Selections from Listening to a Field through the Window of a Truck

It is very possible that the following poems have been written in the way that they are written because the Black Mountain Poets existed. I had never thought to categorize my poetry as anything other than ‘poetry’, perhaps assuming that it was something loosely related to ‘free verse’, but in fact the work is far more in line with the ‘projective verse’ that Charles Olsen wrote about in 1950 and that the other Black Mountain Poets continued to expand upon and bring into being in the years thereafter.

The poems and essays in Listening to a Field through the Window of Truck are generated in this way: I meet with a land steward (a farmer, a conservationist, a birder, an agricultural extension agent, a hunter, amongst many others) on the ground of their choosing and ask them about their relationship to soil. Then, we have a conversation where I don’t record a single thing – instead, I just listen very very closely. Later, the impressions of this conversation and the essence of the land steward’s work and the way we move across the soil eventually become a poem. In other words, the poems are instinctively and intentionally derived from the landscape of their content. The poems happen because I am living, breathing, amongst that which is being written about.

And indeed, these poems physically exist on the page in a very deliberate manner. There is motion between lines in the way that there is motion in a conversation: a back and forth, and pauses of consideration, of chewing over one another’s words with care. The words are physical in the way that breath is physical (particularly breath in a body that is in direct contact with the topographical bones of a landscape). In Black Mountain poet Denise Levertov’s 1965 essay, Some Notes on Organic Form, she writes, “In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds […] imitate not the sounds of an experience (which may well be soundless, or to which sounds contribute only incidentally), but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture.” This is precisely it. The following poems are textures of experiences. And the following artworks are textures of the poems.

In the same way that the Black Mountain College encouraged multiple forms of knowledge-making and -sharing, the broader project that holds Listening to a Field through the Window of Truck is a sprawling one. It makes no hierarchical distinction between manuscript or exhibition or conversation or workshop or a dinner shared amongst the land stewards. All are defined by mutual nourishment, and all of its forms are an extension of a tangled, interreliant, breathing content.

We are shaped by our landscapes / We shape our landscapes. Variable sizes. Ceramic, aluminum, hardware, stone. 2024.

Birding from the gas station parking lot (Snow geese). 48”x34”. Pigment, safflower oil, graphite, aluminum, stainless lag screws. 2025.

Soil is another word for home. Variable dimensions (approx. 2” tall). Soil from different places I have called home, gathered by friends and family, wood glue, sawdust. 2024-25.

It is very possible that the following poems have been written in the way that they are written because the Black Mountain Poets existed. I had never thought to categorize my poetry as anything other than ‘poetry’, perhaps assuming that it was something loosely related to ‘free verse’, but in fact the work is far more in line with the ‘projective verse’ that Charles Olsen wrote about in 1950 and that the other Black Mountain Poets continued to expand upon and bring into being in the years thereafter.

The poems and essays in Listening to a Field through the Window of Truck are generated in this way: I meet with a land steward (a farmer, a conservationist, a birder, an agricultural extension agent, a hunter, amongst many others) on the ground of their choosing and ask them about their relationship to soil. Then, we have a conversation where I don’t record a single thing – instead, I just listen very very closely. Later, the impressions of this conversation and the essence of the land steward’s work and the way we move across the soil eventually become a poem. In other words, the poems are instinctively and intentionally derived from the landscape of their content. The poems happen because I am living, breathing, amongst that which is being written about.

And indeed, these poems physically exist on the page in a very deliberate manner. There is motion between lines in the way that there is motion in a conversation: a back and forth, and pauses of consideration, of chewing over one another’s words with care. The words are physical in the way that breath is physical (particularly breath in a body that is in direct contact with the topographical bones of a landscape). In Black Mountain poet Denise Levertov’s 1965 essay, Some Notes on Organic Form, she writes, “In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds […] imitate not the sounds of an experience (which may well be soundless, or to which sounds contribute only incidentally), but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture.” This is precisely it. The following poems are textures of experiences. And the following artworks are textures of the poems.

In the same way that the Black Mountain College encouraged multiple forms of knowledge-making and -sharing, the broader project that holds Listening to a Field through the Window of Truck is a sprawling one. It makes no hierarchical distinction between manuscript or exhibition or conversation or workshop or a dinner shared amongst the land stewards. All are defined by mutual nourishment, and all of its forms are an extension of a tangled, interreliant, breathing content.

We are shaped by our landscapes / We shape our landscapes. Variable sizes. Ceramic, aluminum, hardware, stone. 2024.

Birding from the gas station parking lot (Snow geese). 48”x34”. Pigment, safflower oil, graphite, aluminum, stainless lag screws. 2025.

Soil is another word for home. Variable dimensions (approx. 2” tall). Soil from different places I have called home, gathered by friends and family, wood glue, sawdust. 2024-25.

Austen Camille is a Canadian-American artist, writer, builder and gardener. Camille primarily makes site-responsive public work that aims to build relationships with local ecosystems and their communities.