have feelings (or experiences, as T. S. Eliot would have it) and through them we arrive at what we say we know.
From 2015–2017, I conducted a research-creation project at the University of British Columbia Okanagan called Visual Inspection. “Research-creation” is the term the Canadian academy uses to describe academic research projects with artistic outcomes. Though dressed up as academic inquiry, Visual Inspection was always, first and foremost, an art project conducted by artists.
Originally, the project asked a basic question: If the page is a field of visual composition in contemporary poetry—and it is such a field—how can we as poets make this field available to non-visual learners in a manner that is consistent with our own individual aesthetic preferences? What would we make?2
At first this seemed like a translation problem: How to account for the white space and typographic experiments in a poetic composition through audio or haptic renditions? Think recordings of poems read aloud, braille, or even poems printed in 3D according to a particular algorithm. With this wrinkle: How to also appeal to the poet as a poet, to be consistent with the poet’s compositional practice, with the pleasure and realization of that practice?
It was important that this was a compositional question rather than a critical one. It was not praxis even but something more instinctual, something approaching from the opposite direction having yet to encounter the need for a term like “praxis.” It was important because the site of inquiry existed beyond the scope of critical assessment as such in the realm of beauty, art and the good.3
But soon, even more a priori concerns appeared.
It is axiomatic, but worth stating nonetheless, that our lives are shaped by our bodies, how our bodies function, how they interact with our environments, both social and ecological. And if our bodies shape our lives then they must also shape our poems.
When I began the project in the fall of 2014, I was having considerable difficulty typing as the result of several immunological conditions, some that had been with me from the start, and others that had developed in adulthood. At times, I couldn’t even hold open a book.
Over the course of the project my life was dramatically shaped by these conditions. Among other things I made upwards of three hundred visits to the Rutland Aurora Health Clinic, a space dedicated to people with complicated health histories and/or precarious socioeconomic statuses. I received more than six hundred injections. I travelled throughout British Columbia to see specialists in rheumatology, immunology, respirology, internal medicine, dermatology and psychiatry. Both at home and away, I received massage therapy, Trager massage, physiotherapy, chiropractic treatments, acupuncture, hypnosis, cupping, moxibustion, chakra healing, Qigong and traditional Chinese medicine. Twice I received emergency, life-saving medical intervention. I spent four days trussed to an IV on a hospital bed across from a room called “Dirty Service” in the hallway of 4B at Kelowna General Hospital. For two years, I spent sixty to seventy minutes of my day, every day, attached to a machine that helped me breathe. Never mind the details of my austere diet and the regime of pharmaceuticals I experimented with. Never mind the hundreds of hours travelling for treatment or given up to convalescences.
How did this shape my poetry? The list above is a chain of references awash in connotation: it employs specific elements of my life to suggest something more general about what it was like in this body over the years of the Visual Inspection project. This book is a similarly devised response to the question of how bodies shape poetry.4
Under the Hampton New Scholars Award, the primary grant funding Visual Inspection, I named two formal collaborators: poet Jordan Scott and social practice artist Carmen Papalia. Both Scott, who has a significant stutter, and Papalia, who is legally blind, had, through close attention, used their bodies as sites of artistic composition.5
In one such composition, Scott designed poems to challenge his ability to say them out loud, thus creating a collaboration between the text and his body in which his body became a vehicle for endless variations of the poems.6 In one of Papalia’s works, he has a small marching band follow him through a city street playing directional cues as he performs everyday tasks like buying a burrito.
And this too is axiomatic but bears repeating nonetheless: There is no body from which all other bodies might be assessed for deviation. Only the body of our imaginations, of culture. Similarly, there is no normal poetry, syntax, grammar or typography. There are only the normative categories cultures practice at any given moment in history.
A while ago, Papalia stopped using the word “blind” to describe himself and replaced it with “non-visual learner,” because there is also no normal blind body, only many iterations of bodies with differing relationships to sight and visual information.
The narrative frame of the text that composes most of this book is an “eyes-closed” walking tour Papalia led for about thirty-five people in July of 2016 through a portion of downtown Kelowna. Just as that tour stretched and accordioned, stumbled and stalled and continued, as people called out obstacles down the line and slapped railings so we could hear what was coming, as the presence and commentary of passersby became important aspects of the tour experience, this text proceeds in fragments, associations and leaps, dragging in a number of histories, references and preoccupations. Like the tour, it is possible, likely even, that it arrives where it began. Like the tour, this may even be by design, though that is probably revisionist history.
As I write elsewhere, in the end, perhaps the best I can say about the questions raised by this project is that I’ve had thoughts. This is a record of some of those thoughts.
I hear the tangy slap of skin on metal as all the hands in front of me pass along the railing. My right hand waves at the air.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Then:
the railing,
round and cold, with what feels like an uneven paint job,
as though parts of what had covered the metal had
been picked away,
flaked off, so that
my fingers run across small ridges, tiny lips
marking the border between one layer7
of façade and the next.
We begin in an empty courtyard in the middle of what is called, on city signage, “the cultural district,” a Richard Florida-inspired project occupying roughly three-by-three blocks of the northwest section of downtown.
We are thirty-five people, each with an arm or two touching the person in front of us—
touch is never pure or innocent—8
our eyes closed, following a man named Carmen, a man with a cane who doesn’t see, through a city he visited for the first time two days earlier.
I’m near
the end
of the line.
To follow is to be guided.
When I was a boy, I knew a man who’d been a big-game guide in the Yukon until his cabin at Burwash Landing burned down and he came to live with us in our fishing village on the Salish Sea.
Dante’s
