'Language litters an ecosystem. Language inscribes a horizon. Language howls‘

The Great White North

a rawlings

4 pages, 12 x 20 cm

ISBN 978-87-998667-4-8

Designed by Fuchs Borst, printed by We Make It and bound by hand

The poem The Great White North explores the intertwining of place and language, and explores the im/possibilities of writing a 'here'.

a rawlings is a writer, interdisciplinary artist and arts educator. rawling's poetry publications include Wide slumber for Lepidopterists (Coach House Books 2006) and Gibber (digital publication, 2012)

The publication is part of the Parapoetics Series, co-published with Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, and with cover designs created by André Fuchs (Fuchs Borst), who works conceptually with patterns, translating geometries found in nature that follow fractal, aleatory and aperiodic structures.

The Parapoetics Series is an investigation into the array of possibilities and problems for a transspecies semiotics in various aesthetic modulations. Parapoetics exorcises the all-too-human quest for monopoly over voice, inscription, worlding. Parapoetics revises grammatical categories, pronominal demarcations, and experiments with alternative modes of (re)presentation within a 'we' of planetary proportions. Parapoetics insists on multispecies storytellings. Parapoetics asks: Who speaks, and on behalf of whom? How do nonhumans, ahumans, inhumans articulate thenselves, and how can 'we' avoid the anthropocentric error of always measuring these articulations against the arbitrariness of human linguistic signs in order to find but an alleged absence or silence? As Wittgenstein pointed out, as long as our language remains the same, it will seduce us into asking the same questions over and over again. Parapoetics asks what other semiotic possibilities can be afforded to us. It asks how to speculate and engage in parallel vocabularies in unknown sign systems. Parapoetics challenges the ideas of what it means to signify, in what manner significations can manifest themselves, and what promises for our relations to Others a poetry in an expanded, transhuman field might hold.