by Lynn Keller
The chemical toxicity of plastics points to another scalar problem: we are accustomed to understanding toxicity as correlated to dosage; that is the premise behind all sorts of EPA or FDA regulations of acceptable levels of consumption or exposure. But while natural toxins tend to do more damage at high doses, the effects of endocrine disruptors are often not dose-dependent. As Nancy Langston explains in Toxic Bodies, unlike natural toxins, synthetic endocrine disruptors often lack a threshold below which they produce no adverse effects; their “biological effects occur at doses that are orders of magnitude lower than current dose limits for other toxins.”11 This produces a regulatory problem (or lapse) intensified by the fact that these effects may not be apparent immediately after exposure; exemplifying what Rob Nixon has called slow violence, the effects may be delayed, invisible until manifest in subsequent generations.
While keenly aware of plastic as a multifaceted environmental problem—as accumulating nonbiodegradable waste; as a danger to environmental, human, and animal health; as an industry that contributes significantly to global warming; and so forth—these poets do not interact with plastics in solely negative terms.12 The richness of their work lies in its unsimplifying ambivalence. Plastic is a wondrous material that has been attractive to artists and designers since its invention, and it is bound up with beneficial or intriguing as well as troubling aspects of our petrochemical era. It has come to be essential to the world we inhabit, defining our material culture, making possible medical as well as military advances, even determining our modes of digital communication. As is suggested by his title, The Polymers, Dickinson’s interest in plastics is part of the volume’s larger nonjudgmental interest in “giant molecules composed of numerous repeating parts,” long chains of recurring forms that are the basis of natural as well as synthetic materials—of “the human brain, skin, hair, as well as DNA”—and which he finds metaphorically may describe all sorts of cultural practices involving obsessive conduct, linguistic or social repetition, memory, intimacy, and interrelation. In his volume he sometimes explores the toxic effects of plastic, but more frequently he exposes the cultural polymers that determine people’s behavior and bind people together. The structure of the volume and of poems within it, moreover, conveys Dickinson’s interest in how the molecular structure and categorizations of plastic might generate “an organizing principle (a poetics)” for his own writing. For Reilly, it is not so much polymeric forms as their trait of plasticity that generates the positive side of her ambivalence. In her work, plastics speak to the flexible resourcefulness of the human brain demonstrated in their very invention; to the malleability of language and form that is so crucial to the poet’s craft; and to the plasticity of artistic materials more generally that fosters invention and rewards human creativity, enabling new formations. The intriguing characteristics of plastic, then, feed Dickinson’s and Reilly’s experimentalism, which each hopes may open possibilities for ways of thinking alternative to those that brought us to our present environmental crises.
CHAINS OF INTERCONNECTION IN ADAM DICKINSON’S THE POLYMERS
The Canadian poet Adam Dickinson has explicitly located poetic experiments like his as pataphysical projects (more on that momentarily) that “constitute a form of resistance to the colossal science project that the industrialized world is currently performing on the bodies of its citizens without consent.” In an interview he similarly observed that “pollution is fundamentally a matter of experimental writing—we are creating chemicals that affect the endocrine system in our bodies, interfering with how hormonal messages are sent and received.”13 The huge unethical and uncontrolled scientific experiment in which we are caught calls for a responding, ethical literary experiment. Yet, as Dickinson observes, the contributions poetic experimentalism might make to environmentalism have rarely been recognized. While he earnestly acknowledges the importance of scientific insights into the nature of materiality, in several essays Dickinson has lamented that “the ecocritical emphasis on scientifically established realism has resulted in suspicion of experimental poetics”; “the argument that environmentally focused literature sufficiently represents reality by reflecting scientific stories about the world undermines the importance of alternate forms of thought expressed in the metaphorical and paratactic poetics of experimental writing.” Moreover, the prevalent equation of realism (as what is desired in ecocriticism) and materialism (as what science offers) is, he believes, reductive; Dickinson cites Daniel Tiffany, who points out in Toy Medium that “the crisis of representation in quantum physics, for example, exposes the fact that ‘materialism is not inherently realistic.’ ” He quotes Tiffany: “materialism in its most rigorous forms descends unavoidably into language, to a place where matter is mostly not matter, where matter cannot be distinguished from the tropes and analogies that make it intelligible (and hence secure the equation of materialism and realism).”14 In Dickinson’s view, we need to recognize the semiotic nature of science as well as the contributions experimental poetics can make to understanding of the world science explores by expanding the current field of signification. This is where pataphysics comes in. “The playful poetics of pataphysics,” he writes, “represent a serious attempt to think of art as an alternative form of science in its own right capable of expanding what matters in semiotic and material environments by interrogating the distinctions between culture and nature, and between human and nonhuman.”15
So what is pataphysics? Invented in the early twentieth century by the French writer Alfred Jarry (perhaps best known as the author of Ubu Roi and as the inspiration for the later Oulipo), it “is ‘the science of imaginary solutions’; it studies the particulars and exceptions that ultimately inhabit and subvert the generalizing assumptions of traditional scientific systems.” Dickinson sees pataphysical texts, which explore unconventional perspectives, as contributing to ecocriticism by “conducting research at the complex and controversial thresholds between nature and culture”; the methodological constraints employed in their construction are analogous to experimental controls in a scientific laboratory.16
The varied compositional constraints Dickinson employs in The Polymers are based on either the specific molecular make-up of polymers (the number of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, or chlorine atoms) or the repetition and recombination essential to their chainlike forms. The volume’s poems are preceded by a page of translucent plastic headed “Cellophane,” containing text that defines polymers, notes their prevalence, and points to some of the significance plastic holds—for example, “plastic marks both the presence and the absence of natural objects, embodying tension between the literal and the metaphorical, as it recreates the world as an alternate or translated reality.” On the back side of that plastic page Dickinson explains the book’s project in terms that make it comparable to contemporary genetic science: “This book directs its attention to sequencing the seven principal synthetic resins that predominate in Western petroleum culture.” That sequencing produces the volume’s broadest constraint: the poems are arranged in seven sections corresponding to the seven most common categories of plastic resins, familiar to readers through recycling codes, with each poem constituting an atom in the molecular formula for that section’s polymer; this determines the number of poems in the book. A drawing of its plastic resin molecule functions as each section’s table of contents; the section’s poem titles take the place of symbols for chemical elements in the usual diagram of the molecule. As a further development of this constraint, the titles begin with the initial letter of that atom’s abbreviation (H for hydrogen, C for carbon, etc.). The poems, Dickinson states in an interview, “attempt to map the social expression of these resins, replacing each constituent atom with a specific behaviour or phenomena.” The final section, “Other”—corresponding to the number 7 resin identification code with that same name—introduces two imaginary polymer molecules that potentially could exist, generated by Dickinson’s search for “the repeating chemical units at the heart of
some controversial, culturally influential texts that have been subjected to their own forms of historical repetition and obsession.”17 The texts he chose, and for which he created striking molecular models, are Darwin’s Origin of Species and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The volume’s poems are constructed following a range of polymeric constraints; some of those “experimental protocols” are spelled out, or at least suggested, in the “Materials and Methods” section at the back of the book. Describing a few of these polymeric experiments will convey the flavor of this conceptual project: a couple of poems record remarks overheard in line—a human chain—for museums; one arranges names of coalition military operations in the Iraq War, while another makes a polymer of states’ license plate slogans. Several present only drawings of polymers and give them titles that imaginatively interpret the designs made by those drawings; one interpreted as a police phalanx is titled, “Honed Security Procedures Following the G-20 Toronto Summit Protests,” for instance, while another containing two pairs of hexagons interprets them as T-shirted breasts with the title, “Che Guevara Delighted to See His Face on the Breasts of So Many Beautiful Women.” One poem is composed of “the immediate words on either side of all occurrences of the word ‘and’ in the ‘Nature’ section of [Emerson’s] ‘Nature.’ ” “Halter Top” is made entirely of words devised anagrammatically from the letters in “polyethylene terephthalate.” Another anagrammatically constructed poem consists of alphabetically arranged “constituent elements” derived from section 64 of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act—the section that defines the conditions for identifying a substance as environmentally toxic. “Historical Accident” recalls a story from the history of plastics concerning a contest in the 1860s for devising a material to substitute for the ivory of billiard balls. “Corporatocracy,” playing with the fairy tale of Pinocchio, imagines various resins for lies; in successively lengthening lines analogous to Pinocchio’s nose that grows longer with each lie he tells, it describes “resins respon- / sible for the accu-/ mulation of un-/ truths in the human / nose.”18
A simple demonstration of the way in which Dickinson’s formal constraints speak to the impact of plastics is offered by the first poem in the first section—organized according to the chemical construction of polyester (resin code number 1)—titled “Hail.” As these opening lines demonstrate, a chain is generated through the familiar repetitive device of anaphora (repetition of constitutive parts being a key trait of polymeric molecules):
Hello from inside
the albatross
with a windproof lighter
and Japanese police tape.
Hello from staghorn
coral beds
waving at the beaked whale’s
mistake,
all six square metres
of fertilizer bags.
Hello from can-opened
delta gators,
taxidermied
with twenty-five grocery sacks
and a Halloween Hulk mask.
Hello from the zipped-up
leatherback
who shat bits of rope for a month.
Hello from bacteria
making their germinal way
to the poles in the pockets
of packing foam. (TP 7)
Marine animals such as beaked whales and leatherback sea turtles are, like the albatrosses of Midway Island made famous by Chris Jordan’s photography, among the creatures that frequently consume plastic detritus that blocks their intestines and often kills them. Hailing the reader later in the poem, alongside animals threatened by inland plastic waste (“desiccated, / bowel-obstructed camels”) and some of the discarded plastic objects that trap, choke, or otherwise threaten nonhuman animals (“six-pack rings” or “fishnet thigh-highs”), are bodily fluids key to mammalian reproduction: “breast milk,” “cord blood,” “sperm.” These, too, are infiltrated with dangerous chemicals from plastic. The poem catalogs grizzly manifestations of Anthropocene trans-corporeality involving plastics, while its mention of coral beds gestures toward other, equally deadly anthropogenic environmental changes. That all the damaged bodies offer the same greeting, “Hello from . . .,” speaks to their environmental interconnection and our common vulnerability to the same human-produced materials.
Like “Hail,” most of the poems in the volume are composed in complete sentences, chains of words linked in accordance with the rules of syntax. Often, however, the sentences are skewed by the punning or homophonic substitution of unexpected words or letters—as in the poem made largely of twisted verbal formulae that begins, “For all intensive purposes, the fire distinguishers / are pigments of the imagination” (TP 23).19 A different kind of verbal torquing in the poem “Hormones” gives the impression of an elegant example of Mad Libs, a fill-in-the-blank word game in which players start with a phrasal template and insert words of the correct grammatical category that they believe will surprise and amuse when read aloud. The overall structure of the syntactic chain is not modified, but the unexpected words are like substituted atoms whose unanticipated chemical bonds shift the properties of the molecule or sentence. “Hormones” opens:
None of the customs officers
can read the receipts new chemists
wave at the border.
Passports gullwing on the counter
as guards ringbill signatures
in stiff-lip service to regs
and rebar. Checkpoints
are the flagships of chalk lines
and compromised eggs.
Nucleotides full of acid rain
slick capital letters
asleep in their holsters
and mess up the paragraph
as a small arms insurgent
of epidermal composition. (TP 50)
Unlike Mad Libs, Dickinson’s surprising sentences often have serious implications. Here, sentences apparently about crossing national borders that involve customs officers, checkpoints, officials with guns, and the showing of passports are infiltrated with terms invoking various kinds of chemical pollution that do not respect man-made geographical boundaries. The incomprehensibility to the customs officers of the “receipts new chemists / wave at the border” suggests that the new chemicals that are continually arriving are substances about which little is known. Invention outpacing knowledge is a formative condition for the modern risk society, the kind of society sketched here. The dangers of some better-known manufactured chemicals are suggested elsewhere in these lines: “compromised eggs” evoke the thinning eggshells (and consequent reduced reproduction of some bird species) associated with DDT. This follows after allusions to ring-billed gulls, a species susceptible to poisoning from organochlorine pesticides, including DDT, as well as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenols) released from, among other synthetic products, plastics. Acid rain’s ability to cross borders makes it “mess up” the relations between Canada and the United States, as well as relations between states in the United States, since pollution produced by burning fossil fuels on one side of a border commonly drifts across to affect the wildlife, forests, water, and air quality on the other side; as Beck has noted, the hazards characterizing a risk society are supranational and do not respect national borders.
Mention of “epidermal composition” introduces yet another porous boundary crucial to trans-corporeality and associated risks, the membrane of the skin. The statement about this poem from “Materials and Methods” provides a relevant, if characteristically oblique, gloss: “On the outside, cream quietly soaks into the hands; on the inside, time signatures compete for remote control” (TP 108). Many cosmetic products, including hand creams, contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as the antimicrobial parabens used as preservatives. These are absorbed through the skin and, mimicking estrogen, quietly rewrite the instructions controlling the body’s reproductive system; results include more endometriosis, lower sperm counts, and more breast cancer. (Dickinson is interested in biosemiotics, an int
erdisciplinary field that investigates sign systems and communication within and between living systems.) This particular type of chemical pollution, which challenges conventional assumptions about the separateness of bodily inside and outside, comes to the fore in the later parts of the poem, where
a man who has been drinking
can make his way into any house
and find his children
reading hand sanitizers into the
endocrine glands of dropped calls.
Homonyms hunt in hand creams
looking for out-of-season
mammaries in textiled memories
that have driven paper-coated milk cartons
from grocery store shelves. (TP 50–51)
The notion of “reading” these chemicals conveys Dickinson’s view that they are effectively words through which science is inadvertently rewriting the hormonal instructions that govern bodily processes. As an analog for the flow through the environment of chemicals that defy the policing of borders, the poem’s difficult-to-follow, often alliterative Mad Lib–like lines suggest the ease with which words, too, can slip into places where they may not, in our minds, belong. The poem closes with a clear message: “It’s pointless to protect / yourself from ricochet.” Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are pervasive, mobile threats to our bodily security from which we cannot effectively protect ourselves, despite official pretense to the contrary.