Michael R. Moore

http://riverofwords.composing.org/

The Community Poetry Series, in collaboration with PANK Magazine and the Community Literacy Journal invite your submissions for an anthology of poetry written by Keweenaw poets.

Submission Guidelines: you may submit up to six poems; poems must be original — written by you — and previously unpublished.
Deadline: Friday, February 6th 2009.
Format: Email your poems in the body of an email — or attach as a .doc file, or both — to mmoore@mtu.edu. Include in the subject line, [Your Last Name] Keweenaw Poetry.
For example: Pitt Keweenaw Poetry

Contact for more info:
Michael Moore, Community Literacy Journal: mmoore@mtu.edu
Matt Seigel, PANK Magazine: mbseigel@mtu.edu

Fine print: there isn’t any.

Last Leaves, by Max Seel, Professor of Physics, Michigan Technological University

Sunday, September 14th, 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Nature & Community Writing Workshop

Putting pen to paper, or fingers to the keyboard, in the service of sustainability, community, and nature is a powerful act. This is an opportunity for you to share your current writing related to nature and community.

All genres are welcome — poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, song lyrics, technical reports, impeachment proceedings, grants, autobiographies, personal narratives, etc. — in any stage of drafts or completeness.

We will also discuss venues for publishing if you desire wider audiences for your work.

More info, via the Keweenaw Sustainability Project.

Writing in a New Ecology:
Revised Landscapes & Home Grounds

Reading the Landscape
Summer 2008 Writing Workshop
Boston Pond and the Paavola Wetlands Reserve
Saturday July 19th, 9:00 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Sponsored by
Gratiot Lake Conservancy
Keweenaw Land Trust

Workshop Leaders
Michael Moore
Heather Wright

Michael and Heather will lead participants on a nature walk and a writing workshop in and around Boston Pond and the Paavola Wetlands Reserve. Discussions along the way include the kinds and causes of environmental change—some natural, some human-made—in these local ecologies. While visiting the sites, we also discuss the technical, environmental, and figurative language we use in apprehending and describing nature. No previous formal writing experience is necessary and writing journals are provided.

Read the rest of this entry »

Waiting For Her At The Garden

Standing here for so long now my boots
have cut their impression into the ground.
I’ve had no answer from her at this gate
knocking and waiting and pacing while spring
overflows the garden; a crimson apricot blossom
reaches over the wall to me.

The Old Fisherman

Last night he anchored and slept
near the west mountain cliffs.
At dawn he draws water from Xiang River
and cooks over a bamboo fire.
As the fog lifts he guides his boat back into the water
until out of sight, the only sound his oars
dipping into the clear, cool river.
Looking back, seeing his camp and the aimless clouds
wandering along, one by one.

Calligraphy of original poems by Zongyuan Liu (773-819) on rice paper
by Rong Shang. Translated by Yilin Dai and Michael Moore
in Pank: New Writing & Art, 2(2008).

This is a brief photographic record of my projects in and around Solentiname, Nicaragua. Solentiname is a remote archipelago consisting of 36 islands in the southern area of Lago de Nicaragua, 25 miles from Costa Rica. (You can see Costa Rica’s Rincón de la Vieja active volcano range from Solentiname.) I spend most of my time on Mancarrón—the most populated island with about 33 families and 279 people—and make day trips via canoe to visit students and families on smaller and less-populated San Fernando and La Venada. The islands have no standard electricity sources, cars, or roads. The economy is based largely on sustenance farming and fishing, and there’s a small but active artists’ collective.

My 2007 and 2008 visits have been spent living with community members, teaching ESL and poetry workshops and preparing projects in renewable energy resources. In March I met with faculty and students in the Agricultural Economics Program at La Universidad Paulo Freire in San Carlos, on the mainland about three hours from Solentiname, and gave a presentation on “The Political Economy of Reading and Writing—Literary, Technical, Environmental—In and Around La Reserva Natural de los Guatusos.“ One outcome of that collaboration is a trail redesign and remediation project in a wetlands area of Los Guatusos that I will organize and help lead in the summer of 2008.

Other projects include installing solar panels for both community buildings and for family homes and consulting on the islands’ preparation for an anticipated increase in “eco-tourism,” an issue of pressing concern for technical, cultural, and economic reasons on the islands; some obvious, some not. The people I work with here are rightfully ambivalent about the prospect, so we’re able to work on the planning at a smart and measured pace dictated by community members. Nicaragua is barely in control of many of its own natural resources, and remote regions such as Solentiname and the Rio San Juan River are sites of increasing global and multinational financial influence. Local community and indigenous rights compete against those less-than-transparent financial initiatives, and part of the current struggle is learning how to protect cultural resources and the community, collective ownership of resources.

“We’re going to decontaminate Lake Nicaragua.
The humans weren’t the only ones who longed for liberation.
The whole ecology had been calling out. The Revolution
also belongs to lakes, rivers, trees, animals.”
— Ernesto Cardenal, from “The New Ecology,” 1979

For example, another summer 2008 project is to pilot a biochar plot on one family’s farm. Biochar is a prime candidate for the mitigation of climate change as it replaces the “slash-and-burn” tradition in farming, especially in Central and South America.

If used as the central ingredient of a holistic development approach, biochar soil offers an opportunity to help end hunger among communities at the forest margins; it can also help slow deforestation.

One of the highlights of my most recent trip was delivering copies of the Community Literacy Journal, which I co-edit with John Warnock at the University of Arizona, to three young poets whose work we published in the Spring 2008 issue.

Photos from March include women in their kitchens; the cemetery in San Carlos, near La Reserva Natural de los Guatusos; delivering solar panels via boat to Mancarrón; and an overnight barge trip to Granada.

Solentiname Church

Built in 1966 by Ernesto Cardenal — Jesuit priest and former Nicaraguan minister of culture — the church was home to participatory community gospel readings and discussions in the 1960’s and 70’s. Some of the participants of those readings were involved in the first Sandanista military action as citizen revolutionaries against the Somoza regime, in October 1977.

Five community members (three were farmers, two were fishermen), now considered martyrs in Solentiname, were captured, tortured, and killed; every building and home on the island–except the chapel, which remained undamaged–were destroyed during Somoza’s bombing and destruction in retaliation. This aspect of my community literacy work–working with people who remember this recent history and the power of language that preceeded and followed that violent period–often challenges what I know about teaching, but also confirms what I know about people’s capacity to learn from each other and to develop collective expertise.

Regular church services are no longer held here in the church, but poetry workshops are still occasionally conducted by Cardenal during visits from Managua, and I hold most of my workshops and classes there.

Want to help?

An alliance organization that I’ve formed — the Jícaro Collective — to connect students at the University of Central America (UCA) with environmental engineers in Managua and people with whom I work in Solentiname is not soliciting funds at this time, but we do need books in English and in Spanish and computer equipment for students and their parents. If you can help in this way, please let me know: mmoore@mtu.edu.