“Devouring the Letters”: An Interview with Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Authors of Decomp

Stephen Collisis an award-winning poet, activist and professor of contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. His poetry books include Anarchive, The Commons, On the Material (awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), Decomp(with Jordan Scott), and the forthcoming To the Barricades. He lives in Vancouver, BC. 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. The following interview was conducted via e-mail in December 2013.   Jillian Harkness: This is quite a unique project. How did the idea for Decomp arise? Why Darwin? Stephen Collins & Jordan Scott: It was Jordan’s idea to leave a book outside to rot for a year. It was very gestural, very simple, almost off-hand and in jest: with all this writing “about” nature, what happens if you leave a book in “nature,” and let the elements do the rest? It was also a way of placing what is intimate (books) against the weather, “exposing” them. It was gestural, yes, but also infinitely curious. Long discussions led to the project being framed around B.C. ecosystems and our use of Darwin. On the Origin of Species is a foundational book for our contemporary understanding of the place of human beings in the natural world. Despite his very nineteenth century need to categorize and order, Darwin levelled the playing field, theorizing that all animals (including we human beings) were governed by the same evolutionary processes. Going back to Darwin was a little like going back to the “source” for writing about nature and our un/belonging there. But this is also quite ridiculous, right? Here we were, two city poets (more or less), fumbling through the brush, spending hours on the ground, pretending to be “naturalists,” laughing at the absurdity of our crawling and careful collecting. In the introduction to the book, Jonathan Skinner writes:

We all know that On the Origin of the Species is really about the disintegration of “species.” A death knell to teleology that was not lost on Marx and Engles. Darwin could not have written this book outside the frames of taxonomy, and yet he pursued the very undoing of taxonomy. No more Adam. Or always Adam, in genealogy. An inability to name could come only at the end of civilization.

So, for these reasons too, but also for the durability of Darwin’s sentences and the poetics locatable within his notions of hybridism, variation, selection, and monstrosity. We’re always looking for theories and material outside poetry to bring into contact with it. In Darwin’s structures of thinking and categorizing the physical world, a possible poetics whorled within this architecture. What does Darwin’s variation and selection look like as poetics? The applications of such theories to our own work was of course more ghosting than habitual, more like shifting weather patterns in our prose than something set in stone. JH: What was the collaborative process behind the writing of Decomp? There are many different voices, even named speakers, beyond yourselves, as well as different modes, ranging from an almost journal-like account of the trips, to the experimental interpretations of the Darwin text. In addition to this, there are the images, which beautifully document the experience. How did it all come together? SC & JS: We started with the images of the decayed books. They presented a strange language of their own, or a language unique to what each ecosystem did to the book left in its midst. We had to learn this language, and begin writing with it. But, in trying to resist simple binaries of “culture” and “nature,” we didn’t want anything to be “pure”—we wanted to tamper with everything. So we included the process, our conversations about it, notes from other writers, research, etc. We realized that of course we, the people who left the books outside, are complicit in the process, behind which we can’t hide. Everything had to keep being drawn back into the process of decomposition, of falling apart. We were also resistant to making the form of our writing visually represent decomposition. We thought we’d leave that to the photographs and have the decomposition occur through both collaboration/drafting (and be alright with this relative invisibility) and the content itself.

“Going back to Darwin was a little like going back to the “source” for writing about nature and our un/belonging there.”

There is an incredible amount of (re)cycling, composting, and repetition/variation throughout the book in words and theoretical inquiries. Along with the ecosystem’s ‘edited’ versions of Darwin, we also used the material of what went missing—the text that rotted into the ground and atmosphere and into the mouths of critters. So the writing, in this way, became a kind of reclamation and questioning of what text went missing and why—our “pensive but perturbed writing.” But always, as mentioned above, a kind of grasping at constantly decaying forms of our own expressivity. JH: The multiplicity and collaboration present in the writing is displayed on the pages of the book in very particular ways. The typographic style has a framing and layering effect so one must take them all in at once, while also paying attention to spaces and silences. The flow of the text is very open—a word that comes up often throughout. Do these stylistic methods achieve a more authentic means of expressing your project, which at its heart is, you might say, a collaboration between a human way of knowing the world and an ecological way? SC & JS: The photographs were always at the core of the project. We didn’t want to just “transcribe” what was readable there—we want the photographs to be “texts” in their own right. So we played with a number of different ways of writing out from and back to that photographic base. There are thousands of photographs, and we always conceived of having them live online, in a kind of archival-heap of visual poetry. In the book itself, however, you have brief samples of “The Readable” with oblique “Glosses” on them. But then you have these strange essay-like prose passages that take the language of the photographic texts and work up not altogether rational explanations and explorations. Poems, footnotes, and other texts intervene. We wanted this multiplicity to register on the page in some way, but never in a way that would shut the project down or contain it: it always had to be open to further permutations of decomposition, further un/writings. It’s a fascinating process, to collaborate in the ways that we did, syllable by syllable, line by line. There’s no finality to this kind of process, no satisfaction. When we perform the book, we change lines constantly, ambush each other and extend or truncate our assigned sections.

"Poems, footnotes, and other texts intervene."

In a sense, this is a kind of failure of the product, the book, and perhaps even a return to our desire to leave books outside in the first place, for its chance and vulnerability. Our writing will not last, there’s no permanence for us, only certitude in what takes place outside, indifferent to what we write in letters. We’re not sure how to respond to the “authenticity” question: we wanted to “collaborate” with these ecosystems in some sense, but also not ever lose sight of the affected nature of such a gesture, and of the fact that “nature,” as a collaborator, might not have anything consistent, or anything “readable” to say at all in the end. That the analogy of language and genetics, language and evolution, can only be taken so far. Then the forest closes in, and the body rots into the ground. JH: There is an effort to demystify the idea of Nature and the Natural in Decomp, and one way it appears is through an exploration of, and experimentation with, the language we use for talking about it. Names of local plants and wildlife, as well as scientific terms, appear throughout but are used in unfamiliar contexts. Their sound and meanings open up as nouns but start to act as verbs, letters are added or disappear, and the inanimate becomes animated. In the first section, you write “without another name we are pinned scions of nomenclature saying Natural for its errancy.” What is significant here about the intertwining of language and nature? SC & JS: We found ourselves trying to “learn” the very strange and often ecosystem-specific language the decayed books presented us. There were obvious word fragments, but these seemed more new words than simply damaged text. And there were lots of new coinages we became fascinated with (such as “accordinbitants,” which suggested something like “the inhabitants of accord”). Decay gave us both a lexicon, but also a sort of “grammar.” This was a good deal of fun to play with, and is certainly where we are most enjoying the “game” of writing “with nature.” But again—we constantly veer off from this base, refusing the fantasy of merger, although we erase our tracks, so to speak, by always doubling back to the language of the ecosystem, or the particular decayed book we are working with. This desire to resist easy positionality (“look, we are erasing the line between nature and culture!”) led us to keep returning to that tired, sad, seemingly kitschy if not entirely empty word “nature.” As soon as it’s pronounced, we fall away once again from what we would name via the word; and as soon as we fall away, the fragments of our copies of Darwin led us back again to a strange space where subject and object, poem and place, seem to merge once again. JH: Early in, you contextualize your regional classification system, noting that it comes from the work of the “provincial government forestry ministry, under a logic of resource extraction … a map made of capital,” which you also relate to Darwin’s project. At one point you write: “We are midway between poetry and doctrine.” What, then, are the political concerns of Decomp? How does the process and form of the book lend itself to these concerns? SC & JS: As we suggest in a footnote, Darwin’s language is laced with capitalism’s value system: adaptations are regularly referred to as “profitable,” and evolutionary steps are “improvements” (an eighteenth and nineteenth century code-word for profitability via privatization and enclosure of what was once common). So understanding and classification blurs into exploitation, as even when doing something as apparently “objective” as science, our language can become polluted with (capitalist) ideology. At a recent reading in Prince George, Rob Budde (who contributes to the book) said that he “wishes we were harder on Darwin.” We think the critique is in the rotting (or even in the giving-back-to-the-land gesture), but these are still interventions. Read this way, the book reveals our positions as poet-litterers, trash-subjects and trespassers (on unceded territories throughout B.C.). 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. We don’t completely see eye-to-eye on the issue, but we are more for a poetry that reveals its own limitations—which we think Decomp does.

“ ... it always had to be open to further permutations of decomposition, further un/writings.”

The book’s politics are mostly mulched into its textual process of decomposition. The form is one of grieving for the limitations and failures of cultural production, the limitations and failures of meaning and unmeaning. The inability to really “hear” or “see” nature in a book. Failure as method when there seems no clear/uncompromised path to take. In the end, the book is very much an object, as mysterious to its creators/collaborators as it will be to any readers. JH: I was surprised to see people in the images. At times in Decomp there is an ambivalence toward the human place in nature, and possibly toward your project altogether: “Our genus sometimes an understory, sometimes a lens.” Cynicism shows through at times: “We were there. So what … Our magical incantations, worlding ruminants. Fuck us. We are homes for others.” There may be a sarcastic tone when you ask: “And in reality, why should we stop building and moulding the world’s clay about our shelters?” but in the next breath a romantic optimism emerges to “take infinity into our lungs.” How are these two polarities integrated in the text? SC & JS: We wouldn’t necessarily see them as “integrated.” Rather, they purposefully “grate.” That’s ultimately what we wanted: a process of positing and negating propositions for how to relate to the material we were working with, how to relate, ultimately, via language, to the “natural world” we are a part of, but constantly separate ourselves from it as we destroy “nature” via our human modes of production and consumption. All writing in relation to nature at best erases and re-establishes the differences between writing and “nature.” It is by definition an “over there” we visit.

"Decay gave us both a lexicon, but also a sort of 'grammar.' ”

We want to come as close as we can to erasing the line, only to have the line snap back into place. Because, how can we prevent that from happening? To do so, it seems, would entail not writing a “book”? In our case, we did write a book. Something about the images and language and ecological specificity kept drawing us back, making us want to have an object we could hold in our hands again, after letting those other books go into the soil. So we decided, as a sort of reminder, to begin each section with some sort of human image—the invading body in the ecosystem, searching or reaching for its book. We wouldn’t call it “cynicism” so much as the will to fail, and then fail again. In an interview published in OmniVerse, the American poet Andrew Zawacki comes very close to our own concerns in commenting on writing and entropy (in the context of Blanchot and Celan). He says, in part:

At the same time, the work is always falling out of itself as well, foreclosing its possibilities in favor of a book, which is said to be finished, hence can be held in one’s hands and sold, read by other people and thereby changed by that reading. Writing is constantly defaulting on its singular chance by putting those possibilities into writing—but what other choice does it have? If it refrains from closing itself in a book by foreclosing on its open status as a work, nobody encounters it. The impossible: writing is undone by the very movement of writing—that’s the “isn’t” that writing “is.”

JH: As a follow-up to this last question, and maybe a bit more personal, who is Roger? I was intrigued by his voice in the Gabriola section; he acts as a sort of foil for the other, maybe more sensitive, voices in the text, but no less insightful. His invocation of Darwin’s “rotting corpse” highlights a key metaphor in Decomp: the linkage of books and bodies, texts and subjects. SC & JS: Roger is Roger Farr, a poet living on Gabriola. One of the books was left near his house there. We really did receive these (albeit playfully) gruff emails from him, asking us to come clean up our mess, as it were. We decided to leave him in there as a divergent, dissenting voice—the voice that is suspicious of precious art-projects, suspicious of the project’s methods. JH: Typically, conventional nature writing seeks the perfect mimetic representation of nature, describing stunning landscapes and sublime experiences. However, Kate Ribgy, in her writing on ecopoetics in “Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis,” suggests that to really give a voice to the earth, art, and poetry would highlight the ways in which they inevitably come up short of the task, the ways in which we can only partially express the “unsayability” of our natural experience. In Decomp, you ask “What has taken place outside?” and answer “This is not for us to say.” And in your final section, Darwin’s text was found unreadable. Does the work of Decomp aim to underline the “unsayability” of the project’s experience? SC & JS: Yes, that’s definitely one way of framing it. Though we love the doubleness, the linguistic marking of unsayability, the marking of absence, so that it becomes another sort of presence. We felt all along that we were offering something of a critique of ecopoetics—at least the simple version by which “nature poetry” dons a more theoretically astute identity simply by being renamed “ecopoetics.” Decomposition—that very messy, broken, dissolute aspect of natural cycles—was a perfect “trope to trope us out of tropes,” a method to take on writing about nature as a messy writing in/through nature. So, no stunning landscapes. Just the view from the soil itself. Or the mangled text that you can’t completely reconcile as “beautiful” or even “a poem.” But, in saying that, sublimity and romanticism do enter the book in many ways. We think these moments are sincere. As sincere as letting the unreadable register itself and breathe within the book. Something does happen to our bodies in these “natural” spaces, and we’re not suggesting for a moment that there’s not pleasure at these thresholds. It’s a complex process—our bodies and poems in ecosystems, be it as invader species or beings desiring synergy. We are the ones seeking revelation. The human and the desire for meaning cannot be expelled, even though we can and do try to oscillate between the poles of the sayable and the unsayable. JH: Also quoted in Decomp is Darwin’s final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, in which he praises the industriousness and intelligence of worms and their unceasing work of renewing the earth. Adam Phillips has written a book on Darwin and his writing on worms in particular; he writes:

Darwin had been able to describe, through the worms, that the earth could look after itself; that there were nourishing processes going on beneath the surface, and that nature could also collaborate with what was then called Man, in his efforts to sustain himself … he [Darwin] would find again and again, that the sense in which we are in nature, makes the word “in” redundant.

In Decomp, it is stated that “we will be as worms.” Is Decomp an attempt to become more sincerely involved with the more-than-human world, or at least an offer of hope for this possibility? SC & JS: We couldn’t resist using this book, once we read it. The notion (we quote this part) that all the soil of England “has passed many times through, and will again pass many times through, the intestinal canals of worms” was just too delicious. There’s a lowering of our own position/perspective in this (just like worms, we simply passed Darwin’s decayed text again and again through our writing), which we were attracted to. But also, as you suggest, the independence of the system of decomposition, and the totality it forms as everything, every biological being and process, in the end, is in the service of the production of soil—including our humble efforts to “make art” by leaving books outdoors. The books we left out became home and food for many creatures. We took those homes away with us. The remains now sitting in boxes in Stephen’s office, and visible in the photographs in our book, are the leftovers of a feast to which an entire ecosystem was invited—by us, for us, and only for a brief time. We, again, are invader species. We, again, are poets desiring a hollowed-out certitude that our works will even last, and that the processes we live among would even care. Maybe in this way the “grief” we were exploring—the failure to mean, the failure to fully “become nature,” our species’ failure in being completely out of balance with the rest of the natural world, and the non-response of “nature” to our gestural intervention—is more of a feast day for “nature,” indifferently devouring the letters used to call its name.