SPROUT Journal #1: Space (The Nature of Cities)

I'm pleased to be contributing a new poem to the inaugural issue of SPROUT, an eco-urban poetry and art journal led by artists, urbanists, and researchers involved in The Nature of Cities, an international platform for discussion about cities, nature, and people.

The Nature of Cities is a non-profit based in New York City. It was founded in 2012 and has since built a network of over 900 transdisciplinary contributors in 27 countries and on 6 continents. It is a 'boundary' organization, specifically interested in discovering what can be learned at the frontiers between art, science, design, policy, and activism, with a mission to foster more resilient, sustainable, liveable, and just cities that strengthen our relationships with nature.

From the editors' commission call:

"We hope that SPROUT will become a space for trans-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations between artists, researchers, and citizens with a focus on geographical diversity, polyvocality, and translation. We want to create a space for expanding our understanding of who/what 'speaks' for a city; through poetry, we aim to structure engagement and exchange at the interface of cities and nature."

The theme for issue 1 of SPROUT is SPACE, and my contribution is called 'frontiers (radio edit)' - a poem excerpted from my real-time transcriptions of talk shows on London's non-profit community radio station Resonance FM during December 2020, and in which a multiplicity of voices, subjects and positions coexist through the process of crystallising into text the untethered language spaces of digital radio. The shows themselves explored a range of social, political, cultural and technological subjects, with guests regularly discussing the role that 'fandom' and partisanship play in conceptions of popular culture, and the power dynamics within it, and society by extension.

SPROUT issue 1: SPACE was launched on 25 February 2021 during The Nature of Cities Festival. From the editors' introduction: "In creating SPROUT, we wanted to offer a poetic space for creatives to think about the various through lines and intersections between poet, nature, and city. With SPACE, we invited contributors to situate themselves in the eco-urban imaginary, and share their own conceptualisations of (to borrow Bachelard's trenchant phrase) 'the poetics of space'. This theme speaks to the ways in which the poem (whatever its form or function) holds space - capturing attention, taking up hold in mind and body - for writers and readers, alike. To experience a poem is to give it grace and the space to move - leaving it just enough space to expand, contract, and expand again from one place to another."

Full list of contributors: Madhur Anand, Dylan Brennan, Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal, Claudia Luna Fuentes, Christodoulos Makris, Koleka Putuma, Caitlin Stobie, Joanna Walsh.

The issue is available to read here. An audio recording of 'frontiers (radio edit)' I made for the issue launch will be uploaded on the journal's website in due course.

My thanks to executive editors Dimitra Xidous and Kirby Manià, managing editor Malerie Lovejoy, and the entire editorial team, for this commission and opportunity.