The Belfast Review Team | 12 March, 2024
Thanks for joining us for Week 4 of our Spring Blog. Each week we feature a handful of new creative works by artists, photographers, writers, poets, and song writers. Different days of the week highlight different creative forms: Feast Your Eyes Sundays (art, photography), Wordy Tuesday (fiction, flash, nonfiction), and Rhythm-Verse Thursday (poetry, song lyrics).
This week we're exploring the theme of 'Environment.' It's a topic that seems to be influencing a lot of work submitted to us. In our debut issue, we included a section where Nature and Magic combined in original ways to draw our attention to the plight of Mother Earth. However, for this week we're broadening the scope to include works that interrogate one's place – both in the outer world and nature, as well as the effect is has on the interior environments we inhabit and create.
Welcome to wherever you are.
Featured writer: Jonathan Lipps
We have a mission here at The Belfast Review, and part of it includes mentoring writers, poets, and playwrights. And, as part of that mission, we have invited some of our mentees to share a behind-the-scenes peek at the creation of their work. It's their choice of what to write about: their process, their inspiration, themes, and thoughts.
Here, the poet Jonathan Lipps shares his thoughts about the reasons he created the poem 'Minnemishinona' (featured in our debut issue). The title of the poem is the name of a natural falls in rural Minnesota, USA. It's a place he remembered going to many times as a child, only to return as an adult and find it had been blocked off from public access by a sign marked 'Private Property.' His resulting thoughts and reflections about the land, the past, and the future inspired the poem.
Let's take a walk in the woods and see what we can see.
On Writing ‘Minnemishinona’
JONATHAN LIPPS
The first theme of the poem Minnemishinona is told from the perspective of settler colonialism and the long history of oppression inflicted on indigenous people in the United States, land being a central theme.
Land and language are hard to separate on Turtle Island, the name used by Native Indigenous and First Nations people for “North America.” The name Minnemishinona roughly translates to, “Water Daughter.” “Mni,” is the Dakota word for water. “Nona,” generally translates to daughter, and the meaning and context change depending on prefixes. For example, “Winona,” means first daughter. “Miš,” as a prefix generally refers to a singular person, or person being alone. There is an inherent disconnect, an indelible loss, between this specific place when its history is severed from the language and the origin of its name.
The second theme has to do with ownership in general, and the idea of private property. Can we truly own land? Can one person lay claim to something with such collective meaning and interdependency, not only to humans, but to every living species? In the west, throughout our institutions of power, whether they be academic, commercial, or political, we perpetuate this idea that we are stewards of nature, we are apart from it, perhaps even above it. The fact is, we are nature; we are never apart from it. In fact—we are naive.
Nature’s power supersedes our own! One day, the earth will be swallowed by the sun. All life as we know it will be gone. That is the final theme of the poem: Nature will continue. Perhaps billions of years after our demise, a trickle of water will be born. Where there is water, there is life. Just maybe, one day, that daughter will be our mother again.
From: The Belfast Review's debut issue, Winter 2024 (available here)
ARTIST BIO
Jonathan Lipps is originally from rural Minnesota but currently lives in Jakarta, Indonesia with his wife, his greatest supporter of his many creative endeavours. He is the Content Director at MankatoLife, a small local arts and leisure publication based in his hometown. He has works in Solarpunk Magazine and WayWords Journal.
Special thanks to the artist for trusting us with his work.
Thanks to all of you readers for reading! Be sure to like, follow, and share.
Check out our other posts this week:
Feast Your Eyes Sunday (10 Mar) with Photography by Clayton Joe Young
Rhythm-Verse Thursday (14 Mar) with Poetry by Hiram Larew and David Harrison Horton
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