We’re delighted to have Petra Kuppers, author of the poem “Bone Planet” in The Future Fire #68, join us for a short chat.
 |
| Art © 2024 Toeken |
TFF: What does “Bone Planet” mean to you?
Petra Kuppers: “Bone Planet” is a poem about pain, and about my ongoing long-term speculative engagement with my deteriorating joints as a world of experience. As a somatic practitioner and dance artist, I often travel into my own body’s fields, and then through its sensations and imagery out into the wider cosmic world. So this sonnet is part of a crown (i.e. seven linked sonnets) that all travel around a planet of my inflamed interior.
TFF: If you moved to another planet, what animal from Earth would you bring with you?
PK: As I do travel so often, all the time, to other planets, I take with me what lives in me: mitochondria and other organelles, bacteria, all the tiny creatures that surround the particular energy of my own conscious life.
TFF: Would you like to live forever?
PK: In terms of material and energetics, I might anyway: stardust, transformed, vibrations, shimmerings… in terms of unified consciousness, probably not.
TFF: What are you working on next?
PK: I have just released a poetry collection that brings together true crime, decaying bodies, horror tropes and ecopoetry, full of nematodes, springtails and worms and the aliveness of soil (Diver Beneath the Street, Wayne State University Press, 2024). Now I am working on the material this poem is part of, a kind of Starship Poetics, a science fiction pain/joy universe.
Extract:
In the grey-green shelter of living bone, you grow ragged,
edges blood-less, crusted. Leucocytes eat this brown lump
Reminder: You can comment on any of the writing or art in this issue at http://press.futurefire.net/2024/01/new-issue-202468.htm.
No comments:
Post a Comment