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.”

Ottawa (BookThug) Launch for Christine McNair, Erin Robinsong + Jennifer Still

BookThug invites you to celebrate the launch of 3 new books of poetry: Charm by Christine McNair, Comma by Jennifer Still and Rag Cosmology by Erin Robinsong!

Saturday, June 10th
Montgomery Centretown Legion, Lower Hall
330 Kent St., Ottawa, ON
7pm-10pm
Hosted by Brecken Hancock.
Free and all are welcome. Cash bar.
Books will be available for sale.
All washrooms and hallways in the legion are fully accessible. We regret that there are two steps down into the lower hall.

Charm, the second collection by poet Christine McNair, considers the craftwork of conception from a variety of viewpoints—from pregnancy and motherhood, to how an orchid is pollinated, to overcoming abusive relationships, to the manual artistry of carving a violin bow or marbling endpapers. Through these works, McNair’s poetic line evolves as if moving in a spellbound kaleidoscope, etched with omens, fairytales, intimacy’s stickiness, and the mothering body.

The ecological is personal; the personal is ecological. Rag Cosmology by Erin Robinsong is a pulsating meditation on this most intimate relationship. These poems inject pleasure deep into the tissues of our language and state, countering fatalist narratives with the intimacy of entanglement and engagement.

Between 2008 and 2014, while her brother was in a lengthy coma, award-winning poet Jennifer Still engaged in a private collaboration with the art and wonder that was his handwritten field guide of prairie grasses. The result: the stunning works of poetry and imagery encapsulated in Comma. Still was moved by an overarching impulse of grief to create these poems. In the brittle lexicon of botany, and in the hum of the machines keeping her brother alive, she developed a hands-on method of composition that plays with the possibilities of what can be ‘read’ on a page. Comma enacts a state of transformation and flux, all in an effort to portray the embodiment of grief and regeneration that can be achieved in the physical breakdown and reassembly of lyric poetic forms.

Erin Robinsong, Rag Cosmology

Look at this brown day

look at this brown day

hosted by beauty

I love brown days when the green

leaves have gone back. Down to the future.

As a tree mulches itself. I could bag it away

on the curb on Thursday but I shan’t. There are

minerals and gases and the ways that everything

knows. To get to the future. Born for this funeral.

Who will put flowers on a flower’s grave?

My anxiety turning

from green to grey

to ash to vapour

to flocked, paisley

fractal, spiral, crenellated

and back to brown

And still it appears

to follow me but is my host –

Poet and interdisciplinary artist Erin Robinsong’s first poetry collection is Rag Cosmology (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017), a poetry collection constructed as a “pulsating meditation” that blends fragments, visual poems, performance and the lyric essay on ecology and the personal, and how they can’t help but interact. In the poem “PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM,” she writes: “we delivered a formal apology to the salmon / did a controversial pregnant photoshoot / in front of a nuclear reactor, all those nice curves / we made page 15 of the New York Times, ok / and delighted in the letters to the editor that said / I was ‘going to give my baby cancer’ well exactly / then got scared and moved but it was everywhere / we went like my unstable worth rolling / oblongly on pink shadows of information / glamping among facts. Friends came / and were astronomies.” There is something of the collection that exists between the book-length unit of composition and a collaged kind of catch-all, as well as elements of the text that read as though the script of a performance, set aside the more traditional poems. In many ways, the structural variety throughout the book is the glue that bonds the collection together, allowing the different elements of her explorations through poetry to interact. One might even say: the performance aspect is key. As she writes of the book in a recent interview at Open Book:

It’s a book that is really thinking about this ragged time. Rags are what we’ve got – the ecological fabric is pretty threadbare. I used to get so fixated on this in a doomful way – and still do – but more I’m thinking about what to do with these rags and holes, both in terms of acts of repair, and also as a record and a rhetorical and perceptual style. Not to push the metaphor too far – but a rag is useful. It’s also a word for sensationalist journalism, in the tabloid sense – a rag. Alien takeover and celebrity break ups are so dull in comparison to the outrageous, lascivious, too weird to be true nature of the ‘mundane’ world we actually inhabit, of violescent sea whips, semi-aggressive flower animals (reef dwellers) not to mention the way our own bodies are in constant very literal communication and exchange with the world, the cosmos, what we call ‘the environment.’

Cosmology of course refers the study of the world, the cosmos, as a whole. How the whole system fits together. My cosmology has nothing of the kind of divine geometric order of the 17th century cosmologies by people like Robert Fludd or Kepler, but it is a way that I have found to put my sense of fracturedness and majesty together, and to give theories to the communal question – what kind of intelligence are we part of? I’m enthralled by this weird, sexy, pulsating intimacy we share with the earth, and also deeply confused about what it means to be a person right now. How do we become less deadly? (to borrow Donna Haraway’s phrase)