Thanks to Michael Dennis for this review of Unus Mundus.

Falco Columbarius

Nothing like getting your new book in the mail. Anvil did a fabulous job on the cover, typography, design. And I love the ochre yellow inside covers!

A sneak preview of a poem as well!

From “Space-Time Dialogues,” in Unus Mundus

]]> http://marilourowley.com/2013/04/19/unus-mundus-has-arrived-2/feed/ 0 marilourowley IMG_0359 From "Space-Time Dialogues," in Unus Mundus http://marilourowley.com/2012/12/26/transforium/ http://marilourowley.com/2012/12/26/transforium/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:54:51 +0000 Mari-Lou Rowley http://marilourowley.com/?p=127 ]]> The reading, unfolding, launching of “Transforium” by Tammy Lu and Mari-Lou Rowley (JackPine Press 2012). Thanks to Lia Pas for helping us decipher the poem-map!

As an eco-science poet who has tumbled, quite gleefully, into the field of biosemiotics the questions that compel me are: What is the nature of poetic and/or creative emergence? What is the zygote and epigenisis of a poem or work of art? How does the poet read and interact with her environment, or semiosphere, in order to translate emotions, memories, sounds, smells, disconnected images, into the phonemes, syllables, words, lines and stanzas of a poems that resonates with the reader/listener. By what mechanisms does a poem or artwork evoke emotional or physiological response? Both Tammy and I believe in the concepts behind biosemiotics. Of course molecules, organisms and animals (human and non-human) communicate in and with the environment. We hear them. We are constantly on the lookout for signs.

The genesis of art, poetry and biological process involves multiple pathways and signals—which involves both an element of chance and of choice. And, in in the case of this collaboration, a psychic/philosophic twinning and echoing. Synchronicity. Not surprisingly, I am currently working on a series of “Echologues,” poems that echo other poems, using ancient Greek lexicons. And a series of poems influenced by alchemical images and texts, creation myths and Jungian psychology.  The poem that Tammy has used to generate the images for this proposal is the first in a recent series of “Feral Verses”—immediate, non-meditated, epigenetic responses to the post-dream, pre-conscious semiosphere. As a “unified collaboration of text and design” our methodology is a simultaneous relinquishing of control and a joint participation in the shaping of content and final outcome, where the visual content of Tammy’s typographical cosmology is indeed “inextricable from the text itself.”

The landscapes and semiospheres of our call-response, echo-chant, poetic and artistic dance will be both process and artefact—a visceral-psychic, cerebral layering and interplay open to multiple readings, interpretations, and ways of interacting with art and text. The physical unfolding of the book by the reader/viewer in turn echoes the unfolding of a mapped landscape, and a metaphorical unfolding of a tactile, physical, dynamic universe.

Very few recluses had chairs at all; at stone bench sufficed as a seat, and the greater number spent their days and part of their nights in prayer, mortification, and manual labour…(Anchoresses of the West, p. 40 )

I, on the other hand, had chairs, tables converted wood stove in which I roasted garlic for  cocktails at the hermitage. Also had expresso pot, wine glasses, toaster, bird food for the chickadees, redpolls. pine grosbeaks, bohemian waxwings. Had a visitation from woodpeckers, heard coyotes, and (according to Dave Carpenter who knows these things) a timber wolf.

Dilemma: In the schoolyard perimeter the paper plane is made up of three surfaces of folds, which meet in two lines, which in turn meet at a single swallowtail bifurcation point. Then it crashes.

Formula:        V = x⁵ + ax³ + bx² + cx

Elucidation:   It’s one thing to see a stuffed polar bear, moth eaten and dusty, its neck wrapped in beads and a silly hat on its head. Another to meet a real bear in the woods while oblivious to territorial claw marks but open to surreal wilderness experiences. Yet another to have your photo taken on Dali’s lip couch in the courtyard of his villa under the scorching Costa Brava sun with the Michelin man standing guard. And later, alone in the swimming pool back at the modest hotel observing wave patterns, angles of index and refraction, minimum-maximum pairs, and wondering about lost chances when a swallow dives just above your head, fanning its tail as if to say Follow me! What have you got to lose if you go with the dark Basque stranger to his parakeet sanctuary in the dusty hills? Your heart, your life, your plane ticket home?

Notation: Where V is the tip of the Swallow’s tail, x the object of attraction, a the direct route home, b the branching behaviour, and c the traveller.

From CosmoSonnets (JackPine Press, 2007)