Clarise Foster - Editorial Notes

Excerpt

Green is certainly good, necessary, and the colour of new foliage—but it is also the colour of jealousy, and greed. It represents the contradictions that the human imagination has given it in whatever language it is named. If I had to give poetry a colour, I would offer up the colour of patience, which for me would also be green, the vibrant shade of green I associate with the magnificent and wise heft of the tall elms that grow along the street where I live. Trees that I imagine somehow gracefully manage to reconcile a long-lived past with a sometimes turbulent present and keep on growing.

I think it was Kermit the Frog who said, “It isn’t easy being green,” and as we all know, being a poet can be at times a fate worse than watching paint dry. So why then do we do it?

In Catherine Hunter’s essay, she talks about soldiers in the midst of war-time violence reading soiled pages of poetry they’ve kept with them in an attempt to maintain both their sanity and humanity.

Today we live in a world where financial success, despite all of our green awareness, is predicated on the belief that it is human nature to waste, and not only our material possessions. A great deal of time and resources is invested to get us to squander those traits that do not support the continuation of a global consumer-based economy: traits like memory, patience, and creative imagination.

In this issue you will find a range of writing about the environment and poetry, an interview, essays, and poetry that speak to both the complexity of human nature and poetry. Like the colour green, contradictions are a part of all nature, and the greatest contribution poetry and an issue of a literary magazine like CV2 can offer to saving the planet is to remind us of the true resource of human nature, our ability to persevere, challenge ourselves—like the elms along the street where I live—and gracefully accept the lessons of the past and with that experience face the challenges of the present, and continue to grow.