160 contemporary poetry
I am trying to create a synthesis between the aesthetics
of creating the poem and its ‘end’ result, which I always
hope is deconstructive, and ultimately impermanent, and
certainly changeable... and using poetry to actively stop
land-damaging (and people and animal and plant-damaging)
practices.^65‘The Ocean Forests: An Elegy and Lament’ was written by
Kinsella during an ice storm in Ohio as a response to the 2004
tsunami in the Indian Ocean.^66 The poem considers submarine
ecology, the causes of a tsunami as well as human interaction with
the environment. Beginning with a TV live feed, the technological
process of newsgathering and dissemination is allied to the physical
sculptures of trees in the ice storm: ‘trees tap inner heat / through
fi bre-optics’ (p. 104 ). ‘Ocean Forests’ performs tropologically,
since it borrows from the language of environmental science and
develops into an exploration of form as an organic system. The
speaker examines the causes of the tsunami scientifi cally as the
movement of convergent plates:
an earthquake
miles below the ocean’s fl oor,
plate slipping under plate,
the massive release of energy
and surge of water
running the gradient
of landfall: forcing entry. (p. 104 )The impact of this submarine world upon land is cataclysmic.
Kinsella later draws our attention to the morphing of map con-
tours, which meld and curve, ‘heaving re-alignment’ to create ‘the
seaweeds of new oceans / new shorelines’ (p. 105 ). Juxtaposed to
scientifi c analysis is the perspective of ritual, myth and spiritual
belief. In these terms the tsunami is perceived as a vengeful god
seeking retribution: ‘Calibrating prophesies / of the living, some
look for signs / of punishment’ (p. 104 ).
The poem refl ects upon the ungovernable elements of envi-
ronmental processes in fi re, air and water and their disruption