[Bronx]

Poem Forest: Meditative Walks Designed by Jon Cotner
November 5, 2011, 12:00 pm
at the New York Botanical Garden, Thain Family Forest, Sweetgum Trail

UDP poet Jon Cotner has designed a 15-minute meditative walk for the New York Botanical Garden's Thain Family Forest Dedication. Poem Forest gives festival visitors a new kind of poetry experience, as well as a new kind of walking experience. Poet-walker Jon Cotner has fused lines selected from 2500 years of nature poetry with Thain Forest’s autumnal landscape. At 15 spots along Sweetgum Trail, visitors will speak, sing, or somehow enunciate 15 lines that encourage them to see and sense more clearly, to inhabit the present more deeply, and to fill with enchantment over the course of this walking meditation. The original poets who composed the lines are explorers – observers, lovers – of nature. They address us from America and from around the globe: Chile, China, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sweden. Together their voices invite us to enter a path with no foreseeable end. Poem Forest is one possible beginning, a reminder to keep going. Walks will take place between 12 and 4:30 PM, November 5-6 and 12-13. Jon Cotner focuses on the practice of dialogue in poetry, philosophy, and anthropology. He is the author, with Andy Fitch, of Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Cotner and Fitch recently completed another manuscript called Conversations over Stolen Food. Cotner has performed his dialogic improvisations across the country and internationally.