Erin Robinsong, Wet Dream

 

I DON’T BELIEVE WE CAN SAVE OUR
CIVILIZATION; I DO, I DO BELIEVE IT

In vibratory consequence to the sea

I fall into the dimensions of an hour

The orcas are ‘done’ Karen told me last night over dinner

On oceanic anoxic tide of unfulfolded brain sadness

Done to in space encircle the earth in loops as lived undulations done

bodies singing voluminous extensions into the sawn-off oceans done

breathing out the tops of their heads

Along the same path the soul blasts at death, out the top of your head

sphincter through which eject spumes of feral joy, or fear breathe

for nearness to be whales / must be

And we’ll continue? Bleaching our wealth, our fame?

At Noba’s last night, in her partly built house with a feverish child

she said, time is a school. She said, you can use that

Earlier she said there’s this thing I always forget to do –

which is breathe in through the top of my head

and exhale out my chest, filling the room not only

but also

The follow-up to Montreal poet and interdisciplinary artist Erin Robinsong’s full-length debut, Rag Cosmology (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017) [see my review of such here], is Wet Dream (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2022). The thirty-six lyric theses that together form the poetry volume Wet Dream are composed and stretched across an expansiveness; one that comes through mapping such a delicate array of sentenced parts that pool to form shapes. “Poetry is access to information. Yes.” she writes, as part of the poem “CAN YOU TAKE SOMETHING OUT / OF THIS WORLD, YES OR NO,” “Is a rose an archive, no / A memory, yes / of silky sense, yes / A garment? No / Many garments, yes [.]” Her narratives aren’t easy or straightforward, and the poems collected here simultaneously accumulate and collage; one might even say that Robinsong’s canvas stretches across the entire sky, allowing her poems to exist as the lines drawn between the stars she’s already set. “What if the fragility of the system is actually / the strength of the system?” she asks, to open the poem “TRANSFORMANCE 4,” “In wild carrot / intervals I dreamt exhaustively. Didn’t // want to go in the water so I didn’t.”

Throughout the collection, Robinsong composes a staggered, staccato lyric, one that collides, contracts and layers. Her lyrics exist as dreamsongs, as monlogues on ecological anxiety, philosophical contemplation and the bearings of the heart. As she writes, mid-point, in the three-page poem “MYRTLE”: “And I thought love would be very // Clear and mysterious like a strange eye // That would see into and admit like // A sphincter into the flower in the heart // And was not wrong // But I didn’t know I could care so much about // The new shelves you’ve built in your room [.]” Her sentences swirl, offering a book on heat and water, heartbreak and ecological disaster. “The voice I heard spirals,” she offers, as part of the opening poem, “A REPLY,” “you could / say drills, it moved / the opposite way of direct / along the non-arrow of time / of being a person – / spiralic task / ridiculous task / often very shitty task / of being a person // I wanted to become one [.]” There is something quite interesting in the way her narrative lines ripple, forcing the eye to slow down to catch every tumble and sudden turn. And yet, this book is rife with optimism: one that manages to emerge through and despite all the empty, broken promises and ecological calamity. As the back cover offers: “Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking on a wet planet on fire.”