House of Anansi Poetry Bash: David O’Meara hosted Adam Dickinson, Sara Peters and Michael Crummey on April 27, 2013 with these 3 books:
Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers that I’d heard so much about, Sara Peters‘ 1996 which seems to be attracting some attention, and Michael Crummey’s Under the Keel which was a big crowd pleaser and sold out of bookstore stock that night. If publishers have a house style, it might be a brain-twister to draw confines around it from this set.
David O’Meara hosted and led the lively Q&A. It’s wonderful when a panel comes together in mutual interest and converse with one another on stage comfortably as this one. Sara Peters has a poem here. In the panel she mentioned writing what draws by what horrorifies as I recall.
An author at Slate, Peters knows guess how to tap into what people like. I zoned out. Apparently the poems are liked. No titters around the room obviously given the exploration of dark subject matter and earnest portrayals of standard poetry fare; people abusing people and killing animals, passing on a wave of pain gleaned from newspaper stories of parents killing their young child, and interpolated into with imagination. The rest of the audience could have found it absorbing. I didn’t check. Not my cup of tea. Which probably means it will win award because it is visceral high impact stuff.
Next up was Adam Dickinson. Conceptual poetry is known for not being some people’s cups of tea, but I’m impressed by that rigour (more than rigour mortis). In the conversational portion where it got to process he said he started with about twice as many poems as he needed. For this book he was set on 62 poems. Where he wrote more in a section it would displace others out of the book then he decided to crank it down to 50 poems.
His previous book Cartography and Walking from over a decade ago also came from a framework of exploring ideas. In this he talks politics and poetry. Why this form, with chemical illustration messed with into pataphysics? He said science can be taken as an arbtrar of truth in our society. I can’t recall the rest of what he said to that end but fusing the forms of objectivity with the lateral thinking of poetry makes something different.
There were some laughter at the pataphysics and where it led. He divided his book into 7 categories of the 7 classifications of resins for recycling. Inside type 1 PETE was the poem Haptics,
Plasticus Corporations (a subsiduary of Dow Chemical) quietly moved into researching the biological effects of touch on memory. The idea was to engineer nostaligia inot the flexible surfaces of goods.
It’s not only funny but it hooks in eye with the science lecture later in conference where neuroscientists train to the end of selling us things efficiently, making sites sticky for their purposes, not our benefit nor ergonomics.
In Common Polymer Shared by Two or More Words in a Different language (p.49, second half of poem)
Bird singing in Thai
jib, jib
Pharmaceuticals tap-watering in Adrenal Gland,
fight, flight
Cannon firing in Mandarin,
ping, pang, pa
Flame retardants keying in Keyboard and Furniture,
dyslexia, combustion
Now that covers a lot of ground. Flame retardants in furniture and carpets I’ve seen remarked on as causing disease in pets that live on the surfaces. It makes as much sense as spraying pesticides on a lawn then setting a baby to crawl on it. And a connection to neurology? a documentary on the big ground of dyslexia. And this is put in all kinds of fabrics. What kinds of chemicals are put in clothes to make them wrinkle-resistant?
Groundwater contamination from various pills and hormones causing a speculated shift in growth and development I’ve heard of. Our instant cultural pumped up further by cascades of fight or flight that never quite shut down even if we walk away from overwork and overplay from what’s in the water? Is that calling a spade or divesting self of responsibility for how we spend our attentions? What bigger picture are we in? Assuming it’s not spurious for the sake of poetry, is it actionable or just as stress-provacative as a poem of abuse by a babysitter?
Something being systemic means many voices can exert change. Something which is corporate practice can get changed by conscious raising. But so can individual acts. It used to be an individual habit to drink as you drive and common for beer bottles in ditches and for bars to be smoky ceiling to the waist. A presumed public property of female bodies meant creepy dudes could safely grope a employee and walk away without getting called on it by the woman in the moment or down the line. In some places this doesn’t happen as much.
He’s looking at the idea of plastics, the physical and the social polymers. What are our cultural polymers? Our chains of lineups, memes, conditioning, our texts? In one he strung together all the U.S. license plate slogans with about half new content to link it into one new national story where “the birthplace of aviation lives free or dies”. In another the poem is looking at the distribution of frequency of words in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and considers the charter’s properties and molecular weight.
The food system comes under examination from what’s sprayed by who on tomatoes to “shelves leaking with expiry dates”. Some of the poems are visual. Some absurdist or perhaps just more oblique. For example “let pollen apron the path to the pharaoh[…] her teeth apply to the planetary apathy.”
In a way the text is more dire than Peters’ because it wrestles with institutional-scaled wrongs. In a way it is the same because individual-scaled wrongs are multiplied by as many people.
Adam Dickinson and Michael Crummey
I knew I’d heard Crummey before but apparently it’s been longer than I thought. That was 2009.
Annabel Lyon, Michael Crummey, Michael Turner, hosted by Phil Jenkins on a Writers Fest novelist panel, 2009.
In the panel he said that unlike some of the writings he did since he started at age 17, where he wrote in an unconscious thrusting forward, he had started to consider his approach over the last few years, other ways of turning the writing.
I can’t recall if it was the poem, a preface or in the interview he said he’s on a learning curve so steep that I keep falling off the damn thing.
He’s more of an anecdotalist in his poems than the other two, whether a love letter to his wife/story of his dad’s death or telling about Cape St. Mary’s one of the largest bird colonies in North America.
In this poetry project, he moved through an archive of Newfoundland photos and imagined the back stories using Newfoundland dialect such as one set in Catalina Newfoundland. There’s an affability, humour and a good will that pops in an out of the poems. In that ekphrastic of the full immersion baptism into the cold Atlantic, the picture is of the preacher remaining on shore. “If they want comfort, let them join the Sally Ann” and “they rise with the Lord in their veins forever and ever, Amen” and the imagined remark of the baptized saying, this is the third time. I hope this one takes.
In another a girl looks out at the ocean. A house by the water has laundry blowing in the wind. The girl says my mother said he was queer to ask to take my picture and not even ask me to smile for it.
It gives a lot of food for thought of ways to present as well as what to present for poems.
Audience questions can be on the would like to make a point or retort or random question, but I think I get one of them now. An audience member asked if polymers poems to reflect their subject should be outside the death/life cycle? And are they?
I think the person was coming out of the admonitions to not use plastic because they last a very long time. There’s the idea that things made from petroleum are “unnatural” as if from a different universe set in opposition as enemy from “natural things” like water. Which is not to say that oil spills are harmless.
But by being polymers doesn’t mean they don’t erode. Or that they are not organic or would not be subject to decay. Even stone changes its properties over time. Polymers was extended to being social polymers. Besides which there are natural polymers like shellac, amber, wool, silk and natural rubber have been used for centuries.
And as I showed over at Eaten Up, there was a book launch buffet of fruits, breadsticks and cheeses.