John R. Campbell is a writer, musician, & visual artist at the nexus of landscape and culture. His poems and essays have appeared widely in national and international literary journals. His music creates soundscapes via progressive jazz, new roots, and contemplative textures. It can be found at Bandcamp. His images place figurative gestures amid intricate, layered environments. They are featured more comprehensively at OCELLI.
Intimate Distance: Poems is a rich and nuanced immersion in the landscapes of the American West. It’s also an exploration and deep critique of cultural constructions of nature, estrangement, maleness, and loss. Gregory Orr has written: “With a deft intensity and an unerring ear, John R. Campbell probes at the mystery of things, insisting that the density of experience yield secrets that will sustain us.”
blues you can use.
blues you can use.
Green Man Blues: roots music from the American earth
After Fire
A chronicle of the momentous west coast wildfires of 2020.
Chamber music for the carbon cycle in a world disrupted by climate change.
Mountains Drawn By Memory, a novella, describes the last two years in the life of Robere Merleau, a California figurative and landscape painter. After a prologue set in the Himalaya, the story takes place in California and Wyoming, as Robere searches for connection with loved ones, his past, and the land. Robere meets Lorenza, a strong and enigmatic woman who matches his intensity, and he renews his relationship with his estranged daughter, Claire. Throughout, the consciousness of an artist unfolds, revealing the intricacies of landscape and loss.
"In order to accept the enormous responsibility that comes of being in the world, we must first conceive, in spite of all the obstacles, the state of actually being the world." It is for this reason that John R. Campbell came to the Klamath marshes, a wetland in southern Oregon formed by three ancient, shallow lakes. Absence and Light is Campbell's account of his exploration of the marshes and a meditation on the world he found there, on his growing understanding of the physical, emotional, moral, and aesthetic meaning of that world, on his own growth as a man. Through Campbell's eyes, we observe the stirring and astonishing beauty of the marshes and their creatures, and the utter poignancy of their fragility before the heedless ambitions of humankind.
"Absence and Light is at once a heartfelt, poetic work of nature writing and an eloquent discourse about how humankind must rethink certain beliefs in order to slow the Earth's destruction." —The Oregonian
"In the best tradition of natural history writing, [Campbell’s] powers of description are marvelous.... A book of great spirit, both poignant and full of life." —The Bloomsbury Review
"A collection of meditations that can be read as might any poetry collection gathered under one theme: as a whole, in related sections, or as individual pieces. The prose is careful, beautifully descriptive, and thoroughly engaging." —The Georgia Review
“Absence and Light is a pioneering book in the way that Walden is. It has the same virtues of transgressive integrity and worshipful irreverence, and it takes literature into a ‘place no one knew’ by integrating poetry, philosophy, and natural history. John R. Campbell should be required reading for anyone who thinks about the landscape.”
—David Rains Wallace
THE IMAGE OF THE FISH:
Consciousness, Self, and Landscape
DEAD WEST: AN EXISTENTIAL ROADTRIP
Traveling the American West, the poet sees the land as a deep source for cultural critique. The texts etch meaning at the nexus of natural history, poetic sensibility, and philosophical concern. Dead West is a collage, a survey, a map. It's external and internal. It documents land and mind.
Dead West is a series of philosophical meditations on environmental aesthetics, ethics, and poetics. Each meditation is set in a specific site in the American West.
Dead West was written with help from an Individual Artist Grant, Utah Arts Council/National Endowment for the Arts. The completed manuscript was awarded First Place, Utah Original Writing Competition, Utah Arts Council, in nonfiction.
Music From Dead West
Guitar and piano-based post-jazz excursions through the landscapes of the American West.
John R. Campbell: guitar, piano, electronics, keyboard, bass, cedar flute, harmonica, curated and original loops & beats, percussion
In The Mouth of the Western Earth
A long-form trilogy that treats the poet's experience in the American West from 1980--present. These excerpts are from Part I, "The Far West," set in northern California and in Oregon.
Part II (completed) is "Interior Mountains," set in Utah and Wyoming, and Part III “Sleeping on the Ground” (in progress) returns to Oregon.
