The Body as Bacteria
(Scholar-Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with Adam Dickinson , Poet and Scholar)
Amatoritsero Ede: Since your well-received first collection, Cartography and Walking in 2002, you have issued out other works, including Kingdom, Phylum (2006) and the much-praised The Polymers (2013). In how far has scholarship – that is, being an academic – contributed to or detracted from your poetic praxis.
Adam Dickinson: I suppose I like to think of my creative writing and my academic scholarship as complementary orientations to a fundamental question: what does it mean to make art at this moment in history? Of course, many other questions extend from this and they interest me as opportunities to respond both creatively and critically. How has technology enabled us to read the writing of the capitalist Anthropocene in ways we haven’t been able to do before? How is the global metabolism of energy and capital rewriting the metabolism of human and nonhuman bodies? How is it rewriting various body politics and the social formations they generate? How might such questions, which imply an expanded view of writing, enlarge and reframe the potential for different kinds of and sites for poetic practice? These are just some of the questions I think about and it seems to me that they require scholarly research to contextualize them and a creative practice to perform experiments on and in them. I like to shift my modes of engagement; it helps keep my senses tuned to unexpected possibilities.
A.E.: I am going to ask you to do something that one might normally consider as subjective. But well, going by the dictum that a writer is his own first critic, do you feel your poetic praxis getting stronger from book to book since 2002; and what are the reasons?
A.D.: If by “stronger” you mean more ambitious and more provocative as resonant works of art, then, yes, I hope so—I like to think so. I’m trying to think more expansively about writing. Interesting works of art, in my opinion, shift the frames of conventional forms of signification subtly but importantly so that you say to yourself: I hadn’t thought to look at that thing in precisely that way before. Suddenly, environments, bodies, and concepts that hadn’t signified for you before, begin to matter in unexpected ways. It’s always difficult to fully realize the idea you have in your head for each book, but I do hope that my writing has been getting at some urgent and ambitious questions as it has developed through each project.
A.E.: What major technical and stylistic changes, if any did you note re-shaping your poetry as your praxis grew and still grows?
A.D.: I have been trying to let the form emerge as fully as possible from the subject matter. For example, I see The Polymers as an experiment in textual chemistry. I thought carefully about what polymeric writing might look like, the shapes polymers could take in language and culture. Consequently, there are poems that vary stylistically, to emphasize the plasticity of the subject matter, but always reflect concerns with accretion, accumulation, repetition, and iteration, which, for me, are the linguistic and cultural analogues to polymeric structures. In my latest book, Anatomic, I took the hormone as a compositional method. The book, which has emerged from chemical and microbial testing on my body, unfolds like a hormone with poems about chemicals and microbes (based on the actual substances and organisms I found in and on my body) floating in the stream of a long poem in sections called “Hormone.” I emphasized narrative sequence and the prose poem because hormones are dependent on cascading, sequential processes; they are inherently dramatic phenomena which respond to stimuli and lead to various effects. Hormones are a system of communication in the body. I wanted to write a book that explored the poetics of the hormone. I hope the book inspires people to think differently about how the “outside” of our bodies writes the “inside.”
A.E.: Cartography and Walking is an Idyll, in my opinion. Comparatively, how would you describe Kingdom; Phylum and Polymers and why?
A.D.: Kingdom, Phylum is concerned with the science and culture of ordering, categorizing, and defining. I was interested in exploring the tension between the necessity we have for order, for systems that make sense of the world, and the contingency of the categories we use to support those orders. People, organisms, objects, and environments, are always pushing against the boundaries of their definitions. We make orders to help us understand the world, but those orders can also contribute to profound misunderstandings, to prejudices that can limit our experiences of the world and especially the experiences of those subject to systematic discriminations. The Polymers, as I mentioned above, is an experiment in textual chemistry that explores our relationship with plastic in the Anthropocene. The book attempts to look at plastic a bit differently by considering how polymeric formations are already expressed in culture and language. Polymers write our bodies in the form of DNA and proteins, but also our material environments in the form of synthetic clothing, packaging, and other ubiquitous forms of plastic. I tried to respond to plastic by using the polymer as a kind of poetics, as a way to write through what I saw as suggestive connections between the environment, science, culture, and language.
A.E.: Canadian poetry has come a long way and is establishing itself as distinct from the English or American. In what directly observable way would you say this has affected your own career as a poet?
A.D.: I am a Canadian writer. However, my community of writers includes people all over the world. My ongoing interest in the Anthropocene and in environmental writing has put me in touch with writers who are concerned with their localities, for sure, but also with developing global concerns (pollution, inequality) that affect us all.
A.E.: Do you teach your own poetry in class – as a variety of Canadian poetry; if not; why not? I ask if you teach your own work because it (For example, The Polymers) is one of the best examples of your academic research specialization in “innovative poetics, ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and pataphysics.”
A.D.: As I mentioned, my research and my creative work overlap. I have certainly talked about my creative work in my classes because I teach students how to develop research-creation projects and I have used my own experiences as instructive examples. However, I do not teach my work as a variety of Canadian poetry. If other people want to do that, that’s fine.
A.E.: That reminds me… what was the reception to your experimental co-edited eco-critical anthology, Regreen (2009), co-edited with Madhur Anand.
A.D.: I believe it was well-received. It is out of print now because the press that published it has closed its doors. It may be time for another version of that book at some point soon.
A.E.: Could you please explain ‘Pataphysics’ to our audience in lay language?
A.D.: Pataphysics is defined variously as the science of imaginary solutions, the science of the particular, and the science of exceptions. It has its conceptual origins in the writings of the French proto-avant-gardist, Alfred Jarry. Historically, it has been a site of playful interaction between art and science, conscious of critiquing systematic, technocratic thinking by satirizing it and by employing its conceptual constraints. I see it as a potential creative-critical practice that stages collisions between disciplines in order to expose marginalized, exceptional perspectives that critique the effacing power of prevailing social and disciplinary attitudes. I see it as serious play.
A.E.: Are you working on a new poetry collection at the moment; if so, in what ways does it continue or extend your experimental parameters.
A.D.: My new book, Anatomic (Coach House Books), published very recently, was written in response to chemical and microbial testing on my body. I wanted to write a book that considered how the “outside” writes the “inside” in necessary ways (bacteria) and harmful ways (chemical pollution). Microbes perform important functions as part of our metabolism. They produce, for example, essential nutrients as well as neurotransmitters that regulate our moods and personalities. These nonhumans are fundamentally involved with making us human. Their abundance and diversity are also profoundly affected by the foods we eat and the environments we inhabit. Consequently, the signature of the Anthropocene can be seen in the effects of the high-fat, high-sugar Western diet on the guts of people around the world. Similarly, petrochemical pollution is measurable in the bodies of everyone, it is safe to say, as the military, industrial, and agricultural practices of the Anthropocene circulate in our blood and fat. I tested my blood and urine for chemicals. I swabbed parts of my body for bacteria. I sent stool samples to microbiologists to have my gut microbiome sequenced. I wrote poems about what I found—I wrote the stories of these chemicals and microbes, their biological properties, their cultural, and industrial significance, their involvement in political assassinations and political neglect. I wrote about my exposure history, trying to figure out the narratives that led to my own body burdens. Many of the chemicals I found are endocrine disruptors, which means they interfere with the way the body reads its hormonal messages. This idea of the hormone as a system of communication interests me a great deal; consequently, as I mentioned, I structured the book to unfold as a kind of hormone. I wrote about my anxiety with researching this work as I struggled to deal with the knowledge that these substances are inside me. My metabolism is connected to the metabolism of the planet, with its flows of energy and capital. I wanted to find a way to respond to this.
A.E.: Do you find, from your classroom experience and in your experience of the Canadian literary circle that there are new poets following in the direction of the new Avant Garde?
A.D.: This is a difficult question to answer. I don’t really know what would constitute the “new Avant-garde.” The “old” one is hard enough to define. I think contemporary poets feel free to use poetic tools from a variety of historical toolboxes. I see a lot of contemporary Canadian poetry that excites me because it does not fit into the neat categories that we might have used to define poetry a generation ago. Part of this is the result of the innovative work required to explore identities and perspectives that have been historically marginalized. New methods are needed. New orientations to the tradition are necessary.
A.E.: As a literary historian, would you say that there ever was any premonition in Canadian poetry of its robust contemporary experimentation?
A.D.: I think that aspects of Canadian poetry have been very experimental for a long time. There is a great tradition of innovative works from writers involved with The Toronto Research Group, Coach House Books, The Kootenay School, the vibrant scenes in Calgary, Book*hug, among many others (too many to mention, actually). Canada is at an interesting point in its history. It is struggling to come to terms with past and ongoing injustices towards Indigenous peoples, women, and others at the same time as it is struggling to confront the unfolding, “slow violence” of climate change and environmental degradation. Within all of this is a growing concentration of resources among a wealthy few, while more and more people are left with less and less. Contemporary poets will inevitably perform a variety of unpredictable experiments on the cultural limits and underlying assumptions of these historical challenges. Poetry always lives at the limits of language and culture, interrogating the boundaries of what it is possible to say or not say. I’m excited by the new encounters to these problems they will offer.
A.E.: Finally, MTLS will like to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk poetry with our audience.
A.D.: Thank you!
