Meredith Stricker

REWILDING, INDIGENOUS RIGHTS & FRANCIA MARQUEZ /  by Meredith Stricker

from 2018_Francia-Marquez-Facebook.jpg

Today I’m reading in Arturo Escobar’s DESIGNS FOR THE PLURIVERSE the words of Francia Márquez. as she helped organize her Columbian village La Toma to march against destructive gold-mining threatening the land, river and people. In 2014 she said:

“Everything we have lived has been for the love of our territories, the love we feel when we see the plantain germinate, when we have a sunny fishing day ... Our land is a place where we dream of our future with dignity."  She spoke and marched: "to create the conditions to take care of all life to privilege the life of all beings above all private interests and the interests of the transnationals. We started on this march to let you know that illegal mining is leaving us without our families robbing us from the possibility of continuing to live and the territory where our umbilical cords are buried.”

 The march succeeded, illegal goldmining in the area was ended.

Not long after encountering her words, I open a mid-terms email from the Boston Review and read of the success of rewilding, indigeneous rights, human rights and the rights of nature in Brasil and Colombia countering fascism, globalization and racism. And I see the name Francia Márquez... Is this the same woman I was just reading for the first time? YES !!  Francia Marquez is now the new vice-president of Columbia, elected in August 2022.

"El territorio es la vida y la vida no se vende, se ama y defiende" Francia Márquez

" The territory is our life and life is not sold it is loved and defended"

REWILD: definitions /  by Meredith Stricker

also,

noun: REWILD, a book of poetry by Meredith Stricker, Tupelo Press, Dorset Prize

Rewild is a collection of documentary lyric poetry that explores places that have been ravaged by war and environmental plunder, then left alone from human interference to regenerate and restore.

At this moment where we find ourselves in the Anthropocene, the poems hover between ruin and restoration. They open ways we can ask transformative questions and turn ourselves into these questions that shift and tunnel through difficulty and despair into "another spreadsheet than human ... chromosomal and intricate".

To begin to unbuy ourselves, to rewild our communal lives

Roughly chronological but non-linear, these poems constellate cross-currents in cultural and natural history to investigate correspondences of atomic energy, shopping malls and globalized markets while encountering aqueducts, underpasses and deep quiet where "there is no place to go but closer to leaves":

REWILD IS HERE ! /  by Meredith Stricker

REWILD is a collection of documentary lyric poetry that explores places that have been ravaged by war and environmental plunder, then left alone from human interference to regenerate and restore. The poems envision ways we might begin to tunnel through difficulty and despair into "another spreadsheet than human ... chromosomal and intricate". To unbuy ourselves, to rewild our communal lives.

My hope is for poetry to give full voice and place to the displaced, undocumented and endangered.

REWILD is also inspired by many years working in an architecture studio with projects in Big Sur, impacted by successive wildfires grown more severe and widespread through climate change. To feel the force of wildfire is profoundly stressful, humbling, revelatory.  Before rebuilding, the land needs to be cleared of toxic materials. Soil requires healing and protection against flooding and erosion. Attention is focused on restoring plant and animal communities – as well as healing for the whole community that has felt deep loss. These challenges reciprocate my practice of poetry.

Envisioning poetics as habitat restoration, I work with materials that address damage and the possibilities of renewal. This connection between what we love and what threatens it impels us to take action. I'm holding out for a very practical, resourceful, mysterious poetics.

Poems are not decoration, they are not static. They are here to change our lives.