . . . he said in land there is a line around a wolf within is other and awe social grace packed who wills foul and unrest . . . . . . . when the chaste self ills the line extends skin to no where inside…

  • To howl

    To howl

        Inspired by and sourced from ‘Ash’ by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, in Relics (Broughton Mills: Corbel Stone Press, 2013). Image credit: John Morgan, Ruins of Drosgol Farmstead, at the foot of Pumlumon (Plynlimon) on the banks of Nant-y-moch Reservoir, near Aberystwyth Part of The Learned Pig’s Wolf Crossing editorial season, spring/summer 2017….

  • Asterisk

    Asterisk

    High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection, their outer limits disappearing into darkness. While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed, I reassess…

  • Kaiku

    Kaiku

    Kaiku peeked through the kitchen window. The scene was empty – the Shaman was out. Kaiku went to the kitchen cupboard. Behind the pots and pans her fingers found a key. With great care she opened the door. The action made her shiver with excitement. The heavy door opened slowly. The room bathed in sunlight….

  • Not Just Fir Christmas

    Not Just Fir Christmas

    The fir tree has had a part to play in traditional winter festivities across Northern Europe for centuries, and a plaque marks the spot where an evergreen was first displayed in Riga town square as part of Latvia’s New Year celebrations in 1510. Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert is credited with popularising the Christmas tree…

  • On a Headland of Lava Beside You

    On a Headland of Lava Beside You

    Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This has led to frequent conversations with us sharing books (for example Karl Ove Knausgaard’s) and views on exhibitions and artists, on newspaper articles and TV…

  • Binbag, Pavement Tree, Chainlink Fence

    Binbag, Pavement Tree, Chainlink Fence

    Dandelions poking through a chainlink fence; brambles sprouting from an unknown corner; a binbag gashed open, spewing out its contents; scattered leaves; a dead fly. Mimei Thompson paints the everyday and the overlooked. She imbues commonplace subject matter with a sense of strangeness. She works fast, with transclucent oil paint on very smooth, white, non-absorbent…