good morning welcome to changes the program on sustainability i'm susan gregory the coordinating producer of the show and today we have poetry matters with david fraser and kim goldberg good morning to both of you professor editor and environmental fist stephen call us stephen is a poet and a professor of contemporary literature at simon fraser university his many books of poetry include the common stalin books on the material also talent books two thousand and ten awarded the b c book prize for poetry to the barricades talon books two thousand and thirteen and the comp coach house two thousand and thirteen has also written two books of criticism and a novel the red album book two thousand and thirteen his collection of essays on the occupy movement dispatches from the occupation town post two thousand and twelve is a philosophical meditation on activist tactics social movements and change he's currently writing about walking resource extraction and climate commons welcome to the show stephen thank to kick off with some questions from kim so here we go yeah i think i'll get us started it's great that you could join us this morning stephen i'm interested in starting with kinda morgan because tkinter morgan of course has been in the news quite a bit lately and you have been in the news with it so you have been you spent last fall and last year quite a bit of time up on burnaby mountain doing what you could to protect the public park and resist morgan's pipeline coming through so can you tell us a bit about your experience up there and of course you got sued for your trouble so what do you tell us about your experience and also what the role is of poetry in this kind of citizen protests sure well you know i teach us a few which is on bernie mountain so i actually on my bus ride there cross over the existing pipeline buried into the street every single day but i'm up for a while how that awareness that what's under my that they want to bore through burning out in rates of the conservation area area and take a shortcut to the harbor to load on tankers which is alarming for lots of reasons there's a sort of for myself and for many people there's a basic opposition t expanding fossil fuel infrastructure and the locking us into using the tar sands and therefore absolutely nothing about climate change but in fact the reverse creating more climate chaos and then of course going through a conservation early  exactly then the eyesight is a local issue of there's this you know very lovely little conservation area or we've encountered this past fall bears many times and deer as ravens you can listen to i going on the side of the mountain it's it's beautiful it's wonderful spot used by people used by animals and they want to drill through and but a pipeline there and of course it's surrounded by a suburban neighborhood so if there was an oil spill and there has been in the past in two thousand and seven and two hundred fifty homes were evacuated because of that one we don't  to see that happen again either no absolutely not yeah so we began organizing a small group of people local people to work on the mountain or live near there and started keeping a watch once we heard that kind of we're going to go on and actually cut down thirteen trees to clear an area in the conservation lands that they were watch and try and make it difficult for going to work to do that work and to make sure people knew what was going on so you were in that what were you do when you were up there actually bearing witness and the ending guard for the trees really you know once we had enough people we sort of just set up a schedule made sure someone or two or three people were there at all times all daylight hours anyway anyway everest and it was actually a lovely day in the in september october to sit in the forest by yourself very quietly and i would i would go there for my shift on my way to teacher after teaching and i would sit there meditate on in a lecture i was about to give her something or was gosh quite lovely for a while there and then things heated up again because you know morgan came back and more people got interested and became as people know probably sort of there was a lot of conflict that is what i do and when poetry does become involved in social movements i'm even more curious about that and and i think it does have an important role sometimes however a small role that sometimes it's too so for myself you know it was just little things i would you know i remember one day in the morning i sat in the forest on watch i wrote a poem and i walked up the hill to the university to go on the radio i read the poem on the radio people on facebook said oh i heard your palm on the radio that was nice can you put it on facebook sign it but the ball on face ok and activists and you know people aren't ready necessarily poetry people are opposed the audience start sharing and passing it around on facebook and absolute love that it's not your typical kind of publication or form of publication but i actually think it's wonderful and really important as deep distancing eco gnomes are not seen but they are evening shadow on mountain trails black bears were first to find this cutting they've left a woolly presence in the clearing where thirteen trees lie on forest floor and thirteen shadows still hold up the sky holding off the helicopter world dropping wally in their midst wow what a pseudo sonnet thirteen line yes it well i think it's beautiful very great observation yeah i should say in the no matter mention which kind of stands out but that the trail they gave us access to this spot is called the gnomes home trail oh and are there no my home is on it  legend is it's named after some old guy that lived for years out in the bush there and became known locally as the gnome even i'm mostly interested in why you were singled out along with a few others to be  as opposed to other people why were you that's yeah well there were five of us eventually named in the suit and we were all in the in for various and different reasons to activists were named because they were they were known to contractors by name they could be identified as activists in the front line to blockade them and confronted them myself and a couple other people were named as being spokespeople essentially i was charged with conspiracy and in court they claimed i was the words he used but i was the or protest the ringleader which they based upon interviews i gave in the media because of course i did venture became a lot of media attention and because of things i wrote on a blog and in fact in court it was quite little it wasn't really a technically a poem it was a piece of literary prose but they they labeled it a poem so i'll take that does show the power of poetry you know obviously in the power of the word if in fact they're going to what was the outcome isn't it true that gender morgan didn't really get to proceed with their further cutting of the trees and with putting that pipeline through their right they were turned back this was was this is the stuff for citizen activists  think it's a success one way of looking at it although the ultimate results are a little indecisive at this point so you know morgan did get to do some of the testing they wanted to do then they they asked for an extension to keep doing that and they were denied that we won that part of it in court they were told nope you can't keep doing it you've done your little bit and get out of here so this is all part of their proposal they are submitting to the national energy board of canada so there's still a decision process to go through not that a lot of people trust that decision process we don't trust it to be a n objective or even legitimate process anyhow so there's still you know chance or even a likelihood that any any year or less or more that they will return was new papers in and saying we now have approval to do this and we're going to do it may start up all over again so that's that's a little troubling but in the meantime i think the win is really the fact that so many people were galvanize and engaged by this and empowered by this and i that and the company realizes that and that they're ready backpedaling like crazy in trying to present themselves as as good citizens and doing lots of marketing as they realise they sort of blew the p r campaign in fact wasn't there just sort of a record breaking indie go go fundraising thing when you guys got sued and all of a sudden you were going to be up against legal bills i recall from facebook and social media just a huge outpouring of funds because people want to make sure you guys you know don't get in trouble over there right it was pretty amazing you know and  young activists approached myself and one of the other name defendants inquire me and said can we build this fundraising site for you and start a campaign and we're like well sure of course the great and within a within a week i think we had fifty thousand dollars i could it was all in small amounts right this is all you know sometimes a hundred dollars or very often was like ten fifteen twenty five dollars but it sure this really touches people's hearts it does both what kinda morgan was trying to do and in fact the whole  and transport issue as well as the suing of ordinary citizens the suing of poets for being poets and for being poet activists people are saying no that's not acceptable i've got twenty bucks i'm going to put it toward their legal fund and people all over did that it was kind of extraordinary you know i've done a lot of media work around activist causes in the past where you're on you know the spokesperson talk to the media and they're often very skeptical about what you're up to and start right away with very challenging or even dismissive questions but in this case the media were just telling our side that the media coming out to me and saying this is really shocking is that it's kind of outrageous isn't like i had to do was agree ok i like what you say that you say in your blog beating the bounces want to what i'm learning from this experience that you know morgan is that we are rising we are growing we are building our capacity every at every step to reduce the  quo and demand another world and i think the way you quote it sums up a lot of one is just how badly yeah i was going to ask you about the the conference that you're going to be i think heading up in funding for it because surprise surprise a lot of funding agencies are a little scary scary because of the extraction issue because it is such a big issue both economically in canada but certainly is as far as a public relations and media kind of issue goes but yeah it's a conference to look very broadly at resorts extract and in canada you know our dependence upon it our governments promotion of it to the exclusion of other things for instance and of course the impacts are talking about which are staggering both in a global sense as far as if we talk about fossil fuels we're talking about climate change in a local sense as well where the lot of us mining devastates and destroys local communities these are often indigenous communities and somewhere in in western canada or latin america we're very interest in the fact that canada is a global center for mining seventy five percent of the global mining industry is canadian based which usually surprises people but what we are as one of the i read says we are to to mining what switzerland is to banking wow wow dad's credit quite amazing i think people don't really realise that yet and that's all you know that's all legislative that's all legal and government regulations and tax regulations that canada has constructed over many decades that make it an attract place for mining which could be a good thing but you know the problem with mining and it just in this kind of money out is that the impacts environmental and social impacts are local but the profits really are global they leave canada this is and one of the big issues is that you know our government and say oh no we've got to develop this because it's hundreds of billions of dollars but there's little little you know reality behind how those hundreds of billions of dollars that if it canadians right from tax dollars from this a few jobs the jobs are actually miniscule we start comparing to other industries there's all sorts of problems with it and how is this conference is to try and address these issues at a very big level but to address them sort of from the ground up or bring in lots of activists lots of indigenous activists from across western canada from latin america as well and try to bring the activists together and some of the academics intellectuals who study this stuff and have big open free public discussions around this whole set of issues what about will there be an arts component yes yeah there is so  there's a poetry reading one night in fact there will be an art exhibit that an artist from ecuador is bringing up del b there's a street march with kind of some street performances involved so we're going to shut the conference down in the middle the day on saturday and get i want to come outside in the streets and block the traffic and march around downtown vancouver and join some performances so it can be really quite as equivalent occasion to help with of we can pull it off or not yet we didn't mention the date maybe you could tell us when it's happening and how people information but the schedule and speakers can be found that there you go we'll see who comes by you know it's kind of an intervention we're trying to make but it's an intervention at the level of can we bring people from the north and south who have different but relatable experiences in terms of the impacts of canadian mining and can we bring activists and frontline people together with the intellectuals in the academics and see what kind of conversations come out those cross pollination i think that sounds great one thing that really fascinates me and obviously you're addressing it in the state of extraction conference is always the confluence between the arts and activism and the confluence between art and politics and political issues and it's just it's so much energy comes from putting those two different streams together and of course cascadia poetry festival which will probably mention later in the show also is dealing with that issues of ecology bio regionalism and poetic absolutely what what's the secret there in the magic why you something happens when you throw poets or artists or street performers together with political organizing yeah well i think you know the issues we're addressing is large social issues the typical protests we take to them that track on the ground gets worn in pretty deep and we get pretty used to it whether it's specifically in an economic argument and someone says jobs and someone says environment and so they were locked right and other ways of approaching these issues to what i think poetry especially in art and general can add to that is you approach the same issues but kind of from an oblique angle you kind of approach them and you've got one eye on the but maybe there's one i somewhere else and suddenly you think about them a little differently and that's one thing the other thing that i love that what i often i'm fine i'm trying to explore in poetry is ways of voicing things that are difficult to voice but that we need movements and i think our capacity building and movements and that's things like ok so how do we talk back to these guys mean it's hard sometimes they don't seem to hear us we don't have access to them whether that be our politicians or or corporate leaders for that matter but poetry has one of what we can imagine be able to direct y speak to them and poetry is still very much a speech based more on the act to me and that's important to sort of embody these these states of agency where i can i can yell at them i can accuse them i can dismiss them and i can call upon the other resistors to join me in resisting and you enter the sort of fantasy realm of ancient sea and empowerment that i think builds into the real realm of agency and empowerment i think so and the other thing i notice with the confluence of poetry and activism is that it gives a broader base of the population a way to enter a means to intervene because often then this is perhaps what you were saying initially with your initial point of it but people who are tuned either turned off or tuned out when it is offered to them simply through journalistic approaches through media coverage and you know they're just sort of shutting out shutting out too much information right all of a sudden they're given a poetic treatment of something or an art exhibition and it's like yeah they're interested you know in their interest that they're literally entering a subject area that they was off limits to them before i think so absolutely something to sort of a break oh i could approach this issue that even smaller spoken word events where the general public do not go right i was just wondering when you get into the area back to him in poetry and protest is this that kind of work that's out there more in the field is it will touch that which is loving in each and every other's hands and while reading this poem still won't be the same as storming a bank oil refinery or a parliament you may yet be reading this poem to a group of people with whom you'll presently a bank and oil refinery or apartment i just love that idea about sense of you know the pond doesn't have to do all the work but you know what the palm might be there at the moment we're galvanizing ourselves we're encouraging ourselves we're building our capacity to do something  not just the paul that's not the that's the only thing that has lots of things we do including simply providing food to a group of people there's lots of nourishing things that are part of building a movement and building a moment of capacity where he actually we can take a step here and do something now you said a while ago in your general approach to poetry i'm trying on a poetry of revolution seeing what it might do how far it can be pushed both into the path and from there into as yet unrealized futures so that's really a bit of what you're talking about here isn't it with that example exactly i mean i guess a couple ways of looking at that one is that idea of the past i think past experiences past movements past uprisings all sorts of things we tend to dismiss and we tend of this idea of oh the dustbin of history and we tried that now throw it out but it's also the things that we never really did give a full trial or shape to or things that worked locally or worked temporarily and then other think sometimes we don't quite know how to go forward but if we track back a little bit we can find all sorts of unrealized possibilities that we can go back to and poetry's a great imaginary i find for exploring that possibility for making those choices life again what i find  often doing having said that maybe we can just say equates to one of your early collections which i know it's called the collection but it's mine in two thousand and one which is that sort of a long a long book length poem where you write about thing anyway but you know you planned all that history personal life as well as the real stories of the people who were in and i'm on the whole area all the way that's right cumberland so i was wondering if you can comment on that  then my father's side my my grandfather my great grandfather guess i moved to cumberland from england to work in coal mining as well so yeah that's my i was curious about family origins and how how i got where i was you know and started looking into that and you know the  stories are remember my grandmother telling that she grew up as a as a coal miner's daughter is still on the phone goes you know they were they were funny little stories and and they had weird holes in them and i wanted to know more so then she did do some digging in archives and it was sort of in satisfactory  way you can find what i kept coming up with is the fact that the poorest people the real working class underground there's not a lot of records for them they don't get to tell their stories watch so you know i have one reason i turned to all those wonderful novel german  was to get a real story from people working underground and of course all the work in a very sociological and research based way so it's not just a story you imagined he he did really in depth research into how how mining in france was working coal mining in the nineteenth century  so i imagine it would have been a similar situation and that gave me some information and and things to go on yeah i was ready so what the oh there are a few mysteries i want to figure out like why one grandfather worked in a mine for a while and quit and why my great grandfather the other side had to move around a lot and in the teens and twenty's and you know what i think is it is because you're black listed which is you know stories i did find of why people were moving around so much and not be able to find stable work at least in the period when there was stable work and this is sort of post  hundred twelve thirteen i think it was a real hardcore strikes and strike breaking and intense stuff and also a curious about the racism i could identify my family too and seeing one source of that kind of replacing us with chinese labor right so all these things you know i really wanted to get a sense of how do i bring that history back to life how do i imagine my way back into it so you know i'm off into space when i'm writing that might result in a history book might result in a novel but for some reason with me a generous often go a tree and i think that has a lot to do with my interest in voices more than anything else so poetry really gives one a mainline to voice and multiple voices in a way that might be harder to capture in other types of exactly yeah it's weird you know it's like i'm not so much an interest in the character but i'm interested in that the emotion in that voice so you get isolated things and cody the way that would be tougher to do and in fiction i think he even i think we're all but of course heard as well c h l y dot ca where we stream live and pod cast and we do have just three events a little mention today first of all you know how they can well they there are those who tend to say that protesters don't have alternatives to propose there they just don't want something that they don't know what they do want well says here clean energy jobs are growing incredibly quickly in two thousand and thirteen thirty seven percent more canadians worked in the renewable energy industry than in two thousand and nine as a result by two thousand and thirteen the clean energy sector encompassing manufacturing power production energy efficiency and more accounted for more direct canadian jobs sustainable energy association will be hosting a weapon are featuring jeremy morehouse from clean energy canada who will talk about british columbia sustainable transportation and renewable energy sectors there's no charge but you do need to register and you can do that through b c s ca's website and that is triple w dot b c as the dot org slash webinars and if you miss the our itself i would suggest checking out the website just b c s or to see what's going on that's because that's very interesting information to morrow the mid island chapter  council of canadians invite you to a town hall meeting that is wednesday january twenty eighth seven pm at bevan park social center in for a discussion on the ramifications of fracking and liquid natural gas or liquid direct gas as some prefer to call it the public has heard lots of promises about the economic benefits of a proposed l and g or l f g industry powered by fracking in northeastern b c but are these claims credible this evening of multimedia presentations will drill down on the myths and realities of this industry and for more information on tomorrow's event that's tomorrow evening seven o'clock bevan park social center you can check the mid island council of canadians facebook page and finally monday february second vi use international development week will feature fed talks fed in this case stands for food education and development in these talks will go on all day in building three fifty five room to eleven that the union imo campus at ten thirty sarah dance peaks on the power of young farmers in the global food movement at noon it's dawn morrison henri indigent icing the global food movement one thirty is brant mansfield talking about the university's role in the global food movement and of course we've had many programmes on now with celio white who is directly involved in that sort of thing you at three o'clock felix martinez will look at temporary foreign agricultural workers in canada for fifty there will be refreshments and mingling and finally at finesse a good all talks about seed sovereignty in canada for more information on all of that this is again monday february second all day building three fifty five room to eleven and vi you and you can look this up at triple w dot vi you see a slash events slash fan a hyphen talks and fed is f like frank the hyphen talks the program that  you're listening to on c h o i went to one point seven f m is changes and today we have poetry matters with david fraser and kim goldberg as well as their guest stephen call it are you talking about walking  happening tonight to the fault i think for ninety nine wallace street in and imo and we have paolo the costa renny shakra and dennis bowlen so show up at seven o'clock the open mike starts then you can sign up at the door bring some poetry piece of prose it's no longer than three minutes and we'll see you there also the living room which is a democratic reading circle is happening this thursday at the in and i'm a library january twenty ninth show up fo thirty and will run until we get totally exhausted probably a couple hours or less sobering five or six poems three minutes or less and we go around the circle and there is actually we spawn another living room and it's happening in kuala km beach on the first there's the of the month this month coming up every the fifty six thirty tape thirty same sort of format so if you find yourself in qualcomm beach near there that time check it out where will  five dollar cold go pass gets you into everything you can find out all the information terms of the schedule and readers and so on it cascadia poetry festival dot org and it's not too soon to sign for those workshops we have and certainly to buy a go past so do that you can pay online or you can email me at a send aspirations dot ca just think of the emails and just before the break we were discussing a little bit why poetry is such an interesting medium and the things that you can do with poetry and particularly as you were saying the history and the way you can sometimes convey history and sort of deeper levels of meaning to history that might really come across to people in other forms of writing so i'm interested in going from there to the fact that you have recently accepted the position of poetry editor or canadian literature magazine and what what your plans are for that what you're looking for what changes if any you want to bring what particular streams of poetry are or of the most interest to you yeah that's a great question finding kind of interesting to think through is canadian literature is sort of a well known magazine been around a long long time to get lots of submissions and i can only pick a few for each issue so i just by sheer numbers i've got to say no to my i don't know ninety or ninety five percent of the submissions that come in which is horribly feel bad but it's an amazing exercise of just sort of forcing myself to rethink well what do i like what do i really think is good what is the basis for that so right say right now you know i'm just working on the first two issues that i've been working on it's really sort of a process of asking those kind of questions what do i think makes for a strong poem now what is it about poetry that surprises or grabs my attention what is it that  and say oh that's that's important i want people to read that summary try to take that kind of approach a ground up kind of approach from from what's there and what i'm reading and not start with with my own assumptions and partially that's because i do have my own a think they're you know in some way in some ways people are going have a sense of that right when they hear i'm doing this thing oh he's got political activist guy or that environmentalist got you know i know my background i was more associated with what people want to call experimental torture on guard over those year and will be coming to it again the featured reader this year this notion of innovative poetics is really very much at the heart of the cascadia poetry festival movement and of course last year in seattle at cascad poetry festival we the whole room was a little bit kind of shocked and gasping when george stanley gave a rather unusual for most of us definition of what constitutes innovation in poetry today and he was saying something you know most people i think me certainly when we think of innovative poetics we think of it as being somewhat synonymous to experimental poetic whatever the experiment may be and george stanley a well known vancouver poet got up and said that really innovation today and poetic is almost a a reaction against or a response against the ironic stance of contemporary poetry and against really post of turns the definition of innovation on its head in terms of what i thought of as innovative and poetry so what what do you think about that yeah well it's a complicated concept the notion and i she had some of those things at the georgia saying exactly exactly that's right so you know i do it's none of the terms are ones that i feel i really love and so on the one hand i would say i think we're in need of and i'm always looking for that which seems newer fresh refreshing look at the situation to get us outside and looking back and from a new perspective i i value that but i'm also aware that that is something that the new is always based on the past and in fact you look at the definition of innovation and it says well there's something there and you go if we do this too it'll make a little better we'll change it but there's something preexisting and pulling something new out of the ether as it were so i appreciate that definition too and that's the way i think is ok so here are the things we have the we're already familiar with what do we do to adjust or change these things to get into a new place or space the word you like what george is saying was about sincerity and i think certainly you know i feel like poetry was dominated for a long time the kind of ironic distance and i'm more interested in that the more immediate and sincere i guess is where we could use expression especially you know from my own work and my own dress it's about the sincere expression of and from within communities especially communities that are there isn't justice and justice is a real social justice is a real sincere af act that i'm interested in so as and that will probably come through i imagine in the film sions you make for a canadian literature magazine the poetry collection so i would think so and certainly i just have having chosen a handful of ones i do want to have published so far and i think sometimes it may not be that there is a recognizable social justice seem perhaps or content to the poem but there's something very truthful in its rider and it's very sharp and precise in its construction and its form or sometimes yes that there are very clear issues or context within which the poem  working that it's leading me to to think differently about those those issues and contexts on my own valuing those things for sure i remember once reading that the editors of crazy horse magazine with the literary magazine in the us when they were describing what they're looking for and how they decide of that few you know two percent of poems that they can accept question they're asking themselves is what is at stake here what is at stake in the home and i think what they were saying or what they went on to explain context what work is this poem doing is it actually doing something in that context or that simply repeating and so i'm interested in what work it's doing i'm also i love that question too or what are the stakes here yeah i read in the new quarterly magazine too that the kind of poems they're looking for saying things that i had to like have value added information or are more whatever the content than just your ordinary poems to come across the tasks that are done over and over discussion that we're having in terms of innovative experimental acco poetry versus nature poetry differences and things like that and will these poems make a difference i mean for me i read a lot of poetry as well and the things that resonate with me are things that surprised me and write and send me off in different directions across women going in a linear way down the page and say oh you know i've read read about the animals in the birth in the trees you kno issues and then i that's probably a poem i'm going to be very interested and and i also i'm inclined to think with eco poetry that unlike nature poetry ico poetry if we're going to even use that phrase is somehow situated in a larger ethical cont moral societal context here and simply a description of a bird on a twig exactly yeah there's a great definition i think maybe it's somewhere in jargon skinner's writing american poet who founded a magazine called eco poetics twelve fifteen years ago or so i guess now he says ok so the nature problem you've got the bird in the tree the eco palm you've got the bird the tree the habitat and the bulldozers about to destroy to have exactly the scale that say oh wait a minute yes it's really a picture of a bird but wait a minute what's happening you know actually ecologically environmentally around that bird and you're right it is a standing back and taking a larger look a broader vision a broader field of view is in play in the eco poem exactly exactly so you're going to be on a panel along christian like cleric and share in peace and so that's going to be fun isn't it fun and charity those are all good friends and all wonderful poets bank and all people with a real sense of social justice too yes absolutely so it's about being we're all all four of you really are very engaged poets and that's what interests me you know as opposed to poets just operating in a vacuum in their own realm it's about being engaged with the larger world and somehow bringing poetry to bear on that yeah it's wonderful for you to bring us together i'm looking forward to it in fact the whole cascadia poetry festival this is really one of the things that sort of i find as i've been to all the while i've only been to priory but i've been to those two the first two and now course the third one which will be in the nine mo and it really is quite unique at least in my experience if i were you customers go because it's about ideas and communication and discourse and networking it is not about single solo poets standing up on a stage reading in a one way sort of communication to a path of audience although you know is that component to it but really it's the dialogue in the interaction that seems to be so important and that something this the founder of it the creator the person who had the vision and made it happen that's right so he would i want to talk to you about a little bit about your comments on the internet a number of places about private property public don't go to the grocery store to get backers estimates so i was just wondering if you could comment on those ideas in light of what also has been spent today in your general philosophy yeah well i i think we live in a world where there are very few things we don't actually pay for their very few relations that aren't you know consumer kinds of relations you know whether it's paying for child care paying for most the food we eat we do we just we don't depend upon our own resources or a communit resources for things the way many societies have in the past some few still do in some parts of the world and i said that but i did old ideas out of the commons as especially articulated in english history where people communities had large areas of what were the right term common lands upon which a community could rely for its local stand ability and you know every community would have its own set of rules and regulations that evolved over time as they tested things out to find what would be sustainable so you could do to x number of days with x number of animals a year on different kinds of animals different regulations and collect different things from common lands and not other things and it was all geared towards how people could sustain sustain themselves truck drive up with ten people jump out and pick an area clean you like what you people do you know the local community so we're kind of we're protective of them but you know in a sense of local access and we make things often that are very sharable out of them we make jam we might give to people or pies and share to dinner and all those aspects of blackberries made me think oh it's a little sliver of this idea of the commons in a world that's almost eradicated that idea does poor people or a homeless fences like that that actual space is sort of you could imagine between properties rockers or vacant lots and so they have this wonderful they grow we're not actually trying to do something for profit areas we're neglecting and they're thorny enough and painful enough that they england in surrey and there was a common cause seen common which was almost as large as richmond park and it was adjacent to richmond park and i can remember walking there on sundays through the trails the large oaks the sort of meadows sort of wonderful within here and i saw my first blue bell we would harvest a roasting chestnuts on the way and take them home and roast them on the fire at home and we wouldn't take too many just like the black berries and so thinking through that that history of common land again and tell us stick what you know i'm sure i think when you think about that whole area up there too so there's so much of that land up in around as they can and the lake district is common and beatrice possible potter sort of donated all her land tame common as well so yeah that's a wonderful place to go yeah stephen do you think you're going to be having a poetry book coming out coming out next year with alan books one day it's sort of a sequence of alternating as a's although they're very kind of literary in strange essays and poems and it was something i was writing last spring and summer before the king of morgan stuff really blew up as it were but i was thinking about because i participated in some public walks along the route of pipelines and i think about the strange way of interacting with space when you're following a pipeline and i actually went to the tar sands in northern alberta to last summer and participate in something called the human playing into that book for sure oh wonderful well stephen it's been great having you on the show i think we're coming to the close of a artist's point well if we had a really short poem we can finish off with one of your points if you have one handy why don't we do that when we finish with a real with messianic fingers on the keys of the arboreal net these aromatic dune plants these northern harriers shellfish i guess great blue heron and others gone to rest or roost amongst trees over every park and the market of nothing left to sell  way right i bye bye bye will thank you kim goldberg and david fraser for bringing stephen to us by phone today and that's our show check us out on facebook and on behalf of our production team thanks so much for joining us