Poetry & Resilience: Lung, Muscle, Archive, Beautiful Cell // Kim Trainor
As part of our guest edited month, Kim Trainor ruminates on ecopoetics during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’m writing this in a small, stitched notebook made in Japan, with the words LIFE / PISTACHIO stamped across the front: the colour of dried blood on pistachio green. It’s March 16, 2020. An RVA virus called SARS-CoV-2 has slipped from bat to pangolin, a smudge of blood to human hand to lip to lung, lungs. Breathe. Breathe.
I’m writing a long sequence called Seeds. Each poem, each seed, focuses attention on an organism or human artefact—Betula papyrifera (Paper birch), lenticel, lentil, Picea sitchensis (Sitka spruce), Galanthus nivalis (Snowdrop), shelter, codex—each holding within its design an idea or sequence of DNA, driven to respond to the existential threat of global warming. I’m thinking about adaptation, resilience. When did I begin to realize I was writing ecopoetry? Writing about drunken trees in the boreal, or chloroplast genomes, or vials of landraces and Crookneck squash in the Svalbard seed vault? Maybe it began with the wildfires in the summer of 2016, when I spent time in the Okanagan and could taste the ash as it settled in my lungs.
The streets empty out. This morning Trudeau announced he was closing the border. “Come home. It’s time to come home.” Flights grounded. Travellers quarantined. Schools and colleges close. The world slows.
I’ve been thinking a long time now about attention as a moral act. Iain McGilchrist tells us there is a kind of pinpoint attention, typological, taxonomical, recirculating the dead—but helpful and analytical. Other kinds are broadband and perforated; light spills through the paper lantern’s tracery and pinprick holes like stars. McGilchrist says, “Without alertness, we are as if asleep, unresponsive to the world around us; without vigilance, we cannot become aware of anything we do not already know.” I carry a notebook everywhere I go, like a botanist’s loupe—except I have one of those, too. Words are lenses. Galanthus nivalis. SNW DRP. Milk flower. Viola alba. White violet. Perce-neige. Floral formula: *P3+3 A3+3 G(3). Chromosome number: 2n = 24. Violette de la chandeleur. Fiore della purificazione. Pendulous, nodding, bell-shaped white flower. Scrawny and drooping. Like a floppy-eared goat. They flower earlier every year. Everything skewed. Some Inuit elders observe, “The world has tilted on its axis.”
At a meeting of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators (FPSE) ad hoc climatic action committee, Eduardo sits across from me at a long table strewn with teacups and papers. He says, “We need the poets and the artists to reach the people, to get the message out. As scientists, we have failed.”
Every morning I check Twitter for the CO2 reading at Mauna Loa for the day before: 414.25 ppm.
@Keeling_curve: If there is any benefit to the coronavirus event in terms of slowing the pace of climate change, it could be in the changing of people’s travel and work habits in ways that lead to sustained reductions in fossil fuel use. Only those kinds of long-term systemic reductions will change the trajectory of C02 levels in the atmosphere, Keeling said. #coronavirus #COVID19
And now I turn to the black Johns Hopkins world map that charts the progress of the pandemic in bright red splashes. Hit refresh.
The electron micrograph of SARS-CoV-2 is beautiful, a sphere delicate as moon jelly, sheathed in a fiery crown. Pierced with electrons, it burns copper and gold.
The word goes out to shelter in place. Wuhan. South Korea. Singapore. Italy. Spain. San Francisco shuts down. Montreal. Toronto. Vancouver. The stores have run out of supplies: surgical gloves, isopropyl rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, bleach, antiseptic wipes. Avoid the bus. Avoid the Sky Train. Keep your distance. Stay home. There’s snow on The Lions. Cyprus and Grouse Mountain are shut down. My sister texts me: Will there be enough food? What vegetables should I grow? My friend Noah texts: so…tonight? whiskey? let’s drink through the meltdown….
I’ve been thinking about theories of knowing. The impossibility of approaching Kant’s dark noumena. The need to reject idealism. The obligation to respect and acknowledge this darkness. Oblique glance of object-oriented ontology (OOO)—the lenticel is a tiny mouth, like a slash in the bark of a tree that breathes in O2. Consciousness as the intrinsic nature of all matter. Catherine Owen writes, “The poem is a lung.” Adrienne Rich described “the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference.” José Ortega y Gasset wrote that metaphor is “the beautiful cell.”
I go out into the forest along the Juan de Fuca trail and pitch my tent in the shelter of Sitka spruce. This is the ancestral land of the Pacheedaht, Children of the Sea Foam. There is just enough room in this nook high over the shoreline to stake the fly. It’s shoulder season and cold. It rains all night. The bark of Sitka spruce has smooth, purplish-brown scales. Its shallow roots, plaited with mycelia, absorb magnesium, phosphorous. Suck and hush of the tide. Invisible to me, the needles shelter tiny chloroplasts, draw energy from sunlight, bind it with carbon. Chloroplast: chloros, green, joined to plastes, “the one who forms.” A Sitka spruce on Campbell Island in the Southern Ocean records the peak of thermonuclear bomb tests in 1965, its tree rings capturing traces of radiocarbon (14C)—a “golden spike.” Read its testimony—here is the onset of the Anthropocene.
Some poems have a similar function—lung, muscle, archive, beautiful cell.
Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in the logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Her second book, Ledi, short-listed for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award, describes the excavation of an Iron Age horsewoman's grave in the steppes of Siberia. Her next book, Bluegrass, will appear with Icehouse Press (Goose Lane) in 2022. She teaches in the English Department at Douglas College and lives in Vancouver, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
