by Lynn Keller
In this era when trans-corporeality becomes so ominous, we need to understand human bodies in a much more expansive way—not only as depending on a vibrant microbiome but also as consisting inevitably of man-made materials. As Dickinson puts it in “Polyfederalsiloxane,” his poem based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “The age of polymers is a genital stage of articulated hybrids, campervans, and cyborgs. A human has the alien right to viruses in her genome, microbes in his gut, phthalates in her blood, pharmaceuticals in his brain, contacts in her eyes, and a battery in his heart” (TP 101). Dickinson’s poems repeatedly stress the ordinariness as well as the pervasiveness of those no longer alien but nonetheless often dangerous substances that have become part of our cyborgian bodies. Several poems ironically emphasize that some of the deathless things that are killing us from within are household products intended to keep us clean—soaps, stain removers, sanitizers, latex gloves. In “Cups and Knives and Forks and Spoons,” which considers the turn from glass vessels to accumulating Styrofoam cups and plastic bottles, Dickinson wryly observes that the twenty-first-century decision to ship alcoholic beverages in plastic bottles “relieves us of forethought / when it comes to throwing up / or throwing at, / and commits impulse to concealed / weapons of translucent declension” (TP 87). If the booze bottle is made of plastic rather than glass, one doesn’t have to hesitate to heave it at someone or something; the new translucent bottles mark a decline, not only in civility of behavior, but in the health of our environment and even of our language: “Debris, in its finality, is our cutlery / and conversational / idiom” (TP 88).
Responding to the ready availability of verbal debris on the Internet, some of his poems rely on online material.20 For instance, the Internet is a probable source for the poetic chain of Iraq War operations mentioned earlier and probably made readily available the license plate slogans.21 More interestingly, the difficult poem “Habitat Disambiguation” responds to selected links on the Wikipedia page of that title. Habitat is, of course, a key ecological concept: habitat preservation has been a central aim of conservation movements, habitat destruction a major cause of extinction, habitat degradation a concern for environmental justice activists as well as environmental scientists, and so on. Dickinson’s “Materials and Methods,” however, offers for the poem of that title the following list apparently selected from the Wikipedia entry “Habitat (disambiguation)”: “Habitat 67, Habitat for Humanity, Habitat Blinds and Shading, Habitat InsulFoam,” all of which concern specifically human housing.22 (Habitat 67 is a model community and housing project of elevated cement units in Montreal, designed for a future of high-density urban housing.) The poem itself—the first in section 3’s sequencing of polyvinyl chloride (PVC or vinyl)—seems an oblique meditation on the turn away from care for the larger environment and the many life forms it supports as industrialized humans focus on the material structures in which humans dwell and on the manufacture of products to build and decorate them:
and instead of hugging the shoreline, inroads drive inland and camp
near refineries, and the temperature pressures the outcome, and
the thread is so repetitive all our clothes look the same, and stepwise
fashions form higher species throughout the monomer matrix,
and successive cross-links vulcanize a call for more thermal security.
(TP 47)
“Inroads” should mean progress, but here it seems to mean only the movement toward more extraction and carbon consumption, more cultural homogenization and conformity. “Thermal security” of selected human housing, achieved through plastic products like Habitat InsulFoam, comes at the cost of global thermal security in the form of climate stability. That’s what it means to live in a world risk society.
The handful of poems I have discussed that feature plastic in more or less central roles occupy only a small proportion of this volume that runs to 111 pages. Although The Polymers is conceptually organized around plastic resins, those plastics are not so much its direct subject as the prompt for its pataphysical experiments. In an interview, Dickinson explains:
In The Polymers I am interested in the sorts of ethical and epistemological questions that get reframed by the unexpected juxtaposition of culture and chemistry. What if we were to think of plastic (its proliferation as waste, its relationship to the oil industry) as not simply the expression of certain questionable cultural priorities, but also as something intrinsic to culture itself ? In other words, what if we exposed the ways in which culture is polymeric; what would the identification of cultural polymers tell us about our complicated relationship to plastic and plasticity? Ultimately, my intention in the book is to apply the structure of polymers (their repetitions, chain-like dynamics, their chemical behaviour) to what I see as analogous phenomena in culture.23
Many of the poems that track or mimic cultural polymers have a far less direct connection to plastics and the environmental problems they pose than the poems in Reilly’s Styrofoam, which differently explore “our complicated relationship to plastic and plasticity” and to which I will turn momentarily. Yet regardless of how directly concerned with synthetic polymers they may be, Dickinson’s intriguing experiments with an ecopoetically focused conceptualism valuably demonstrate an alternative to conventional realism and its deference to mimetic scientific renderings of ecological processes. The Polymers exemplifies an exploratory adaptation of poetic forms and language designed to keep in readers’ minds the interconnection of nature and culture and the fluidity of boundaries between natural and artificial or inside and outside. It reveals how deeply rooted in our cultural practices, our desires, and our behavioral patterns this particular set of environmental problems may be. Implicit is the poet’s hope that imaginatively rendering these patterns visible may make those that are harmful more amenable to change.
NETS OF INTERCONNECTION IN EVELYN REILLY’S STYROFOAM
My introductory chapter’s discussion of Reilly’s “Wing/Span/Screw/Cluster (Aves)” provided insight into her collage poetics—a formal contrast to the syntactic glue Dickinson favors in representing polymers—in which disjunct verbal fragments may connect in multiple directions to other words or images on the page, making of the poem and, on a larger scale, the volume a mobile branching form readily associated with the connectivity of the Internet as well as with Timothy Morton’s notion of the ecological mesh.24 Brian Reed has observed that “montage, collage, and juxtaposition were the aesthetic puzzles of the twentieth century. For the twenty-first . . . the problem is managing the information flood.”25 Reilly, however, uses the capaciousness of collage as a way to flow over and through that twenty-first-century deluge, keeping her reader’s head above water, if sometimes just barely. Formally and semantically, her writing in Styrofoam’s nine extended, interrelated poems encourages thinking in terms of a vast net of interconnections and interactions. “Ecopoetics,” she observes, “requires the abandonment of the idea of center for a position in an infinitely extensive net of relations.” My introduction’s discussion also introduced the environmentalist reasoning behind Reilly’s resistance to poetry’s traditional association with what she calls “the mesmerizing spell of the transcendent.”26 In what follows, I will explore more fully her volume’s representations of the environmental toxicity of plastic along with Styrofoam’s explorations of the complicated relations of plastic to art and creativity, of past art to current environmental problems, and of art to science. I begin by returning to the opening poem, titled “Hence Mystical Cosmetic Over Sunset Landfill,” from which I quoted above, to consider the relation between Reilly’s poetry and the Internet and to examine her volume’s ambivalent meditation on the intertwining of plastic with contemporary creativity and of contemporary environmental problems with problematic attitudes that art may render beautiful.
Both plastic and the Internet have been, in powerful ways, democratizing forces. The manufacture of plastic has made inexpensively available all sorts of objects
that once only the wealthy could afford. (Freinkel’s Plastic examines the comb as one such object.) Similarly, the Internet has been a means for ordinary people in industrialized nations to access far more information than had been available even in the best libraries and most comprehensive encyclopedias and to gain unprecedented powers of public expression through social media, websites, and blogs. Reilly’s frequent use in Styrofoam of punctuation suggesting domain names indicates on the one hand an appreciation of the nonlinear, expansive modes of thinking and organizing information offered by the World Wide Web (an environmentally provocative moniker); such ways of thinking, fostered by her collage poetics, seem suited to genuinely ecological understanding. On the other hand, the current intertwining of art’s resources with the Internet, a democratization of artistic production, also enables the cooptation of creative impulses by environmentally destructive corporate interests, as Reilly demonstrates in “Hence Mystical Cosmetic Over Sunset Landfill” via the Foodservice Plastic Packaging Group.27
The passage that displays this cooptation begins with definitions of foam and emphasizes the inexhaustible malleability of plastic foam, which makes it such a marvelous material for scientific and artistic creativity:
foam 1 : a mass of fine bubbles on the surface of a liquid 2 : a light cellular material resulting from the introduction of gas during manufacture 3 : frothy saliva 4 : the SEA
(lit.)
which can be molded into almost anything
& cousin to.thingsartistic:
Kristen J
A low oven and a watchful eye turns bits
of used plastic meat trays into keychain ornaments.
Monica T
Soft and satisfying for infant teething if you first freeze.
posted 10/11/2007 at thriftyfun.com
hosted by FPPG the Foodservice Plastic Packaging Group (S 10–11)28
FPPG is enlisting the creative energies of the public not to address environmental problems (though that might be a pretense, reuse being comparable to recycling), but to participate in them more intimately. Ingenious citizens—amateur artists and scientists of sorts—are encouraged to share their discoveries about how to use leftover Styrofoam trays. FPPG imposes no ethical restraints; there’s no acknowledging, for instance, the dangers of using polystyrene “for infant teething,” although infants and children are particularly susceptible to endocrine-disrupting toxins. Science has clearly established these dangers; an article from Environmental Health Perspectives, for instance, asserts that almost all commercially available plastic products, including those advertised as being BPA-free, leach chemicals with reliably detectable estrogenic activity.29 While the environmental ubiquity of chemicals like BPA reduces the usefulness of the idea of point sources, and while systematic legislative efforts at mitigation (rather than individual attempts to avoid contact and consumption) will be needed to meaningfully address this pervasive problem, precautions against avoidable exposure are nonetheless worth taking. FPPG allows the public to imagine that it’s fine for babies to teethe on cooled Styrofoam, and that is profoundly irresponsible. Moreover, as the example of Kristen J demonstrates, if plastic foam products are at least “cousin to.thingsartistic,” art and artistic creativity now are imbricated in contemporary capitalism’s unethical marketing of unsustainable consumption and of products hazardous to the health of human and nonhuman animals.
Reilly’s next lines, “All this.formation / anddeformation,” might suggest not only the transformations of bodies, cultures, and landscapes to which the multitude of plastics are contributing, but also the potential within plasticity for possibly productive new forms to emerge in biological, social, and artistic life. Yet the creative potential of the malleable man-made materials proliferating in our world does not mitigate their environmental damage. As the poem goes on to point out, while some species manage to thrive amid Anthropocene habitat transformation, many more are disappearing from this world where plastic waste has become ubiquitous:
beyond the dense congregation of species successful in environments where the diversity of plants and animals has been radically diminished
(for all averred, we had killed the bird [enter albatross
stand-in of choice
hence this mood of moods
this.fucked.flux.lux.crux
(broken piece of lamp garbage)
sunset
400 lux
LCD computer screen
300 lux
full moon
.25 lux
starlight
.0005 lux (S 11)
In this passage, allusions to earlier artworks introduce another aspect of art’s plasticity: its ability to speak to multiple generations in different time periods. Here, as is often the case in Styrofoam, Reilly’s allusions point to art’s problematic ability to sustain trans-historical connections to earlier intellectual frameworks and ideologies that helped produce and still contribute to current environmental problems. By juxtaposing references to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the chapter of Melville’s Moby-Dick called “The Whiteness of the Whale” with references to current environmental degradation, Reilly suggests how some elements of Romantic thought represented by authors on both sides of the Atlantic helped foster the environmental mess we’re in. Reilly’s deployment of these allusions to art produced at the dawning of the Anthropocene as industrialism took hold draws on an understanding like Raymond Williams’s that it was during the early industrial era that Nature came to be regarded as something apart from human settlement and culture, when Man and Nature formed a dichotomy, as discussed in my introduction.30 Many environmental scholars regard such a conceptualization as having allowed for the degradation of the places industrialized humans mine and inhabit. That these artworks are widely known today speaks to the trans-historical adaptability not just of art but of the ideologies artworks embody.
Where Coleridge’s ancient mariner suffered the guilt of killing a single bird (“For all averred, I had killed the bird”), “we” who are transforming habitats around the globe are collectively responsible for vastly more deaths.31 How the mariner’s murderous act and the current extinction of innumerable “albatross stand-in[s]” reflect in Reilly’s view a shared Romantic orientation toward nature is suggested through allusions to Melville’s meditations on the horror of whiteness—white being the predominant color of Styrofoam, as Reilly’s cover image of Styrofoam packing material emphasizes. Her line “antarctic fowl.cherabim” invokes Melville’s footnoted description of first sighting an albatross: “I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark . . . it uttered cries, as if some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God.”32 At the end of that passage Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, envisions the “Antarctic fowl”—a phrase Reilly repeats—which had been caught with a “treacherous hook and line,” ultimately flying “to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!” In such an idealizing perspective, the white bird’s death points human thought toward heavenly rewards; that death is not ultimately anything to mourn. However—as in “Wing/Span/Screw/Cluster (Aves),” discussed in my introduction—Reilly resists such a transcendental impulse and its focus on otherworldly glory. In contrast to a Romantic vision of God-infused, sublime nature positioned apart from human civilization, she keeps her readers’ attention on this world, filled with plastic detritus such as broken lamps; she presents a list similar to the one in the Wikipedia entry for “lux” (a unit of illuminance “measuring luminous flux per unit area”) that registers the thorough imbrication of the synthetic and the natural by placing an LCD computer screen’s illuminance alongside those of sunset and moonlight.33
Even the poem’s title, “Hence Mystical Cosmetic Over Sunset Landfill,” through its allusions, calls attention to received—and sedu
ctive—attitudes toward nature in order to show their inadequacy. Here, however, because Romanticism is neither monolithic nor simple, Reilly works partly in collusion with Melville’s art, thereby highlighting positive dimensions to art’s trans-historical adaptability: Romantic artworks may sometimes support environmentally savvy cultural analysis. The words “mystical cosmetic” and “sunset” derive from a later passage in “The Whiteness of the Whale” in which Melville speculates about why white acts on us as it does, “stab[bing] us from behind with the thought of annihilation.” Considering white as the absence of color, his narrator ponders the theory that what we perceive as the “earthly hues” that color our environment, including “the sweet tinges of sunset skies,” are in fact “subtle deceits” “only laid on from without” so that “all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.” From this perspective, what Melville calls “deified Nature,” often celebrated in the writing of British Romantics and their American transcendentalist counterparts, is revealed as a horrifying whited sepulcher. The passage concludes:
and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us as a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.34