Filtered through Ponge’s approximate presque, the pre of the ”Ding an sich,” this collaboration between Tina Darragh and Marcella Durand writes and rewrites the endlessly rewritten eco-/ego-poetics of our moment. All too human, these bellwethers appeal to the sentient and non-sentient, repeal the very sentences they parse into phrases, and limp toward, having lost or misplaced what can only be found at the dead letter office—the poem, the book, etc. “…and what becomes of this in the end? A habitable place,/ strollable justification for aggregable surface gables, gagle…active-ish, a little stream in the bed.” –Tyrone Williams
Darragh and Durand have done it—they’ve written a proemic for our time. Part deep ecology anthropocentric counter-mandate, part cycling and spiraling in and through “the landscape department” of the poem á la Ponge’s The Making of the Pré. Deep Eco Pré offers a multi-genre meditation on “what space we shld/occupy,” asking the reader to bring the body back, but with the caveat that this body is not pure human, not homo sapien privileging, but rather a new push for “self-realization of all”—translate to mean “equal among the land masses.” As Michael Zimmerman writes, “we need all the wisdom we can get to face the implications of global climate change.” Well, look no further, the wisdom we need is here, in the form of Deep Eco Pré—a preface, prelude, prefix, precaution, preamble, precarious precast, precise preclusion prepare! — Erica Kaufman
