Visioning Poetry and Activism

DecompE Martin Nolan and Jillian Harkness ask the authors of Decomp about poetry and activism and how harming the earth might just be human.TC: Where the language of poetry is often regarded for its multiplicity of meanings and ability to express complex experience, the language of activism is assumed to be much more rhetorical and direct. However, they both can be stirring or inspiring. Are the two modes of poetry and activism useful to each other? Do they overlap?SC/JS: I think they do overlap. My own experience as a poet-activist is that my poetry has generally evolved in a more “rhetorical and direct” direction as my sense of “community” has evolved and changed. However, there is generally an openness to the characteristic “telling it slant” of poetry in diverse audiences, and many in activist communities “get” that poetry will often oscillate, productively, between direct moments of “speaking truth to power” and more indirect attempts to capture the affects of resistance—outrage, solidarity, wild dreams, rage—which may come couched in convulsive or embodied/sound-centered language. Real, political complexity actually requires some of the multiplicity of meanings that poetry brings. There is no script here, no right or wrong, and the passage between poetry and activism is only policed by those with an “interest” in keeping them distinct, or monitoring what goes which way.TC: More specifically: Stephen writes of Christine Leclerc’s “Oilywood”—winner of the 2014 bp nichol award—that she is “one of the most impressive ‘committed’ poets I know.” Is the overlap between poetry and activism in the commitment the two modes lend to each other, or the commitment they share?SC/JS: The commitment I had in mind here is a commitment to a cause, to a collective and collaborative effort to change something in the social and material world—a commitment so strong/extensive that it cannot but shape the work of the committed writer. This sort of commitment has long been censured in literary circles, for the fear that it leads to “propaganda” and “bad art.” While there are certainly historical examples that this fear is based on, the idea that someone simply cannot make committed art—that the very fact of social and political commitment necessitates a sort of “bad faith” and inevitable artistic failure—is ludicrous, and there are no end of examples to disprove the idea. Poetry has always existed in a social matrix that the writer enters, dwells in, lives through, and thus writes out of. Somehow, at some point, we got the strange idea that writing comes out of an individual distinct from any context or social ties/responsibilities. No such individuals exist, and poetry is shaped by an intellectual and experiential world that is shared. This isn’t to say that poetry can’t be some sort of “haven” or “shelter” from a difficult world—but it is just as likely to be a means of grappling with and interacting with that difficult social world. Christine Leclerc is a great example of someone whose poetry is an extension of her social engagements, and whose social engagements in part take the form of poetry.TC: In our interview last year, you mentioned the feeling that the Decomp project was somewhat complicit in the colonization of the land: “When you go into the wilderness, onto unceded land, and return with an art project—well, there’s always this level of complicity with colonization.” Meanwhile, some environmental writers, such as Jack Turner in his book, The Abstract Wild, advise us to simply leave nature as it is in order to prevent further harm. Is there a guilt involved in writing about the environment, perhaps similar to a feeling the hiker has as they clean up their campsite: knowing they’ve tried their best to leave it undisturbed, but their simple presence might still be harmful? How do poetry and activism work on each other in this fraught relationship?

Stephen Collis was recently pursued by Kinder Morgan in a civil suit for “trespassing”SC/JS: It doesn’t have to be guilt. Complicity is more productive when we can step past guilt and acknowledge responsibilities. The issue, for us at least, wasn’t to completely refuse the usual writing/art project pattern of “field work” and then “published results,” but to try to find new/different ways of moving through this process, and of being aware of its pitfalls and “extractive” tendencies.The notion of “no contact” is an intriguing one, but perhaps, in the end, not very generative. In a recent CBC interview with journalist Paul Salopek (who is retracing human migration out of Africa on a seven year, 21,000-mile journey from Ethiopia to South America), Salopek lamented the fact that everywhere he walks, even the most remotest of regions, there is garbage. Couple this with the tons of “seen and unseen” plastic within our oceans and we’re perhaps in the situation where “no contact” is defunct; only decomposition remains. We could ‘stay away,’ but in many ways we’ve infiltrated ecosystems with the artificial bodies we use to service our organic ones.  Leaving a book outside is then, to follow your analogy, a little like shitting in the woods but not leaving the can of Pilsner. Degrees of complicity? We acknowledge that ‘harm’ then, as you suggest, takes place with the physical process of the art project—of placing our bodies and cultural productions in the woods—but the notion of writing as harm is an interesting one.  All making (poesis) is harming—that’s the unavoidable metabolism of human being: we carve our lives out of living environments. The question is: can we imagine limits to the harm we cause? Can we harm more consciously, carefully?TC: If all making is harm, and human beings are makers if nothing else, then we could conclude that all human living is harm to the Earth. So perhaps we accept that our very existence, our needs, damage the planet, and we try to manage that harm, to do it more consciously, as you say. An unpleasant thought, for sure. So does the question become not what can poetry and activism do to help guide us through this difficult problem, but how could we possibly navigate such a fraught relationship without the assistance of the nuance, double meanings, etc, offered by poetic speech? On the flip side, is the more common way of addressing ecological damage—through a scientific lens—unable to convey exactly how difficult our present position on this planet is, given the subjective factors—like human psychology—that come into play and so often help to block action on hugely important environmental issues?SC/JS: The first thing here is maybe not to put too much pressure on poetry! Poetry won’t solve all the world’s problems. But neither will science, or any other single discipline or practice. Science can provide us with the information, say, about the harm our living causes—our co-dependence with other living systems, and the impact our economic and industrial activity has on natural systems. Then other creative endeavours and disciplines need to engage with solutions, visions of alternative ways of living more harmoniously and sustainably, pathways to transformation, etc. (If we are to survive, at least, this is what needs to happen.) Poetry can be a part of that visioning process, and it can be a part of the process through which we become engaged, or build our capacity to transform ourselves and our ways of life. Just as lots of other communal and creative practices can. But we are always in a complex situation. We take up a lot of room and drain more resources from the planet than the planet can sustain; our consciousness of the fact that we are a life form that depends upon other life forms means we do indeed need the complex thinking through connection and contradiction that a discourse like poetry enables and deploys. So—poetry or poetry and activism likely won’t save the world, but it is one place we can find the nuanced, multi-layered and oblique thinking we need to begin altering our conceptual course.Stephen Collis is the author of five books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010) and three parts of the on-going “Barricades Project”: Anarchive (New Star, 2005), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008, 2014), and To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013). An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012).Jordan Scott is the author of Decomp (with Stephen Collis), Silt, which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Blert. Blert was adapted into a short film for Bravo! and was the subject of an online interactive documentary commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada. He lives in Vancouver, BC.