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Unread 02-12-2002, 06:36 PM
Esther Cameron Esther Cameron is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Madison, WI
Posts: 240
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Dear fellow-poets,

Bellowing Ark is currently publishing in installments my magnum opus, The Consciousness of Earth, a blank verse epic of about 7000 lines on the ecological crisis. Needless to say this is a very big event for me, and I hope not for me alone.

The Consciousness of Earth began in 1983 as a prose response to Jonathan Schell's The Fate of The Earth. It wouldn't jell until one day a prologue crystallized in blank verse, thereby committing me to an epic. It was published privately in 1989 and is being revised for this publication.

Needless to say, this has been for me a massive educational experience. I had to read and digest a great deal of information from many fields -- and then devise an idiom to talk about it that would be informative and yet poetic. Among the subjects discussed is the nature and the role (actual and potential) of poetry. Below are some things that other poets have had to say about the work.

Bellowing Ark is offering an "epic subscription" for the eight issues in which The Consciousness of Earth will run, for $18. The address is P.O. Box 55564, Shoreline, WA 98155.

I have some hope that if this work could be discussed in the literary as well as the environmental world, it could make a few things happen. Any help with or suggestions about spreading the word would be deeply appreciated.

Esther

Hadassah Haskale: "A white whale of a book!"

Joseph Salemi: "A staggeringly ambitious and powerfully conceived philosophical epic of great scope."

Richard Moore: "What a huge achievement, The Consciousness of Earth, and carried out with such grace, precision, application, erudition...! [...] It's a philosophical poem, an essay in verse in the tradition of Lucretius and Pope's Essay on Man."

Constance Rowell Mastores: "It is beautifully thought and beautifully written. The poetry really flows! And you seem to write out of such an inner awareness of such outwardly complex phenomena. The language feels just right. Formal, "noble," but not awkward or archaic."

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