Smutty Alchemy

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2021-01-18 Smutty Alchemy

Smith, Mallory E. Land

Smith, M. E. L. (2021). Smutty Alchemy (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/113019 doctoral thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Smutty Alchemy

Mallory E. Land Smith

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JANUARY, 2021

Abstract

Sina Queyras, in the essay “Lyric Conceptualism: A Manifesto in Progress,” describes the Lyric Conceptualist as a poet capable of recognizing the effects of disparate movements and employing a variety of lyric, conceptual, and language poetry techniques to continue to innovate in poetry without dismissing the work of other schools of poetic thought. Queyras sees the lyric conceptualist as an artistic curator who collects, modifies, selects, synthesizes, and adapts, to create verse that is both conceptual and accessible, using relevant materials and techniques from the past and present. This dissertation responds to Queyras’s idea with a collection of original poems in the lyric conceptualist mode, supported by a critical exegesis of that work. “Smutty

Alchemy,” the poetry collection, navigates lyric and conceptual traditions and forms to discuss scientific subject matter, taking as a focal point the work of Margaret Cavendish, a writer at the start of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. The exegesis aims to situate the collection,

“Smutty Alchemy,” within the intellectual context both of contemporary Canadian poetry and of creative-scientific writing. Stylistically, “Smutty Alchemy” speaks to the concerns of lyric conceptualism by blurring the lines among lyric, conceptual and language poetry traditions, playing with such recognized forms as sonnets, triolets, epic poems, and free verse, as well as refigured poetic shapes, such as the element poems, the cursed sonnets, and invented poetic shapes, such as the tardigrade-shaped poems, which specifically reference concrete poetry.

Feminist writers and critics can both refuse to limit subject matter or style based on the autobiographical and confessional modes of the lyric poets and still discuss the mark of the personal upon even the most process-intensive poetics and “objective” voices. Additionally, they refuse to adhere strictly to any stringent rulemaking of the conceptualists, or to choose exclusively a focus on language moments as do the language poets. My project explores this MELS iii impetus towards the understanding of poetic forms, coupled with the impulse to delimit and expand the range of those forms by creating a poetry collection that pairs scientific subject matter with experiential knowing and the synthetic and invented poetic shapes of lyric conceptualism.

MELS iv

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, thank you always to Judie Land, my Mom, for always hearing me out. The spirit of this project and its lengthy undertaking could not have happened without your constant support. I can never repay your gifts of time and incredible insight in this collection, and I dedicate this collection of poems to you.

Thank you to my gracious co-supervisors Prof. David Sigler and Prof. Larissa Lai, who came to this project with sharp eyes and open minds, and who helped me forge a better collection, and writer, than I could imagine coming. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Jacqueline

Jenkins and Dr. Anthony Camara, who fabricated the time to give this project their attention, stepped out of their comfort zones, and broadened my critical thinking. Thank you too to Dr.

Susan Bennett and Dr. Harry Vandervlist for serving in my committee previously and may you both be enjoying well-earned retirements. Thank you to Dr. Christian Bök for working on the early shape of the collection. Thank you to Prof. Victor Ramraj in memoriam, who was the first person to help me truly see my context and graciously extend his expertise to this project.

Thank you to my friends, The Best Cohort that a scholar could ask for, to accompany her on this journey: Jess Nicol, Peter Forestall, Rebecca Geleyn, and Jane Chamberlain. Almost there, and always together. Thank you to my incredible colleagues Will Best, Erin Emily Vance,

Amy LeBlanc, Benjamin Blythe, Joshua Whitehead, Ben Groh, and Julia Polyck-O’Neill for your support and interest since this collection was a sheer nimbus of words.

Thank you also to Prof. Aritha Van Herk, for your moxie and wise words, and Prof.

Morgan Vanek, for sharing your love of 17th century literature with me. Thank you to Prof.

Stefania Forlini, Prof. Christian Olbey, and Prof. Eden Lackner, for your interest in my work and MELS v kindness. Thank you to the wonderful administrators of the English Department who kept me afloat in a sea of paperwork; my endless gratitude goes out to Prof. Aruna Srivastava, Prof.

Suzette Mayr, Ms. Karen Preddy, Ms. Carole Taylor, and Ms. Barb Howe.

Thank you to the Writer in the School residency supported by the GATE program at

Queen Elizabeth High School, with particular gratitude to Karen Webster and Gary Perfect, and the students in those classes who heard some of my first drafts. Thank you to the Kinship

Residence and Ian Kinney of the Earthship for letting me borrow some starlight and write some poems. Thank you to the Artist in Residence program organized by the Health Humanities committee, and especially Aritha van Herk and Tom Rosenal.

Thank you to the Department of English, the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the A.T. J.

Cairns Memorial Award, and QEII Scholarship program for the generous financial support that made my venture possible. Thank you also to the staff at the National Portrait Gallery of

England, the Thomas Fischer Rare Book Library of Toronto, and especially Adriana Sanzana, of the Geography Library, and Melanie Boyd, the English Department librarian, for their integral assistance in research at the University of Calgary Libraries.

And thank you to my previous writing teachers Mr. Bohdan Kinczyk, Prof. Robert

Majzels, and Prof. Larry Garber, and my previous reader, Prof. Kim Solga. With the right teachers, sometimes a collection can be fashioned from a throw-away idea.

MELS vi

Table of Contents: Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv

Preface: Syzygy 2

Part I: The Pikaia 4

Part II: Elements

i. The Abstract

The Abstract 15 Of Art and Atoms 16 Word and Bond 17 Marginalia 18 Little Books 19

ii. The Fire Suite

Fire 21 Sulfur Fig. 1 22 Oxygen Fig. 3 23 Carbon Fig. 3 24 CO2 Fig. 1 25 CO2 Fig. 2 27

iii. The Air Suite

Air 30 Oxygen Fig. 1 31 Oxygen Fig. 2 32 Hydrogen Figs. 1-10 33 Helium Fig. 1 34 Neon Fig. 1 35

iv. The Water Suite

Water 37 H2O Fig. 1 38 Tardigrade: Water Bear 39 H2O Fig. 2 40 NaCl Fig. 1 41 MELS vii

v. The Earth Suite

Earth 44 Carbon Fig. 1 45 Carbon Fig. 2 46 H2O Fig. 3 47 Tardigrade: Moss Piglet 48 Sulfur Fig. 2 49

Part III: Experiments

Salt 51 The House of Fame 55 Sound 56 Smell 57 Touch 58 Sight 59 Taste 60 Experiment 40 61 Against Microscopes 62 Entropy 63 Microcosmscope 64 What Measurements 65 Severall Figur’d Atomes 66 Light from Cucumbers 67 Of Loose Atomes 68 The Fittest Flowers 69 Quantum Entanglements I 70 Quantum Entanglements ii 71 Quantum Entanglements iii 72 Poets have the Most Pleasure 73 Tardigrade: Slow Stepper 75 Fames Library within the Temples 76 Experiments ii 77 A Priori 78 Virtue 79 Mistress Sonnet 80

Part IV: Conclusions

Elegy 82 Alchemy 83 The Margaret Cavendish School of Thot 86 A Visit to the Royal Society 87 [her]esy 88 MELS viii

Carnivorous Plants 90 The Duchess Wears not Ribbons 94 Venus Among the Atoms 97 The Marriage of Hermes Trismegistus 104 Partnering 105 Autoerotography 106 Hand Bound 107 of conclusions 108 Paleontolography 109 Margaret the First, Not the Last 110 Tardigrade: Evasive Species 116 Salt: Extro 117

Glossary 118

Exegesis:

Introduction 120 Margaret Cavendish 123 The Debate about the Function of Form 130 The Convergence of Poetic Movements 133 Scientific Epistemology 137 The Forms for the Voices 141 The Pikaia 146 The Elements 151 Experiments 157 Conclusions 166 The Collection’s Contexts 172 Conclusion of the Exegesis 186

Works Cited 190

MELS 1

Preface

MELS 2

Syzygy

Margaret, forgive my intrusion i can’t help but note that i was already here, here in the persuasion of your words chosen, the microscopophillic understanding of this language the Angluttonous expandings offered me the room, didn’t even need Rubens’ house: leave a possible space, undesignated in nature, but a crevice, and i will come

Poe theorized that if our universe were infinite, it would be flooded with endless days from countless suns: (don’t go paradoxxing my socials) the night brings a reassurance: that all things, even our universe, have their ends and pardons our many limits, and whose aren’t many? no life can be lived forever in human shape, no strife will persevere, no flesh will fully contain our ambitions or legacies but I will hitch my moon upon your sun to cross your trajectories and conjure let’s see what the electromagnetic spectrum still presents the fleshy glass refraction of constellately self and steer this thinkership to a bioluminescence of facets

MELS 3

Part I: The Pikaia

MELS 4

The Pikaia

The Pikaia, oldest of human life’s line, separates, distinct, by novelty of spine. Cambrian water’s explosion, abundant phylum, assemblage evolution can’t help but pullulate, and varieties pulse with firsts of biology. Stagnant dulse, stabilizing ocean’s floor, pushed aside by burrowing proto-mollusks, disrupting thick bacterial layers, supping benthic-style: no sea floor cupping a lifetime’s worth of single-cell nutrition instead under-ground’s planktonic fermentation. Dig it. Sidle down the bilaterian burrows, wormholing under, epicurean impulse to tunnel, gourmand’s pleasure of the throat begins, finding such treasure of food, churning the silt and mud, savour the spoils of innovation, the flavour of ingenuity, discreet, select: difficult. Such searchingly circumspect taste yields change-- variety’s coming self. So, take your taste buds under the Burgess’s shale shelf.

Meanwhile, perpetual snow eases off, thawing, melting, flooding, and glacial ice chawing through Pre-Cambrian cold’s stability, and Snowball Earth’s frosted-round proclivity to stay cold. The uni-cellular mass suppression, singular bodies a class that fails to hold reign over swaying seas. Th’inconstance of water’s domain cedes no preference for the stable, unchanged shapes. A whole age of cell totality now gapes at chordates- - soft figures, gill pouches, nerve cords, support rods, eukaryote slouches into another age, Proterozoic hang-on, crashing the Cambrian, not licked. Yet, this eon-lingerer dances a slow waltz, hits its own cell wall, falters, retreats, halts. The ocean floor heats up, the pace turns beats up, more water, somersaults faster, toss up outcomes hitting the seismic dance-a-thon, flourishing through the motions, advancing brawn. As ice cracks and cranks into chunks, grinding MELS 5 slabs, resonant bass liquid now finding resistance, slowed by firming bodies, shells vibrating, glacier’s crack, predators repelled, sounding bodily solids with split ice.

Meanwhile, explosion and radiation Sing simultaneous parts, comparison Of legato and sforzando levelled by a fossil composition, revelled for singularity: modern phyla harmonizing with ancient fa la la latent understanding of an age passed to us through samples without a sound gauge of comparison. Surfaces compose the basic data, analyzed to impose theories on what plays as thin, scarce, reedy, versus this age, where just insects, beady- shelled adornment of the earth, outnumber, fly, crawl, dig, leap as humans lumber, two hundred million to man’s small one.

Abundance and invertebrates strike chords and earth’s magnanimity would not abhor such flourishing in prehistoric times. Radiation’s premise sees vast lifetimes of change slowly build bodily value: a fin for a current, teeth to chew through hard shells, said shelled exteriors block said teeth, and every body’s genome chock full of changes, blaring clarion clear, that two past extinctions mean that to inhere is to embrace variability. Yet flesh fades out, a tremulation seems slight, unless there is no orchestra to compete; decrescendo gives way leitmotif. Yet gradual change best plays out in fixed measure: soft-waltzing late species face crash-course erasure.

Meanwhile, Earth’s fissures fault deeper than ice, slide-grinding under ocean’s thick blue bice, and tectonic plates break in slow motion, large chunks of rock surrounded by ocean, which predates land itself, there to float rocks, thick sea and light stone a heterodox.

First, when thick magma cooled to form cratons, MELS 6 they rose through dense waters, surfaced hereon like ice cubes in a cocktail: no matter how many varied ingredients stir into the potent brew, the ice will rise to the top, lighter mass neither sinks nor lies, as with these primeval masses of rock. After these cratonous bulges shock- merged, cooled mantle lava suspended, rent of stone, forged the first supercontinent known, Vaalbara, named for its craton parts, which Kaapval and Pillbara’s pieces impart, billion of years old organic tangrams, with components still appear, break, then dam, a puzzle with indefinite pieces that can stack, collide, recombine, which creases its very surface. Each change releases seismic shifts, several are traceable: after Vaalbara forms, more particles gather into proto-continents, but no matter how looming-larger they jut out from the oceanic horizon, Ur-landmass holds the longest, outlasts dawn and dusk of Pangea, much like how ancient pottery holds eons tight in their vessels when some modern soup bowls can’t withstand thaw and reheat, which shows shape and make is not the entirety of durability: longevity relies on circumstance, and context is part of any long-stored histories. This planet itself moves through gradual shifts, like how glass, brittle liquid, slowly drifts in aged windows to the pane’s bottom with melted sand streaks, now millennium- old, making a pattern clear where glass does not.

The same is said for these volcanic clots slowing, surfacing, grouping, blocking, landing, plates made fragments-first, eon gathering collection. Kenorland assembles next oldest, understood as no mere speck, seen now composing parts of our known North, first fractions of continents issue forth. But, its breaking ripple cracks Earth’s weather, proving a tureen: causation showers down rain, increases atmospheric steam, MELS 7 water now roiling through dense skies’ smog screen. One climate’s upset carves a new foothold for a species to glide, gracefully bold, as a footman desiring to butler to a master: ecosystems incur oxygenation with gases unleashed by first snowball earth’s dissolution steam: new species arise. New occasions call for fresh decorations: from cretonnes to crustaceans, all exist as reaction, and initial need’s filler is seldom overdone.

Then Columbia the first fully-formed supercontinent comes next, a new norm with fifty million kilometers squared to compose this mass, patched from teared from the Earth’s cooled crust to cratonic blocks paired with subduction’s pull; as with chic plating, layers stacked will forge height, variating the landscape’s façade. Mountains range into existence with strange heaving, building rather than dissolving back into cratonous crumbs, surfacing continuation. This orogeny folds over millennia, with many more to stagger-arrive, gradually partake of Earth’s internal heating element’s lake of magma cycling through, like a chocolate fountain that’s sputtering pump negates its function, spouting that cooled-off crust, remote from warmth’s motion. Some solid Columbia-fragments then shatter-slid one billion years ago to create geo-leftovers eon special re-plated.

Continental trifle, Rodinia, a real, yet imagined, phenomena presumed to exist, connected by gerent, same-aged mountains on all continents. But like the melange dessert, sans dish, too amorphous to describe transferred from the large-cut clear trifle bowl imparts no exact configuration, with geodynamic speculation the shapeless continent brings species éclat.

MELS 8

In formal wear dining services, ice as sorbet washes palates, weather’s trice of Snowball Earth readies rugged landscapes, for crumbling rocks sediment-merge seascapes, like how a good crumb coat on lux cakes keep baking and icing from going to flakes, transition together, now climbable. The busting of Rodinia then meant the earth’s sixth broken supercontinent. Some five-hundred and fifty million years prior, all life from just oceans spawn. But mountains, though they seem solid, fracture plates rough-collide magma’s apertures and volcanoes surge outwards, raining smog, fire, and ash wafting through choke-dense miasma air, lava brûlée on land, and a welcomed seasoning to primordial soup. Nutrient-rich water thickener shall soon turn to species fortifier: the more variety of cuisine means the more diverse gourmands they attract: roving palates and adventurous mouths, moving beyond the known, are evolution’s first bodily tool: curiosity’s thirst.

With surging energy from volcanic specks, hovering round what’s later Antarctic, this Southern Hemisphere landmass becomes approachable: Snowball Earth pendulums, and snow condenses, reverts to water, space-gorged ice melting down, shift-maker generating openings. Higher sea levels mean closer stepping stones, combined with kind climates and energy’s zenith. As hot, liquid rock wills itself upwards, sea creatures enriched with ash-pelf, tossed by eruption-chance into their diet, geo-umami, that soupçon jets the quality, and so elevates the taste of ambition that pulsates with new heights.

Meanwhile, ancient does not mean outmoded, when genomes stock miscellany and come loaded: the bilateral body shape remains in species galore. But echoed refrains MELS 9 of hypersymmetrical radial forms in species, bodies archadial, oceans’ plant-like figures, stem from a core, and corporeal configurations store a variety of directional ways to expand, segments intentional in their replication of offshoot limbs.

Tribrachidium heraldicum is an Ediacaran exemplar, is known for its tri-radial symmetry. Once-living triskelion grows in three spiraled axes outwardly expanding, curling like the golden-spiralled rings of a ram’s horns, but with three full growth-prongs, a reverse-vortex, filling space, that throngs into existence. This bodily class represents harmonic co-existence, a time before predation’s ravaging: oceans-wide, creatures feed sans savaging other living beings: fauna eats flora, not needing to kill, hunt, thrust, no psora beyond herbaceous sea nourishment. These cnidarias’ ancestors predate anemones, hydras, coral, jellyfish, and sea pens, all emanate from a central point, genes extending through Ediacaran time to this day, the eldest origins climbs through layers of knowledge to emerge in thought in the twenty-first century, spin the story’s beginnings by likening the ancient to the present happenings. The Ediacaran Hills, fluctuating Australia’s South, emulating a momentary ecology, were flash- interrupted by disaster’s swift crash. Fractions of crinoid limbs litter strata of Paleozoic deposits, a fracture is pressure applied to weak points, fissures then solidarity aroint.

Amorphous sponges grow by small polyps upon more small polyps, haphazard slips into anti-geometrical mass indeterminate gathering, morassing miniature creatures’ community. MELS 10

This multicellular jejunity defies a collection’s curation impulse, making unity’s ablation into hodge-podge functional confusion. In physics, the concept of randomness means that organizing logiclessness does not readily make its pattern known. Giving the semblance of chaos, un-sown origins, independent variables with infinite results unswearable host vast masses of probabilities, lacking requisite culpabilities in continuing to build surface. Part by piece by bit by unit they restart their living layer. This mobocracy exponentially bulks up a crazy teeming of branches, starting their lives ejected, moving back, roots revive their places in the collective, continues with adult life by anchoring. Imbued. . .

The pervasive fettle of knowledge is completely incomplete to the point. A truly central nervous system brims with immediacy of sensory transmission; starfishes’ intensity of food blurs mouth and anus into one whole digestion process: nourishing runs central and centred in its existence. The poly-armed starfish begins its life as a bi-lateral, miniscule, lithe form, the mirror image splits and expands, and the larval-looking glass body fans out, with reflection bifurcating then germinating supple limbs, split reflection refracts two limbs into five, a funhouse mirror growth pattern.

born ancient, built to bioutlast oceanic swathes, competitors scavenging, skipping sublevels, teeth, four claws stalagtiting eight feet survive or not remain two possibilities, playing to excess violence longevity’s trundling ace wriggles, not sprinter, but marathoner

A mere sixty samples create a norm’s MELS 11 information out of one location in the Canadian-side Rocky Mountains. Science propels knowledge, and these past one-hundred years of discovery fast revealed thousands, millions, billions of years of earth’s history, unknown. And yet here’s evidence of the planet’s evolution under our feet, bedrock’s convolution sounding through earthquakes, in rupturing mounts of collision rock’s fire paramount fountains of magma from shunting slabs of rock, once thought made and moved and grabbed by supernatural force’s intent. But this isn’t a solitary thought rent from a previous metaphor: first evolution’s described as a line, cursed by interruptions of kinship and knife- happy Fates cutting through the story of life and burying the umbilical offal in obscure layers of rough earth. But all the early searches for the missing link betray and inaccurate sink of time devoted to preserving the Great Chain of Being. Ignored branches are the price of excluding valid fossils found outside of Europe, and science is confounded by the arrogance of nationhood, blinded by missing links of logic and bind to the assumption that human’s final form peaks.

Then, the notion of spinal creatures’ superiority translates to another image’s transmission trait: evolution as a study flourishes and takes on the picture of tree branches, peeling from a tree’s trunk, diversifying variations on the theme of sapien, with a common ancestor, the paean of scientific discoveries. Yet humans describe their species as the tree’s crown, the part that propels the plant to fetch for light. In doing so, the far-stretched notion that one self-involved species reigns over variant ancestor sapiens is pseudo-science masquerading as MELS 12 incontrovertible fact. This view has been hacked off at the trunk by evidences of genes reaching back to several instances of homo interbreeding. The older the river, the more intricacies to flow it advances: bends, splits, convergences, falls, streams, brooks, undercurrents, variants on the path from source to deposits.

And so, in honour of water and its many ways of avoiding stagnation, the evolutionary imagination fashions a braided stream, to now describe how some species fade while others thrive. Homo paths crossing many time junctures, lingering interbreeding clings, no pure species, no isolated genes, proven by the one to two percent of genes cloven from human’s Neanderthal ancestors, still present in Eurasian sapiens. Homo Erectus had circumstantial means to mingle with Neanderthals and Denisovans, hominins in sundry lands, meaning all modern race of man represent surviving contributions of species spent.

Meanwhile, with age comes complexities of form, and survival is variation upon the initial theme. Flow prevents stagnation, and with each obstacle the form reinvents, morphs, curves, elaborates so that when the straight path no longer exists, inertia lets life travel life circuitous: a construct is a comfort in chaos. Gray’s Anatomy’s survey starts shape with the spine, a column curved from babe’s birth, that adds slopes with growth’s urge to walk and stand. So, like the plaiting rivers of our primogenitors, from pikaias to hominins, a chordate’s coiled descendance need swerve the spine of existence, and make variability adaptation. These poems will follow Margaret Cavendish, an Interregnum Royalist, English, first of her name, a thrice-noble woman, and self-educated in the roving atom. MELS 13

In a vast, still Lucretian universe, newly thought old, with taxonomy’s curse of nationalized ownership of that which predates our species, predecessor re-shaped by modern movements and thoughts wore through the past: not something from nothing, but matter not created but transformed. My journey begins with her bold quest to replicate her thoughts as books, and I do follow to find a spine of my own, and reveal what ideation globe is supported by my Atlas vertebrae.

MELS 14

Part II: Elements

Suite I: The Abstract MELS 15

Abstract

If my words aren’t quite right, it’s because the magic of science can never be explained beyond its intention.

And if you really feel the need to scry something of me from these incantations, let it be this: these words, still bare to me, attempt to fulfill my own needs, assuming someone else will share the same desire.

MELS 16

Of Art and Atoms

“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.” ~Niels Bohr, Discussions about Language, 1933

“If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.” ~M. H. Abrams

particles of speech, letters, suspended on the page, encapsulate protons, neutrons, electrons, dative case meets data, as the subatomic orbits itself whole, select consonants and vowels, the subatomic particles of language, and white space, stands in for matter and space, more representation than reality, give themselves over to being an element of language on the page image, not for vision, but the imaginary impulse connects eye to paper, to what cannot be seen by the eye, the composition matter(s)

MELS 17

Word and Bond the gutter is the pooling of expected blankness at the edge of the text’s margin, tipping into the page’s curve into quires’ folds that extra page to let words float by eyes and through mind no scientific name speaks for the space between molecules not a void, perhaps a lapse in occupation, a necessary place, used space between a charged core and its electrons, electromagnetic relation of comfortable places for interactions as orbits, the miniature planetary, energy planes out another name for spaces are potential, or speeding electrons to come around a neuron a mind whizzing around a text’s central idea, in short, a bond

MELS 18

Marginalia

I have myself a system that should make me Bedlam-bound but I have managed to wall myself off a piece of the outside

MELS 19

Little Books

Margaret, Colchester child, the youngest in an insular brood of Lucases nestled together in the ancestral home seldom quivers her vocal cords, but fabricates paper playmates gathering leaves and sheaves, stitched through needle’s eye, blind only with ambition but filled with the through-stitch of self hood connecting thoughts and words little bird Margaret is yet to sing but nests early for amusement, she creases linen paper, writing and cutting until sheets are shaped by vision, and sixteen little books her first batch, none of her first surviving, she goes on to nestle for a London season raising books, forms from fancies, in multitudes as densely populated as the mind a book is family a mind’s genealogy, and a legacy of learning a book can be gathered in a time when even a grave isn’t sacred space a book is a collection of theorized selves

MELS 20

Part II: Elements

Suite II: The Fire Suite

MELS 21

Fire

spark

starting as

inter-stellar heat,

between materials, whorling into

signatures, noise-move propelling molten

aquafer as yet incognoteworthy blazing wellspring

MELS 22

Sulfur Fig. 1

plastic

coiled

blue flame Sol, crystalline sun yellow, Mercury’s bright polar equal soul-forge light heat Substance of pungent prima materia

core’s star

brimstone combines

MELS 23

Oxygen Fig. 3

ob ate

dur

On route to heat’s hungry pull ject li Ochre-making octahedron fuel

ing

shunt ere

MELS 24

Carbon Fig. 3

coal

black

Cinders fume, coiling lift off char voy Carcinogenic grime

heat

MELS 25

CO2 Fig. 1

Chemical expended Corrosive fire-breath waste cast out ac id

down

Odiferous miasma Our nascent air exhalation

pour

air’s sludge

MELS 26

ex pel

o zone

old

Omen-thick skies curdled black Oxygen heat-discharged film remains

age

lu cid

MELS 27

CO2 Fig. 2

Carrier of plant life Chlorophyll-corralled with light back slide ac id

draw

Occam’s swiftrazor breath cycle Outgoes to oxygenate

ping

Ome ga

MELS 28

ex pel

o zone

old

Out breath of flora circulates Offeratory, cyclical

age

lu cid

MELS 29

Part II: Elements

Suite III: The Air Suite

MELS 30

Air

my wards

atmospire’s finely

wrought conglowmeration only

visible through injected gaseous additions

ethereal leftovers, creatures float the inconspivaciousness

MELS 31

Oxygen Fig. 1

lev ty

oscillation incarnate forms ell ing untethered air, permeates all

ress

ing us

MELS 32

Oxygen Fig. 2

vol vent

Oleaginous molecule with u ral Outlandishly versatile scope

mish

ble less

MELS 33

Hydrogen Fig. 1

there Here

Hydrogen Fig. 2

hint Hale

Hydrogen Fig. 4

wet Half

Hydrogen Fig. 6

change Hides

Hydrogen Fig. 7

this Hear

Hydrogen Fig. 8

fast Holds

Hydrogen Fig. 9 low Hail

Hydrogen Fig. 10

born High

MELS 34

Helium Fig. 1

hap

hangs out inert

less

MELS 35

Neon Fig. 1

glass

ble lu

house

Night time’s urban illuminator drifts no mens Nonchalant, permits all, acts sans shadows

proud

dule li

gas

MELS 36

Part II: Elements

Suite IV: The Water Suite

MELS 37

Water

dripping collective pride atom pyramids pull these

configurations slouch along building

gravity of raindrops poollulating

self-gathering before

breaking

tension

MELS 38

H2O Fig. 1

hale li quid i fold

man

oakum-foe, filler of rivers, streams, oceans, rain, ice, exemplar shapes

prim or always holds

MELS 39

Tardigrade: Water Bear

Microscopic animal, unsought, still found, in Mariana’s deep trench chokehold. Amphibiguous in waters, casually undersea effortlessly, surviving pressure that could crush bones sediment fine. No bones to wreck, just the old skins they make. Ugly is its own perfection.

MELS 40

H2O Fig. 2

Here there to noma

Observant of attraction Obliging occlude, jointure

ad root stock dendum Hank

MELS 41

NaCL Fig. 1

dur her

en block sodden ocean water unconceals ade trans naiad levelled by an electron’s motion

garden pose

sea

MELS 42

full

tile min

fill

ter sea

fer al o chloric, acidic gas, neutralized pen chant er by filled ion hunger cleaved from most sting, chemical offal, seasoning of vast oceans

u s y

of al

gae

MELS 43

Part II: Elements

Suite V: The Earth Suite

MELS 44

Earth

last-emerging of four cornerstone thought elements

evidence, and precedentially combined

mix of minerals, air, water,

and mouldering flora and fauna decadent host of life past and to come

animate

clay

MELS 45

Carbon Fig. 1

cause

cho

Canticle of life forms e tles Chords strike through chemicals

rus

hints

MELS 46

Carbon Fig. 2

form

Compacted graphite chunks trans pure Condense, diamond-pressured

car MELS 47

H2O Fig. 3

Figure 3

Hus ban dry e lans

Ordinal liquid union Openings closed, swift-melt fluid

bin ger na ting Har

MELS 48

Tardigrade: Moss Piglet

Scuttling slow, indestructibly creaturesolution takes all time saunter through varied earth’s indiscriminate phases. lumbering gait’s key to living two straight years, but making lineage last discountinurture Cambrian futures. Ancients spark light, smouldering’s pace.

MELS 49

Sulfur Fig. 2

set forms

molten

essence

Substance, subterrain, orthorhombic post-volcano deposit

solid varied Shaped non-metal solid crystal-pierces elements, shifts valences

gaseous

buckle

MELS 50

Part III: Experiments

MELS 51

I: salt: insatiable scholaress salt breathes as a surge, the tang of the fifth element as divine restlessness jostles the already mutable water of oceans, seas, saline rivers not yet filtered for the calm of in-land marshes and ponds and lakes made still by the steadiness of land the oceans, thought formless, contained by the coreward-drawing of gravity, density of solids sultry-sharp on tongue and eyes un-sates the corporeal water brings more than mortal thirst the strange beast, female ambition, uniodinized excess unable to duct, wields sway over the mind’s faculties as origin of all writing covers itself in the veins’ minerals of the biological blood, imbues a pelican pen with its need to give to survive, a heartful of counterintuitive rivers

MELS 52

II. salt: ignoble sex all human bodies are seasoned, sodium chloride composing just enough of tissue, to draw water in but she is a small ocean, and the density of the self is generative, boundlessly retentive in its scope to keep welcoming more water in as salt of the tongue dispels through words, the salt of the inner thighs soaks up a lover’s labours thrust and pull mineralized sheets crystalline crisp, and semi-transparent love the bed a halite cube, solidifying in the after-toil

MELS 53

III. salt: idyllic savouring halo or halite? both pale, reflective of virtue, refractive of the heavenly located at the human head hail, light! salt of the mind packs round her brain a delicious rarity fit to be consumed most appreciatively in later ages, yet to come

MELS 54

IV: salt: intricate ventilator synapsis saline respiration living for the bitter motivation of blood cycling through the prima triage jolt-start agitating clay from homo sappyen into people, angled outbreath staking the spine off the ground primaterealization look, look, the milk of kindness is well and good but adder’s poison can laden the body and scatter the light molecules via fat globule disbursement too to venom and toxin alike, what’s bitter powers the briny objects in crisp words angled outbreath a question is a disturbance is a convulsion is a rousing of soul self salt of beyond-earth, not circular-smooth as ether but volatile heaven alkali ascension

MELS 55

The House of Fame

The glory of spoken longevity, a life, then afterlife, composed entire, of words, repute of gravity or levity, born to last ages in mouths set afire.

Queen Fame, all eyes each aflame, can discern all worth noting in the mouths of mankind. From such generated stories she’ll learn of those worthily etched upon the general mind.

Orbed Milagros, talismans’ glass winking, ex-votos, all devotions paid to sight. Illuminoti amulets blinking heed cross-referenced dreams: that eyes see plights.

If seeing is believing, Fame gives rise to the hope for equal chance immortalities: sinners and saints all kiss Fate to sighs and courting dodge their liminality.

This saline mistress, Margaret, namesake’s first, Needs to quench death’s obliteration fears: Her salty-sharp nerve, an envious thirst that cannot be slaked save by glittered tears.

Two faceted drops, to hang from her ears, (the adorned self-fortressing signifies too often women made pretty by fears). Diamond in the tough, balm to salt’s deep sighs.

The All-eyes Goddess beholds Lady Salt, and bestowed a favour during her life: today’s writings feed tomorrow’s exalt, a slow-building fame for the paid-price, strife.

MELS 56

Sound truly, is there any sense but touch? waves of motion fill/feel the air frequen(t)cies tympandemonium then converted all senses happen at the level of tissue what is the medium? always the body, subjective, striving, absorbing?

MELS 57

Smell taste-conjoined nasal palate often pre-eating, but per(missive) of what we cannot, should not consume, a dalliance of cedar, asphalt, lilies, gasoline, an enfleure de/live/ered molecule by molecule our sinuses only discriminating by rejection’s mucus coating that which the nostril acc(ss)esses full-hole

MELS 58

Touch strata of molecules, tissues, tendons and the (nerves) between vague dimensions exist in defiance of the notion that two lovers can feel each other we never actually touch what we feel but the sense that takes away the truth of caress is a giver, with a near-perfect kink switch-hits on a molecular level we are what we touch when we pull away, we take a miniscule piece with us and feel the absence of even microscopic losses of our layers we first knew how to miss in language

MELS 59

Sight most abstract of senses, least like touch, the eye sees what li/e/ght an object does not absorb, and identifies colour based on a refusal to engage part of a visible spectr(al)um the sky reflects aquamarine, azure, blue topaz, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, navy, sapphire, sky-blue, turquoise ultramarine to flip filters out the reality of c0nvex lenses

MELS 60

Taste a patient sense when food’s swallowed growing more accepting as age makes us less subtly sensitive, a bristle of papillae sharpness stinging the apex bitterness eventually becoming a fleeting disgust at the back of the tongue salt and sugar bud first, flowering on taste buds’ proboscis tasting is touching comprehensive chemical makeup tasting pleasure in a recognition of your upcoming composition to taste is to know your self better MELS 61

Experiment 40 and the Proof of Air, or, the Lark's Lament

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, shrieks override the singing urge no reverberating air rings inside this glass globe. I'm gutted for breath for curiosity, for pleasure of progress, for mere science, without philosophy to see my life flapping, frenzied, fleeting, drawn out by the air pump. The magnified eyes of observers mark the dwindling oxygen orchestrated by Boyle and Hooke's opera in reverse, feat of choking, proving air's realness through rare removal, the pump vacuums out life-giving gases, followed by ether's divine draft direction. The noble zephyr feeds the spark of life, but not here, faking null. Quiet tyrants scratch notes with their quills watching transparency ignoring feathers scraping sides. Claws scratch chamber. Invisible ventilation can't circulate Who conceived this scholar's snuffshow? Release my voice! I am bound. Tiny lives, made to live, just knowledge's fodder feast just to feed what it means to breathe in.

MELS 62

Against Microscopes

Expecting the subatomic peepshow, Most real in its microsecond afterglow, rewarding the scientist as voyeur, coyest and smallest of the unit-verse.

With a shimmy of existence, they wink out, oftener measured by our rampant desire to see, wavelengthening wants, such grand clout for a one-millionth second to strike fire.

The physics’ joes peer, all curiosity, for these barely-theres, playing the particles. Long observation tubes shaft adroitly, extend, but natural observation culls: hyper-focused eyes stretched, intimately distanced.

MELS 63

Entropy

Energy is not created or destroyed, only transferred: but, the vital transaction ain’t perfected. The known universe contains energy, slowly filtering back through all matter. Travels intersected by a wayward pull, dallying impulses, a perverse refusal to ever fully join the meaty structures that give motion overawed meaning, just a firm thrust without loin pushes thin air, resounding off nothing. So pour a drink, a watt, a kilojule out for chaos remembered, a token gesture for shapelessness sans rule, a reverse toast that laps up mayhem.

MELS 64

Microcosmscope

Microcosmscope vision fills eyeballs, fine crystal lenses cupping intervals, the brain prism-flips, the convex reverse: vision's often the best sense to coerce. Between eye and object is focal point, a lens-large microcosm's full presence and scope; the deluding glasses tint perception's lope along the mind's pathways, beguiling human sight. Molecular worlds within ours expand their importance beyond material confine, without proportion, with focus, they combine with views. When eye replaces globe, progress is undermind.

MELS 65

What Measurements

What inch or centimeter? what volume? what circumference, width, breadth, height, or density? what colour, composition, circumference? what construct of abstraction’s propensities ever staggered plants’ spring propulsions from warm loam to crisp sky? Or rendered lightning touch predictable? Read the true depths of the seas? Or lessened a dashline of ants’ encumbrance? Does this numerical world merely exist as template, architect’s veil-drawn vellum plans to give the world shape? Or are numbers cysts on variation’s adaptation- - perfect spans of flux-design; quantities’ unneeded limit?

MELS 66

The joyning of severall Figur’d Atomes makes other Figures o.g. Severall Figur’d Atomes well agreeing When joyn’d, do give another Figure being. For as those figures joined, severall waies, The Fabrick of each severall creatures raise. i. Being severall, severall atomes joyn’d, Figur’d fabric figures raise those give-waies. When joined, as agreeing creatures do well, For each figure another the sever all. ii. The creatures being severall-figur’d as Joyn’d atomes, do each another severall Severall rasie when those fabric-waies give, For figures joined-agreeing well-figure. iii. When well-figur’d atomes fabrick severall Creatures, those joyn’d figure-waies do each another Severall raise, for the joined As several, being figure, give figures. iv. Forgive creating figs. ever joined. Assure well when waies other a figur’d tome. Agree: all those joyn’d fabrickings do ever Raise these, an ur-each. v. Those atomes-waies do raise agreeing figures, when severall severall figur’d creatures give being: as the for-joyned several do each another figure fabric well.

MELS 67

Light from Cucumbers

Sometimes scientists seized by Laputian impatience heed not Earth’s slow, cyclical systems, and hasten a futile solution to movements, eons-long, slow but flowfull. Energy’s circuit follows directional patterns: water does not rush and hurl over crackling craigs, blistered bluff to waterfall skywards, nor is excess energy leftover from spontaneous chemical reactions, nor do eggs unboil, nor foods digest backwards. La! A monomaniac’s focus’s deflection gags perception: spotlight althea revealing only an impatient fool.

MELS 68

Of Loose Atomes o.g. In every braine loose atomes there do lye, Those which are sharpe, from them do Fancies flye, Those that are long, and Aiery, nimble be. But atomes Round, and square, are dull, and sleepie.

i. Those—those—fancies! which in braine-nimble atomes Are long and are sharpe and are loose! That them There do flye aiery! But atomes round and Square do be from every dull, sleepie lye.

MELS 69

The Fittest Flowers

Mere correlation is not causation, except during acts of pollination, already facilitated by some industrious go-between, impregnation by wing, seed spurs latching to bristled tums, insects the intersect-carriers, fly. But, Mendelson’s peas evolved from selection contrived, forged proximity of cross-breeding by a history-credited man’s foundation of hereditary trait studies, not feeling the need to issue his own line, makes science by ratifying millennia of reliance on farmers, too gracious to claim bees’ labour.

MELS 70

Quantum Entanglements I

Two photons, both alike in trajectory, take spooky action at a great distance, in Einstein’s word, particles’ synchronicity reflected in parallel existence. The particles refracting motions render the theory of relativity moot: these synchronized speculum photons tender correspondence faster than light and can scoot through space-time, mimicking motions regardless of their physical environment, as if a river swerved around its twin’s rock-stress to flow. But, what material or subtle form the mirror axis takes remains unknown.

MELS 71

Quantum Entanglements II

The inexplicable and useable can be one in the same: the paradox of two in the same might remotely enable quantum telecommunications, flocks away from understanding, but not our hold. Such particles, each aware of the other, mirror motions, and space’s expanse folds like map panels, and shortcuts to its brother in doppelgänger trajectories, which forgo space’s arbitrary blockade, yet fail to slake explanation’s urgent demand to know. The commercializing of mystery makes science for science’s sake improbable.

MELS 72

Quantum Entanglements III

A quality of interaction makes for lasting impressions expressed through joint actions, like two hands that in charged union shake, parting palms with coexisting oaths, point their futures, potentially never meeting again, and yet honour’s reflector vectors move from the origin point of intention’s cleating rigour. Now, imagine a pair of two particles engaged in such double mimesis, physics-breaking mutuality of statistics, rejecting local factors to favour its mates’ locus fluxuations, these speculum stellar tics: closed circuit of mutual references.

MELS 73

Poets have most Pleasure in this Life. o.g. Nature most pleasure doth to Poets give, If pleasures in Variety do live. There every sense by fancy new is fed, Which fancy in a Torrent Braine is bread. Contrary is to all that’s borne on earth, For Fancy is delighted most at’s Birth. What ever else is borne, with Paine comes forth, But Fancy needs not time to make it grow, Hath neither Beauty, strength, nor perfect Growth. Those Braine like Gods, from whence all things do flow. i.

With which sense do those poets pleasure forth Paine? Is every Fancy in braine-torrent there borne? Doth earth flow from gods at’s beauty-birth, to needs to live variety, is contrary-delighted?

Neither strength-perfect nor braine-bread pleasures fed else: most fancy comes not by Nature.

What Hath Growth is ever new in a fancy.

All, all that’s borne is most like time But is on things to forgive. If whence Fancy do grow: make it ii.

Fancy Braine comes forth from Those Which Nature Hath by delighted fancy doth live earth-like time is all Torrent: that’s pleasure’s strength. If There is not do else give onto most needs neither For Gods nor all Fancy is ever fed in a Braine-bread Beauty, it is Sense borne, But Contrary do Poets make Variety whence to perfect pleasure MELS 74

What with everythings to Paine flow

Growth is most new at’s Birth: grow In borne fancy

MELS 75

Tardigrade: Slow Stepper

Desiccation’s thirsty moisture suction siphoned through air kills larger beasts. Cambrian-forged, the eight-legged endurance model. Self-sure, contained, time for them spans five-hundred million years of hard thirst self-slaking design. Conserved energy persists through the smallest of scales, slowest of feet.

MELS 76

Fames Library within the Temples o.g. Fames Library, where old Records are plac’d, What acts not here unto oblivion case. There stands the skelves of Time, where books do lye, Which books are tyed by chaines of destiny. The Master of this place they Favour call, Where care the door-keeper, doth lock up all. Yet not so fast, but Bribery in steals, Partialities, cousenage truths not reveals. But Bribery through all the world takes place, And offerings as a bribe in heaven finds grace. Then let not men disdain a bribe to take, Since gods doe blessing give for a bribes sake. i.

Since skelves all are blessing books by place-bribery, doe not let men give master-chaines the lye, not disdaine keeper-destiny in the cousenage library, not bribe fast gods of Fames offerings, but do here in partialities heaven-place give old records a grace-lock through time to truths, and typed up for find where where where where a favour cast. Yet, which world takes the oblivion, and so steals all books, doth a door cast, there reveals what bribery-call they take unto plac. This stands. Bribes do care, are acts not then plac’d. ii. where of the place which takes not oblivion finds do old partialities favour men in keeper care where the master skelves all tyed, the chaines cast by where the records, not yet plac’d here, through time-disdaine, are bribe-books, not library offerings of gods, but they take fames men for bribery sake, doe give in a library acts a world where place reveals cousenage grace let lock lye fast there, then do call bribery, this blessing, and all are heaven, since what up unto the door stands, steals not?

MELS 77

Experiments ii

An element removed from its context performs without its relationships next to its behavior. Just try to observe spores detached from dendritic parents’ swerve of fungal nexus, or root-hoisting soil; aerated seeds, detached sporelings won’t spoil as readily as embryos housed in flesh, but zephyrous zygotes aren’t barren. Therein lies the problem: laboratories swap urgency for artificially forged adversity, and sterility, sole nonce interactions a vility of tests’ contructed curioustiy: function never yields stark isolation.

MELS 78

A Priori

The ability to augment one’s sense negates not the faculty of reason. A society founded on such meagre basis for trust ignores the mind’s deductive skills. The cogito ergo summation follows that should the voice of opposition think itself necessary to counter a defense’s argument, then theory proves its treason by claiming that brain-born process beleaguers with antithesis’s mistrust, rather than distill antimony to water-tight, hallowed conclusion. Echo-chamber standards will sink into oblivion’s rough tests.

MELS 79

Virtue

Virtue is an insular pleasure measured by organs and thoughts untouched, gifts of untorn flesh, bubble-clear, leisure floating reputation, a decision-maker’s crutch. Virtue extols a refusal to recompense socio-environmental factors and ritualizes permanence’s hold on states, disallowing any actors to play upon morals, although touch is a micro-exchange of cells, and adapting’s fleet tool in the survivalist’s prop trunk, this immutable desire, and desire’s longing for impossible immutability.

MELS 80

Mistress Sonnet

Abstraction’s wholding: double maps, carriers immutable, what hallowed brain tenders the synchronized photons and the longing to prove, but the prismed propensities fly through tight transactions, mimesis of artificial, directionally follows engaged, vital reconstruct, and desires convex partner panel circuit shortcuts to mind transfer. speculum’s particled desire intersects the anti-other in re-verse peep urgency, but one brain’t in for these twomony sects- such subatomic swap-flips show spine: like water, the Energy’s Expecting it.

MELS 81

Part IV: Conclusions

MELS 82

Elegy

The fact is dead. Long live the fact.

This ruthless lineage owes no fealty to predecessors, because they were wrong. No flesh will be embalmed for posterity, but will be aired to fester at crackling gates. Wooden altars raise to laude the limited and praise with dismissals on wafts of soured breath.

When the bones bleach dry, whitened beyond the flesh’s memory’s tincturing mark, the shadow stain a of muscle joined by sinew alone, the bodies disassemble. Parts will be redistributed to stuff holes and bolster heights of the very walls from which they were denounced. Now they prop up today’s declarative new scientist, tomorrow’s rubble, and the future’s selected fodder.

MELS 83

Alchemy i. give up a lifetime of comfort for an ounce of mystery, to dab in the diffusive shadowy crease behind each ear, and on that hard-soft place, where neither breasts nor ribs declare themselves to inquiring touch

I’m apparating something better of myself from this human pulp the thickest ghost known, hovering over this world with finished business, the elevation of mankind, goldenly steadfast king to mercurial moon’s queen, all in the completion of processes, all in the completion of this form

MELS 84 ii. everything desired is balance, ambivalence of matter, the beautiful rot, vivid green, putrefaction sharp in scent and softening designations and distinctness alike the microexpression flux of a face that admires and abhors sublime allure of the decomposition of process the bones will blur as the genders combine to stand on a sun-moon in the universal sky made for light, dark, and its glorious expanse of spectrum the likes of which we register with limited eyes and encased mind binaries are worldly and their constant, negotiations and importance of proportions, is no stasis, constant motions, and their combinations in each degree divine

MELS 85 iii. material perfection is no more possible than spiritual ascension on earth the visions are plainly sweet with a bone-crunch aestheticized quiddity elbows-deep processing a journey simultaneous to mind and matter body and environment unfolding soul and flowering elements to strip an impurity of the elemental self is to invite room for collaboration decipher the flaws of the self through muddled compounds, and althealeate better parts for immortal companions that death may not do unified you part

MELS 86

The Margaret Cavendish School of Thot admirers throng around her carriage, black as two stars on her cheek bone trim as silver as threading hairs stitching through a coiffure this piecemeal woman’s followers throng around the carriage

Samuel Pepys too lingers weeks for a sighting, and beholding sours to dismissing: she’s more vanity than wisdom, undiscerning of propriety less fashion than fantasy from her own mind issues forth black inklings in fabric and fortyish flesh black coach with silver trim white skin and two kohl stars in polar tension, pushing forward while pulling in a mass of ego, situating a crowd of one hundred orbiting, and lesser oglers constellating, the periphery of her ex-exiled presence, double-negative appearance that fails to make a positive impression on Pepys who nevertheless goes home to drag her name in dirtied quill first across a page, and then thuds diary words to set moveable type, and insoluble infamy, dragged through the mud and limping on to tackle history in dirty clothes

MELS 87

A Visit to the Royal Society

they have every intention of holding this academic hussy to the standards of a society worth a king’s return, and a narrative fitting science faction

air is not substance so much as a system of moving, not in and out, but constantly through, knowing no barrier, because no one substance is just its matter and material they fight the fear inherent in being one mind, never a defined whole, a conglomeration orbiting a notion of self a body is not a border or a boundary

a society should be a fluid dense in its motions, but these men, a race of beings pretend the whole of a species is composed of but one sex woman is man with a womb, a man with an unexplained space

a domed cloche glass suctions to its table, air pulling from a body the finch makes an art of air’s constant movement, warbling the ethereal spaces till it punctures your sensibility with sound, now sucked-silent of its movement and life a woman, even an extravagant one, obvious as this, also makes a specimen the abdominal void sucked out through a subtler art, to take a wind out from her sailing tours through London, and in sucking the oxygen from her, these men think they will sharpen their edges, cut like limestone creases on the building which they cannot see slowly dissolving with the constant drops of rain

MELS 88

[her]esy i. she shall not settle for mere accuracy when the style of mind’s matter is at stake in a manuscript’s first section of poems tracing the circuitous logic of atomic rovings, the verse must be as particular as particled

MELS 89 ii. hide to board aligns spine-skin to constructed cordate quire-fastenings the matter of mind is body, and the urge to reproduce, because our nature does not know a void, takes sundry shapes a brain is flesh, and replicates itself in quartered vellum and the bilateral holding a multiplicity within its axis, one half of the self already doubled, binary fission of ideas and plentitudinous folds labyrinth of selves

MELS 90

Carnivorous Plants i. The Fig the fruit of the inward-blooming female flower yields the double-delicacy of fruit ficus doncarica flesh pollinated and then fed the relationships are only symbiotic when the fostering male flower releases its stamen’s pollen to the roving fig wasp, and stark mutualism when the devouring female plant revives its hunger in a growth between split leaves that kill then absorb the messenger exoskeleton shards enzyme eaten mostly indistinguishable from the grit of its ostiole and used to furnish succulent female flowers syconiyum’s molasses skin enclosure swelling inward, downwards, heavy, black and peduncleus towards ground gorged on protein in a flower-eat-bug world

MELS 91 ii. The Venus Fly Trap

Aphrodite’s mousetrap, amourous of flesh, the Venus Flytrap supplements subtropic Carolinian soils with exo-skeleton coated protein the leaves have hinges and hungers not sated by nutrient-poor wetland soil one ingenious adaption of design leaves hinged into jaws with bars of teeth and in the hinged jaws chloro-filled hairs, movement buds, with a two-trigger sensor ensuring food worth the energy of catching, the elegantly resuseable in its construction of floral logic

MELS 92 iii. The Bladderwort of late plant developments, the angiosperms, flowering reproducers, divergent blooms, novelled in the Triassic, infringing upon coniferous terrain-domination in the Lower Crustaceous age the utricalculations betray a vulgar need to supplant nutritionally bereft soil and stringy swamp light and instead eat from water and air the most sophisticated plant structure in the world, gratifying justified across continents, specialized for mere food a gourmand’s selection of larvae, tadpoles, water fleas, miniature fish, and sundry digestible, wriggling proteins can all be sucked into the chloroformed bladders in the instance of the one-fifteenth of a second the plant expands its leafy gob manufacturing a vortex of primal hunger as shape

MELS 93 iv. the bifurcation of flora and fauna meant the subservience of plants to the energy of larger creatures, fodder for more advanced structures why wait for replenished soil when survival is at stake? why be subordinate to decomposition when enzymes can process a taste of one’s own enemy? the garden of Ediacaran is lost and plants left untended break into the meat market

MELS 94

The Duchess of Newcastle Wears Not Ribbons i. adherence to thought of the day is genius à la mode a ribbon inserts place into books marks pace-place, but cords anchor ridges in spines, stories wrapped in flesh as without, so within filigreed embossing glosses earthy leather, no luxury spared in satin end bands, a Rubens-guided artist with cross-hatching needles embossing flashings glittering tan-smoothed leather the duchess chooses no ribbon bookmarks how can genius have but one location?

MELS 95 ii. needless is fashionable thought to one who vaults towards timelessness the females clack their mouths scratch their eyes gasp with their pens to see that the duchess wears not ribbons cavaliers about in pants bares breasts to nourish a play yet makes her wardrobe a record of her adoration

Christina Henrietta, titanness ruler, with continental winds budding nude flesh

William, horse master of seventy, who dutifully spreads clothed thighs everyday with love of the art

Lucretius, obscurest essential, foundational atomist who exists not save for an epithet of laurels, a memorial wreath for a legacy left on the page the duchess models dresses of silks and lacings and shrouds of linen and leather

MELS 96 iii.

flanked by Athena and Apollo, an alcove for a writer who has no peer and yet you may do just that gown and drapery billows with mythological inflation, a laurel crown in the pastoral perfect delineates her own sentence: eternity why choose fraying decoration when one can lay base work?

MELS 97

Venus Among the Atoms i. your birth the uncoiling titan guts torn hot from the fray’s adrenaline-frenzy into Gaia’s mettled seafoam churning into existence a goddess born of unprecedented birth fundamental as an asexual alpha owes no allegiance to, no heartstring’s drown-pull into reflection to, no joining multiplications of coupling genitals and latently useful eggs hiding in the young to the clinamen of origins she presides over lovers objective in her dominions always a lover, always a woman, never a once-raised, infant child love is the echo that persuades repetition into meaning words the stacked stones interlocked like scales of the fabricated armor around our perception of the world love is the ability to forge conclusions from the amalgam of experience to work towards a desired end love is the choice to see meaning in the gales of chance

MELS 98 ii. loves’ experiments shot through with cupid’s scalpel, a wound an entry point for examination love’s wound-divine, curiosity, from which the outsider believes they shall learn more from examination of affection’s test subjects than inhabiting that same body can yield that no trojan outcome will yield a short-stopping conclusion the orgasm of dissection splitting layers is another folded-flesh opening blushing the fusing of blood-thickened tissues to rusting oxygen

MELS 99 iii. do not watch your life be ruled by the people who proved unworthy to be in it that way lies more than mortal entropy stop, and sit somewhere quiet and become the noise in the room, feel the cycle of breaths, oxygenating cells and the fuzz of energy transferred to be used, the blood flow of our sustenance machine, the turn of earth out of the sun’s light and into its own shadow, feel the Earth rolling lopsided around its orbit-tracks towards Northern hemisphere’s short-changed light fall feel the smallness of a body also cycling around energies somewhere, in the midst of mandelaesque cycles, love pauses to transfer energy, fighting molecular instinct to self-spend, keeping energy moving through our own bodies the head is not the globe of existence open up the ecology of selfhood

MELS 100 iv. you kiss my eyelid petal-brush shy and my neurons fire a path from the juncture to established thoughts blazing through the sensation to remembered snatches of language i will make thee beds of roses, beauty’s pull of moment into memory a rose is a young thing yet in the world, no older than the Phanerozoic eon, Cenozoic Era, Paleogene Period thirty-five million years ago, attractive for its lineage of suddenness and brevity, the innovation of its harkening to winged fauna, as spore-messengers, pollen matchmakers for the criss-cross of cholorphylled bodies the pataphysics of touch sap to trunk, stamen to ovary, gives a wholeness to the presence of your touch, the situationally scientific proven by its fruit proof through paturition more often than its sense that occupies brain cells that last a lifetime

MELS 101 v. i was born the night supernova SN1987a particled its light showers on earth, their journeys revealed to keen instruments my great aunt, and then my mother called me murmle, short for miracle mal i am no general saviour despite the heralding of burst star light, except to those who love me something inconceivably pre-time collapsing into the smallness of the new in you i taste start dust the calm in what’s ancient, the litany of your rebirthing parts the intricacies of body your infinite newness the merging of anomalous biology and the exceptionality of tenderness in your print ridges brushing flesh between pores and follicles and an exception, for you, i will make your kiss on my eyelid is the enfleuré of prairie rose petals to my lips we were born ancient but in a cogent instant your sleek skin and reflecting eyes grow young for me in the delight of the combination of ourselves the eternity of presence we call love with the very thought of you utterance of your name MELS 102 my heart churns blue blood to red, oxygenation of excitement es-tu, mr. muse? tasting out the possibilities your gift of sanguine ignition catches all I touch but, the paper and pre-inked pen the dead-ended glass tunnels of test tubes microscopic moleglobules striations of earth also beckon between the abandon of affection and the demands of constant work i sit down to wed a labour of process seemingly abstract as a blinking switchboard without a legend discernible to any but the operator within

SN1987a as an earth-sight evolves death is a release two outer rings of gas interlocked by a ringing core collapse with the flatness of the Hubble Space Telescope’s translation through wide field planetary camera 2 complete the infinite come live with me and we shall all the theorems try and together manifest what feels like fate in one hundred and seventy thousand years of chance

MELS 103 vi. oh, Lucretius, contemporarily known as the least Epicurean in a genealogy of Epicureans, believer in life composite before a chorus of magnified eyes, could claim observational evidence at the microscope, defender of atomic whorls and ways, and default atheist an invocation and dedication to Venus remains the oldest vertebrae contending the spine of your argument, misaligned with your straight rule of belief and a hollow knock on the doorway of a long-deserted temple but, she comes anyway

MELS 104

The Marriage of Hermes Trismegistus

Young love’s not always made to age: Life spends itself, fleetingly fast. Don’t grow old without waxing sage, Young love’s not always made to age. Discerning courtship makes the mage, Why be green when emerald lasts? Young love’s not, always, made to age. Life spends itself fleetingly fast.

MELS 105

Partnering

Union is an earthly pursuit: the proof is your hand holding mine. Flesh-bound living will souls dilute. Union is an earthly pursuit. The mind’s soul will with a spouse transmute earthly substance, first matter’s fire. Union is an earthly pursuit; the proof is your hand holding mine.

MELS 106

Autoerotography expectation manifests that space between you and the lens, lens to film click away film to photo to hands click your body flash-swelters click with the hot kinetic murmur of a remembered touch burns colour onto the brown Polaroid static of the street-sky developing this psychopornography developing maybe into the delicious anticipation of dark rooms charging your device to fuel desire, your tensile finger poises, readying the shutter-flash laden with its coming the viewfinder steps outside filled with you, but in a moment you can’t see the subject, or your artistry at first couldn’t see the beauty but for your lover’s desire, but now click every shuddering-hungry aperture’s no mere hole, but an intimate portal you slide into becoming a photographic ouroboros, at one with consuming yourself, swallowing all but charnel trail of instamatic scales, feelin’ you devour your selfie

MELS 107

Hand Bound

We are gathered here today, tomorrow, in time archival to celebrate my loving you, the verso to my recto, a spring’s worth of leaves sewn whole, our book of life. Marriage’s hermaphroditic structure: for every volume my name emblazons in gold’s front-covered flash, book’s Janus figure means you bolster all my pages’ horizons. My talent’s obverse, backed by shared knowledge, is always you: the book’s anatomy through volumes amplifies love unabridged, and through stacked copies, we kiss infinitely. My book seems a brain, unfolding to you, but one spine wholding two minds proves partnered through.

MELS 108 of conclusions do not smother that which is already obvious: we all conclude we, the animals, the plant structures, the globules of planetary dust, the flaring stars, the netting of galaxies, perhaps this universe our time proves brief, infinitesimally microscopic, below comprehension so, why hasten this

MELS 109

Paleontolography sedimentary scripts, sheaths and leaves of aggregrate particled rock, the story non-linear and fragmentary the losing of the Garden of Ediacaran hortus inconclusus only glimpsed at through ambered letters of authenticity, exoskeletonal honour duels through a glass, tales of petals, petrified dripping of burnt manuscripts bones pressed between stone pages, petrified hairs in a cavlier’s alluvial fan, and heterogenous deposits in the ventricles the history of animals’ elliptical descendants from the planktonic through to the spinal up from the magma and eventually back again

MELS 110

Margaret, the First, Not the Last

Fellows of the Royal Society *

Professor Jan Anderson FRS [1996] Professor Judith Armitage FRS [2013] Professor Frances Ashcroft FMedSci FRS [1999]

Professor Gillian Bates FMedSci FRS [2007] Professor Jean Beggs CBE FRS [1998] Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS [2003] Dame Valerie Beral DBE FMedSci FRS [2006] Dr Mariann Bienz FMedSci FRS [2003] Professor Elizabeth Blackburn AC FRS [1992] Professor Andrea Brand FMedSci FRS [2010] Professor Eleanor Burbidge FRS [1964]

Professor Eleanor Campbell FRS [2010] Professor Doreen Cantrell FMedSci FRS [2011] Professor Lorna Casselton CBE FRS [1999] Professor Deborah Charlesworth FRS [2005] Professor Jennifer Clack FRS [2009] Professor Nicola Clayton FRS [2010] Professor Suzanne Cory AC FRS [1992]

Dame Kay Davies DBE FMedSci FRS [2003] Professor Caroline Dean OBE FRS [2004] Professor Anne Dell CBE FMedSci FRS [2002] Professor Eleanor Dodson FRS [2003] Dame Athene Donald DBE FRS [1999] Professor Michele Dougherty FRS [2012] Dame Ann Dowling DBE FREng FRS [2003]

Professor Dianne Edwards CBE FRS [1996]

Professor Uta Frith DBE FBA FMedSci FRS [2005]

Professor Lynn Gladden CBE FRS [2004] Professor Rosemary Grant FRS [2007] Professor Clare Grey FRS [2011] Professor Gillian Griffiths FMedSci FRS [2013]

Professor Joanna Haigh FRS [2013] Dame Wendy Hall DBE FREng FRS [2009] Professor Edith Heard [2013] Professor Janet Hemingway CBE FMedSci FRS [2011] MELS 111

Dame Julia Higgins DBE FREng FRS [1995] Professor Brigid Hogan FRS [2001] Professor Christine Holt FMedSci FRS [2009] Professor Judith Howard CBE FRS [2002]

Professor Patricia Jacobs OBE FMedSci FRS [1993] Dame Carole Jordan DBE FRS [1990]

Professor Victoria Kaspi FRS [2010] Dr Olga Kennard OBE FRS [1987] Professor Frances Kirwan FRS [2001]

Professor Ottoline Leyser CBE FRS [2007] Professor Ruth Lynden-Bell FRS [2006] Dr Mary Lyon FRS [1973]

Professor Georgina Mace CBE FRS [2002] Professor Trudy Mackay FRS [2006] Professor Enid MacRobbie FRS [1991] Dr Philippa Marrack FMedSci FRS [1997] Professor Dusa McDuff FRS [1994] Professor Angela McLean FRS [2009] Professor Anne Mills FMedSci FRS [2013] Professor Brenda Milner CC FRS [1979]

Dr Anne O'Garra FMedSci FRS [2008] Dame Bridget Ogilvie AC DBE FMedSci FRS [2003] Baroness Onora O'Neill * CBE FBA FMedSci FRS [2007]

Dame Linda Partridge DBE FMedSci FRS [1996] Dr Barbara Pearse FRS [1988] Professor Fiona Powrie FRS [2011]

Professor Susan Rees FRS [2002] Professor Daniela Rhodes FRS [2007] Professor Elizabeth Robertson FRS [2003] Dame Carol Robinson DBE FMedSci FRS [2004] Professor Margaret Robinson FMedSci FRS [2012] Professor Janet Rossant FRS [2000] Dame Nancy Rothwell DBE FMedSci FRS [2004]

Professor Helen Saibil FMedSci FRS [2006] Professor Elizabeth Simpson OBE FMedSci FRS [2010] Professor Patricia Simpson FRS [2000] Professor Maria Grazia Spillantini FMedSci FRS [2013] Professor Karen Steel FMedSci FRS [2009] MELS 112

Professor Brigitta Stockinger FMedSci FRS [2013]

Dame Jean Thomas DBE FMedSci FRS [1986] Dame Janet Thornton DBE FRS [1999] Professor Cheryll Tickle CBE FMedSci FRS [1998] Professor Shirley Tilghman FRS [1995] Professor Ulrike Tillmann FRS [2008] Professor Anne Treisman FRS [1989]

Professor Veronica Van Heyningen CBE FMedSci FRS [2007] Professor Angela Vincent FMedSci FRS [2011] Professor Karen Vousden CBE FMedSci FRS [2003]

Professor Elizabeth Warrington FRS [1986] Professor Fiona Watt FMedSci FRS [2003] Ms Sophie Wilson FRS [2013]

Professor Julia Yeomans FRS [2013]

Honorary Fellows: Female Foreign Members of the Royal Society*

Professor Bonnie Bassler ForMemRS [2012] Professor Margaret Buckingham ForMemRS [2013] Dr Catherine Jeanne Cesarsky ForMemRS [2005] Professor Joanne Chory ForMemRS [2011] Professor Pascale Cossart ForMemRS [2010] Professor Clara Franzini-Armstrong ForMemRS [2001] Dr Barbara Hohn ForMemRS [2008] Professor Nicole Le Douarin ForMemRS [1989] Professor Jane Lubchenco ForMemRS [2004] Dr Christiane Nusslein-Volhard ForMemRS [1990] Professor Carla Shatz ForMemRS [2011] Professor Susan Solomon ForMemRS [2008]

List of previous (now deceased) female Fellows of the Royal Society*

Agnes Arber Brigitte Askonas Charlotte Auerbach

Polina Bayvel Rosa Beddington Wendy Bickmore Ann Bishop (biologist) Dorothy V. M. Bishop MELS 113

Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge Edith Bülbring Margaret Burbidge

Susanne von Caemmerer Mary Cartwright Katharine Cashman Jane Clarke (scientist) Patricia H. Clarke Sarah Cleaveland Anne Cutler

Naomi Datta Sally Davies (doctor) Marian Dawkins Annette Dolphin Christl Donnelly

Yvonne Elsworth Alison Etheridge

Honor Fell Anne Ferguson-Smith Amanda Fisher Maria Fitzgerald

Pratibha Gai Anne Glover (biologist) Margaret Gowing

Jean Hanson Gabriele C. Hegerl Veronica van Heyningen Dorothy Hill Dorothy Hodgkin

Sue Ion

Lisa Jardine Louise Johnson E. Yvonne Jones

Eugenia Kumacheva

Jane A. Langdale Corinne Le Quéré MELS 114

Kathleen Lonsdale

Eleanor Maguire Irene Manton Sidnie Manton Sheina Marshall Anne McLaren Marcia McNutt Helen Muir Noreen Murray

Dorothy M. Needham Jenny Nelson Anne Neville (engineer) Alison Noble

Mary Parke Karalyn Patterson Josephine Pemberton Winifred Pennington Mary Pickford (physiologist) Rosalind Pitt-Rivers Helen Porter Sally Price (chemist)

Sheena Radford F. Gwendolen Rees Mary Rees Anne Ridley Muriel Robertson Miriam Rothschild

Ruth Sanger Caroline Series Sheila Sherlock Julia Slingo Alison Mary Smith Nicola Spaldin Marjory Stephenson Natalie Strynadka

Sylvia Agnes Sophia Tait Margaret Thatcher Jennifer Anne Thomas

Janet Vaughan MELS 115

Marthe Vogt

Anne Warner (scientist) Winifred Watkins Janet Watson Susan R. Wessler Elsie Widdowson

*not listed: the approximate 1’465 living male Royal Society Fellows, as of March 31, 2018

MELS 116

Tardigrade: Evasive Species

To inhabit the peripheral places and skirt seen possibilities aniliminal states working over the some-change scope of the known blessings upon the odd, that shan’t factor into cruel equalizers to fall outside of recognized rulings means the limit does not exist

MELS 117 salt: extro my savory-sharp prisoner sacred salt dazzles my warm ocean drink like naked breath’s fever marbles blush on the brain, linger-throbs velvety on lobes liquid always devours broken-glass brilliant cubes surround-embrace vast works with need coiling under lie circle-long: salt is a cycle i bite my cheek, choke on my words, lick your ideas clean, and taste your ink

MELS 118

Glossary benthic- an eating style seen in the Cambrian Explosion where animals burrow under the surface of the sea floor to gain nutrition bice- a deep blue-green colour so dark that it appears near-black and an antiquated term for the colour of depths of the ocean bilateral- a creature with a central axis, where two sides of the body are mirrored

Cambrian- a period during which multi-organism creatures rapidly developed in correlation with the warming of the Earth, approximately 541 to 485.4million years ago (mya) cratons- the lumps of cooled lava that floated from the ocean floor to the surface that preceded, and later became parts of, continents dulse- a variety of seaweed

Ediacaran- the era that preceded the Cambrian explosion, and lasted approximately from 635 to 542 mya, and predates animals eating other animals

Lucretius- a Roman author, about whom few autobiographical details are known, save that he wrote De Natura Rerum, which is important due to its early espousal of the theory that all matter is composed of atoms, and became an important text to the 17th Century community of European scientists developing microscopes and experimental methodologies

Eukaryote- a single-celled organism from the Pre-Cambrian era of geology gutter- the space on a page that takes you into the folds of a physical book margin- the white space surrounding the text on a book’s page

Pangea- the longest existing supercontinent known quires -also known as signatures or leaves, a bookbinding term for a grouping of pages sewn together radial- a body type radiates from a central point, preceding creatures with bilateral structure, and can still be seen in creatures such as starfishes

Tardigrade- a microscopic creature that can resist death by drowning, desiccation, exposure to outer space. Due to its discovery in the 17th century, it is known by many names including water bear and moss piglet, but this name comes from the scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani and is Italian for “slow stepper.”

MELS 119 tectonic plates- the pieces of cooled magma that have floated up and pieced together the continents tokonoma- a Japanese word to describe a niche in a space meant to house a knick-knack

MELS 120

Smutty Alchemy: Lyric Conceptualism, Margaret Cavendish, and Poetics of Polyphony

Section I - Introduction Sina Queyras, in the essay “Lyric Conceptualism: A Manifesto in Progress,” describes the Lyric Conceptualist as a poet capable of recognizing the effects of disparate movements and employing a variety of lyric, conceptual, and language poetry techniques to continue to innovate in poetry without dismissing the work of other schools of poetic thought. Queyras sees the lyric conceptualist as an artistic curator who collects, modifies, selects, synthesizes, and adapts, to create verse that is both conceptual and accessible, using relevant materials and techniques from the past and present. This dissertation responds to Queyras’s idea with a collection of original poems in the lyric conceptualist mode, supported by a critical exegesis of that work. “Smutty

“Smutty Alchemy,” within the intellectual context both of contemporary Canadian poetry and of creative-scientific writing. Stylistically, “Smutty Alchemy” speaks to the concerns of lyric conceptualism by blurring the lines among lyric, conceptual and language poetry traditions, playing with such recognized forms as sonnets, triolets, epic poems, and free verse, as well as refigured poetic shapes, such as the element poems, the cursed sonnets, and the tardigrade- shaped poems, which specifically reference concrete poetry. Erin Wunker, in Notes from a

Feminist Killjoy, touches on Donna Haraway’s situated knowledge to say that “Situating yourself enacts the deliberate practice of locating your own identity and experiences as coming from somewhere and being mediated by certain things such as your race, gender, and class. Laying these things out for yourself locates your way of being in the world – your knowledge – within MELS 121 larger systems of knowing” (30). Wunker’s theory, if applied to contemporary poetics, shows that feminist writers and critics can both refuse to limit subject matter or style based on the autobiographical and confessional modes of the lyric poets and still discuss the mark of the personal upon even the most process-intensive poetics and “objective” voices. Additionally, they refuse to adhere strictly to any stringent rulemaking of the conceptualists, or to choose exclusively a focus on language moments as do the language poets. My project explores this impetus towards the understanding of scripted forms, coupled with the impulse to delimit and expand the range of those forms by creating a poetry collection that pairs scientific subject matter with the synthetic and invented poetic shapes of lyric conceptualism.

My collection explores the ability and privilege for scholars outside of the sciences to educate themselves and express opinions on science’s technologies, methods, and effects. The exegesis further locates my work within the Canadian context provided by poets whose work puts in the foreground environmental concerns and focus, such as Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, and

Christopher Dewdney, who include accounts of observation which remain important to the scientific disciplines of biology and ecology. Additionally, my collection identifies with the work of Adam Dickinson and Liz Howard, as their publications within the past five years consider scientific subject matter from chemistry, biology, and neurology, reframed with a poetic voice, and how that very subject matter complicates that poetic voice. By claiming Margaret Cavendish as a character for subject matter in my poetry collection, and as a voice within that collection, I see “Smutty Alchemy” as deconstructing the patrilineal power struggles of poetic discourse. For the lyric conceptualist to move towards a more complex notion of poetic inheritance in contemporary Canadian poetry is to acknowledge “her debts to multiple strands of contemporary poetics, art, design, architecture, philosophy, environmentalism, unions, students, modernism, MELS 122 postmodernism, conceptualism and romanticism” (Queyras 63). “Smutty Alchemy,” and the critical counterpart of the exegesis, then question any polarization of the lyric and conceptual schools in Canadian poetry. In the past few decades of Canadian poetry, lyric and conceptual poetry have been critically situated as opposites —the former, foregrounding expression through form, and the latter, experimenting with form to the exclusion of overt expression. Donato

Mancini in You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence posits this difference as a historical division between what he calls the “permamodern,” and the postmodern, which entered the Canadian poetics scene in the mid-1960s. The formative difference between them is that the

“permamodern” poetics cater to a merging of aesthetics and consciousness to uphold humanism, and postmodernity generates “contemporary critiques of dominant values” (23). Queyras teaches us to see these as poles of a spectrum instead and treats the negotiation between these differences as generative exploration.

The voice of the Smutty Alchemist in the collection builds metaphorically on alchemical practices by forging the “something from nothing” in poems. Alchemy is often perceived as a perversion of the “purity” of disciplines and the codified ways in which their information presents to a readership. My Alchemist is “smutty” because this collection is not about transcending and elevating, but rather enhancing and deepening the reader’s perception of earthly existence, and, in the older sense, the word “smut” is related to a smudge, dirt or a blackened mark. While the collection seldom uses the personal pronoun, my style as a poet marks the collection with the use of double entendres and subtle sexuality, to acknowledge the human, the “smutty,” by operating playfully in multiple registers of language, without overshadowing and stripping the seriousness of the implications of the scientific content.

“Smutty Alchemy,” then, celebrates improbable but possible combinations. This collection MELS 123 repurposes the ideas and terminology of early modern science to explore our notions of how the personal can factor into twenty-first century, objective-driven, experimental processes. The objective and de-personalized voice of scientific writing implies that the discipline only creates room for empirical, knowledge-based content and conclusions, but by shifting the language into the poetic, it recognizes that desire is a component of the learning process. Work that is aesthetically accessible contributes to its being independently complete, by repurposing the subjective as an essential component of explorative thinking. Despite the development of a culture entrenched with empirical facts, scientific experimentation relies on the ability to adjust models to reflect new results, because the process changes the initial concept; the hypothesis is a maybe statement, not a finished certainty.

Section II - Margaret Cavendish

From the time Margaret Cavendish wrote and onwards, she has occupied an interesting and often controversial spot in the literary canon, partly due to her historical situation within the

Cavalier Poetry period. Cavalier poetry is “an emotional, embodied, and sociability-oriented account of elite men’s cultural practices and literary production during the Civil Wars” (Earl

Miner, qtd. in Chedgzoy 393). At the same time, while female writers have frequently projected a personal tone to satisfy the expressive lyric mode expected by readers and publishers alike:

“seventeenth-century readers had appreciated Margaret as a heroic woman, rivaling men in her

‘wit and sense,’ and the ‘strong reason’ of ‘her mighty mind’ [ . . . but] by the mid-eighteenth century, female authors were no longer supposed to write like men” (Whitaker 351). This later trend meant that women writers were to convey “[d]elicacy, tenderness, refinement, purity, beauty, grace,” which later, in the nineteenth century, led to Katherine Philips, a peer of MELS 124

Cavendish’s who was associated with Cavalier poetry, being seen as an exemplar for her time for her “feminine modesty and the sentimental personality she constructed in her verses that so appealed to this later period” (Whitaker 351-352). Cavendish’s work offers some unexpected exceptions within her seventeenth-century context; for example, she refuses to embrace the

Cavalier poetic tropes, including erotic love, in her first collection, Poems and Fancies (1653).

Although themes of love and sexuality in poetry can be found in other seventeenth-century works by women, such as Aphra Behn’s “To the Fair Clarinda” (1688), Cavendish did not produce work that uses metaphysical conceits, nor does she present love poetry with any hint of erotica or even corporality in either her courtship poems, exchanged with William Cavendish, or in her first published collection. This act of refusal shielded her work from societal scrutiny and kept the focus on her subject, scientific theories, a radical departure from the usual Cavalier concerns.

“Smutty Alchemy” is inspired by Margaret Cavendish’s self-teaching and her initial introductions into scientific society, in her case, through reliance on educated acquaintances, and, in my case, through exposure to the sciences in a country and era where access is less class- driven in terms of social circles and more available through higher education. Sarah H.

Mendelson in The Mental World of Stuart Women notes that “Aristocratic women were excluded from the ‘great tradition’ of the grammar schools and universities which molded upper-class male culture, and wives of the middle and lower ranks did not join in the camaraderie of alehouse or guild. As to whether women produced a culture of their own, historians have had little to say, pleading lack of evidence. Yet women’s mental and material world is reflected in their own writings and a variety of other sources” (7). Simultaneously, “Smutty Alchemy” aligns itself with lyric conceptualism, so that the poetry cycle offers a series of observations and MELS 125 opinions, usually about science, from the perspective of the Smutty Alchemist character who represents an enthusiast rather than an academy-trained expert, but with a conceptualist’s interest in form. The purposeful blurring or confusion of “Margaret’s” voice with the Smutty

Alchemist’s voice of the collection keeps the form process-based and the voice openly complex, allowing for the re-working of old forms and the invention of new ones. The instances of lyric voice deliberately resist presenting a consistently singular or autobiographical stance, and adaptations of form support the unsettling of the cohesive lyric voice without removing it completely. This collection intentionally uses the scientific model of observation and investigation to take as its experimental subject lyric conceptualism. Margaret, therefore, functions on multiple, intertwined levels, as subject, as a speaker, and as a poet, to parallel the impetus of lyric conceptualism for layered context and open-ended discourse.

Lara Dodds, in The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish, notes that, although

“Cavendish is aware of the conventions of female literacy, and at time addresses herself to female readers, she does not make gestures of explicit acknowledgement toward other women”

(224). Dodds goes on to note that “Cavendish’s ambivalent commentary on women’s writing, commentary that is mirrored in her contemporaries’ censure of her writing, reveals in miniature the special problems of writing women’s literary history” (224), in that women were pushed to advocate for the originality of their work in a way that could isolate social context and influences. Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) indicates that works by seventeenth-century women were sometimes published without the author having initiated the process or having a say in the matter (Sokol 156), which is distinctly different from

Cavendish’s experience; she was very much in control of her publication process, and refused to be published anonymously, which also happened in her time to other female authors. Cavendish MELS 126 was the first woman to be admitted to the Royal Society on May 23, 1667 (Whitaker 298), and, it needs to be noted, she was also the last to be admitted for more than two hundred years. Such was the effect of Margaret Cavendish as the first woman to participate in the Society, a woman who did not meet the patrilineal expectations of the day. Her aristocratic status and her much publicized enthusiasm for science were not enough to synchronize and integrate with the formally educated, male status quo, represented by prominent male intellectuals such as Robert

Hooke, Robert Boyle, John Evelyn and Thomas Hobbes. In her first book of poetry, Poems and

Fancies, despite her adopting the title “poetress” in prefatory notes, which might indicate a feminized diminutive of the title “poet,” Cavendish refuses to write on personal subject matter or circulate her work privately as a manuscript meant only for court settings or for her personal coterie: she decided on lavish, public distribution. Cavendish educated herself in the work of philosophers and scientific thinkers introduced to her through her husband William’s social circles, and like Lucretius before her, she chose to write about natural philosophy in verse, but with her theories unfolding as a series of short lyric poems. Cavendish was once considered

“wild and unstable eccentric,” but in the closing of the biography Mad Madge, Katie Whitaker closes her book by calling Cavendish “a woman at once sophisticated and multifaceted,” and an author with versatility (395).

“Smutty Alchemy” is, therefore, inspired by her work and concerned with the public accessibility of scientific information to a broad audience and how this information affects and is changed by poetic presentation. At the same time, “Smutty Alchemy” remains aware of the complication of her as a role model: she saw herself as an exception to her sex, and felt no need to advocate for her sex in general, but champion the right of any individual to self-educate through investigation. This collection then focuses on her as a springboard in the examination of MELS 127 disruptions of the usual scientific representation and the objective voice to re-situate scientific inquiry into poetry instead, as it explores the tenets of lyric conceptualism. A great deal of this collection channels the voice of Margaret Cavendish or presents her as the prevailing subject matter. Cavendish inspires the speaking voice in Sections I and IV of “Smutty Alchemy,” and is the main character in the poems which consider her life in Sections III and IV. She is also the co- conspirator of the Smutty Alchemist in the Element and Experiment poems in this collection.

The actual, historical achievements and actions of Margaret Cavendish remain remarkable, despite sharing an interest in atomic theory inspired by Lucretius. However, even were these factors not hindrances to a possible academic or social connection, another blockade would be

Cavendish’s low opinion of the achievements and career ambitions of other women, with her going so far as to excuse her lack of history reading “for fear I should meet with such of my Sex, that have out-done all the glory I can aime at, or hope to attaine” (Mendelson 56). Mendelson also summarizes Cavendish’s lack of interest in and compassion for fellow female creators because:

She was not a true champion of her sex, but an egoist who happened to be of the female

gender. The freedom from limitations of her sex for which she groped in her writing and

in her personal style had reference to her own life rather than that of women in general.

When balked in her quest for male privileges she adopted a feminist perspective. But

instead of wishing to see her female contemporaries raised from their ‘dejected’ position,

her real desire was to shine above all rivals. (55)

For example, despite sharing an interest in atomic theory inspired by Lucretius, Cavendish would not have entertained Lucy Hutchinson as a potential collaborator, educator, or even ally due to Hutchinson’s anti-Royalist beliefs, should the opportunity have arisen. Cavendish’s anti- MELS 128 woman bias is in part a product of a systematic discourse that believed geniuses were a divine gift to their field of study, and existed in isolation, an exemplar, and an exception altogether.

Backhandedly, then, she also indicates ongoing problems within STEM disciplines: even now, as contemporary institutions mandate an increased representation through the addition of previously marginalized and excluded candidates, Cavendish’s concerns about the lack of space for women in the sciences remain an issue centuries later.

Cavendish’s anti-woman tirades in life do not fit with the feminist underpinnings of lyric conceptualism, but Queyras’s philosophies about lyric conceptualism allow for the Smutty

Alchemist, informed by both Cavendish’s work and Queyras’s tenets, to present a fractured world view which sees such exclusion-driven thinking as Cavendish’s as incomplete and flawed, but remediable. Cavendish definitely spoke out against the lack of female ambition in her own day, but she also radically changed the notion of what women could publish: Mendelson writes in “The Mental World of Stuart Women” that Mary Evelyn and Lucy Hutchinson condemned her literary ambitions, and yet emulated her biography, meaning that “Margaret’s effrontery in challenging certain barriers which sustained the polarity of the two sexes may have had a subliminal effect in broadening women’s ideas of what constituted conceivable behavior”

(Mendelson 61). Although Cavendish does not serve as an ideal proto-feminist, her behaviours in the publishing world fall in with the contemporary Canadian discourse that seeks to say the work of female writers and scholars is worthy of occupying space and seeks to rectify the publishing inequity made clear by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s “Numbers Trouble” article of 2007.

Cavendish’s anti-woman tirades in life do not fit with the feminist underpinnings of lyric conceptualism to turn “away from the gated community” (Queyras 62), but Queyras’s philosophies about lyric conceptualism allow for the Smutty Alchemist, informed by both MELS 129

Cavendish’s work and Queyras’s tenets, to present a fractured worldview which sees such exclusion-driven thinking as Cavendish’s as incomplete and flawed, but remediable. Her actions create examples that allow other women now to grant themselves permission to be ambitious, in an age where Canadian publishers are still working towards achieving publishing equality and

“expand a public dialogue on gender and poetics that is both attuned to the realities and discourses of a new generation of writers and critics and attentive to the histories of innovative women’s writing” (Eichorn & Milne 10).

Simply, Margaret Cavendish was an early scientist, philosopher, and writer, who produced both literary and scientific work rooted in Natural Philosophy. In the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth century she was overlooked as a lesser-known poet, due to the rarity of reprintings of her work (Whitaker 350), and, as noted, because of the ascendency of reputation of writers such as Katherine Philips. Virginia Woolf famously contemplated Cavendish as a literary foremother in A Room of One’s Own, but her observations “were also based heavily on later traditions rather than primary historical sources [. . . it] owed much both to Charles Lamb and the subsequent tradition of Mad Madge,” where her posthumous reputation painted her as presenting from eccentric to insane (Whitaker 357). While Woolf’s portrait is not considered flattering by

Cavendish scholars, her investigation, nonetheless, attracted attention again to Cavendish’s work.

While Woolf characterized her and William as building an echo-chamber of mutual admiration in the country retreat “scribbling plays, poems, philosophies, greeting each other’s work with raptures of delight” (Woolf 51), Woolf, because of her attention to Cavendish, created interest in

Cavendish: her choice to discuss Cavendish reinvigorated scholarly enthusiasm for Cavendish’s work. This, in turn, had the effect of lionizing Cavendish’s range of publications within the literary canon, a gamut that the International Margaret Cavendish Society, launched in 1997, MELS 130 showcases and celebrates to this day (Whitaker 359). “Smutty Alchemy” engages particularly with the first section of her publication, Poems and Fancies (1653), because her work locates within her historical context, but also within the current context of lyric conceptualism: its short forms do not always take on a human persona for a speaking voice; they use scientific terminology of her day; they refuse to turn scientific findings into moral lessons. Her work invites further questioning and resists closed-off answers, interrogating the known and postulating the unconfined possible in forms which contain but do not constrain.

Section III – The Debate about the Function of Form in Lyric and Conceptual Writing

While the discussion of poetry usually considers the play of form and content, “twenty- first century poetics has been preoccupied with two ongoing conversations: the perceived divide between lyric and conceptual writing, and the underrepresentation of women and other nondominant subjects” (Wunker xi). Queyras sees these debates as intertwined issues offering a potential approach to poetics which would allow for a range of techniques and voices instead of a separation. At its core, conceptual poetry focuses on process rather than expression, and the process is very structured, or, as Sol Lewitt says, the “idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” sometimes at the cost of the readability of the poems (Goldsmith 4). In other words, experimentalism is poetry about techne rather than episteme, emphasizing craft, rule-making, and constraint which, in turn, take precedence over moral lessons and beauty: it stands as an extreme version of ars artis. The construction of the idea is the point, and the structure of the poem does not necessarily answer to expectations of readability. Wunker succinctly defines the lyric, on the other hand, as, “at its most traditional a grammatical vehicle that moves the emotions of the speaker from a lost or desired object toward a listener and then out to the reader” MELS 131

(xii). In this process, lyric poetry tends to attach itself to “an authentic and stable identity at all costs” (Goldsmith 7), which in its contemporary manifestation of free verse results in reduced formalism compared to that of conceptualism —it is as if such poetry risks becoming all confession with no booth. Vanessa Place, in conversation with Marjorie Perloff, claims that “art still considers language capable of conveying something of the unadulterated (lyric) subject,” suggesting that the recognized forms of the lyric may be tired, but they may not have been exhausted. (72). Queyras, in presenting poetic movements as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy, offers an open-ended possibility if not an unqualified endorsement of the future of lyric conceptualism when she fosters the importance and vitality of the tension between the evolution and the constraint of form, cited in the Manifesto in Progress’s only set of questions: “Are you writing it or is it writing you? Does the form evolve or constrain? Is your poetry always already written? Are your ideas always already thought?” (62). Form, if not formalism, can be revitalized and individualized and poetic voice can become polyphonic.

In Lyric/Anti-Lyric, Douglas Barbour discusses the theoretical dismantling of the transcendental I/eye from the Renaissance on to the Moderns, but not the political circumstances which a current reader must now consider in that deconstruction—the ongoing issues of racism, sexism, classism, sexuality, gendering – to include the context of the voice situated within a body, and how those bodies are treated. Lubrin and Queyras speak of the question of identity of speakership and the distrust of any voice that takes on the position of what Queyras calls “the

‘unknowable’ ‘too eager’ ‘I’ – it always seems to be centring itself in the poem. Making pretty.

Making nice. It’s the earnestness, the speaker as the ‘awake’ one, the one above the implications of seeing ‘I’ that I find troubling in lyric poetry [. . .] But the poetry I love always turns its back on those easy formulas in favour of complexity” (48). Walt Whitman stands as an example of a MELS 132 poet who speaks from the American polis rather than as an individual, in a formation that

Barbour calls “choral poetry” (9). Queyras likewise destabilizes the perceived importance of the solitary voice, or the solitary genre, in poetry by using conceptualist techniques as appropriation of text as a tool in poetry. This position recognizes that one poet persona might occupy multiple positions, dramatis personae, or even synthesize opposing voices, therefore rendering the poet capable of producing choral poetry.

Queyras’s theory of lyric conceptualism acts as an extension of the twentieth century’s separation of the lyric voice from the transcendental ego. As Barbour notes, a pattern emerged in the early twentieth century, according to which: “the ‘I’ therefore slides away from its writer’s ego to embrace the unknown throng, it slips the reigns of conventional lyric to become a kind of vox populi. No transcendent ego, of the kind [Anthony] Easthope sees in English lyric discourse, remains, but rather an open, sliding voice we can all slip into if we so wish” (Barbour 30).

Barbour looks to Easthope’s take on English poetry to talk about Ezra Pound’s poem, “At the

Station of the Metro,” being a breaking point from the “I” in lyric poetry, which stands in for a transcendental ego represented by what Barbour calls the “I/eye.” Barbour’s theory of the lyric / anti-lyric entails the notion that a counterpart exists outside of the conventional lyric that speaks through a transcendental ego driving the “I/eye” of the poem. Yet, by naming this counter- movement within poetry the “Anti-Lyric”, Barbour points to the inability of the anti-lyric to dispense wholly with the lyric poetry which gives it rise.

The anti-lyric operates by using the choral position to remove the individual-driven ego out of the equation. This moves poetry away from the notion of “completion,” as is indicated by the rise of meaning and a sense of narrative being spread throughout serial poems. Transacting this shift creates a curious ripple effect where there occurs a parallel movement away from the MELS 133 notion that one voice may speak for one “true” experience. What Barbour’s lyric/anti-lyric theory allows for then is the identification of a space between conventional lyric poems that rely on a singular, authoritative voice and experimental and language poetry streams: an area of contention becomes instead an area for discovery. What is interesting is that Barbour definitely positions Pound’s haiku-inspired “At the Station of the Metro,” as a point of divergence from the transcendental ego, and he offers up this deviation, seventy years after the poem appears

(Barbour 14). This then suggests that what Barbour argues for as salient now depends on a well- established trend within poetry, so clearly, lyric has not been cohesive or static for some time before Barbour and before Queyras. This asserts that there is a long history of alternatives to the development and centuries-long presence of the “I/eye,” as lyric conceptualism breaks poets and readers out of a mold which started to fragment and mutate a century ago. As Barbour investigates a cultural move away from the idea of the transcendental stance of the poet (Barbour

14), he also shifts away from a mode of criticism which claims to invent a genre or begin a zeitgeist. Rather, this “lyric/anti-lyric” type of thinking allows room for symbiosis and co- existence within the poetry world. Going forward, the question becomes what purpose this

“open, sliding voice” can serve if it is given the opportunity to exist and be recognized outside of the previous genres of poetry.

Section IV: The Converging Poetic Movements

Evolutionary science has updated its metaphorical language to describe humanoid species relations. Accordingly, a scientifically valid and socially aware notion of inheritance can update the discussion of poetic influence and its role in writing, which speaks to the strength of

Queyras’s “Manifesto in Progress.” The parallel meanings that exist within the title suggest not MELS 134 only that this manifesto may be supplemented by Queyras or future poets and critics, but also that the subject matter of the manifesto may well point to how poetry defiantly needs not be finished, ready to fit into a neat category or style, a product tailored to sell copies and win awards. There is space to debate with one’s influences and context without downplaying the contradictory influences of different poetic movements, their forms, ideologies, and tropes.

Queyras’s poem “Whose Genealogy” works in tandem with their adaptive theory of lyric conceptualism and emphasizes that the question of poetic relationships need not act a part in

Freudian-style family romance struggles for dominance, such as those seen in The Vorticist’s

“Blast / Blessed” lists. Queyras writes that to claim an inheritance means being “developed, shaped, and reshaped / by individuals” (ll. 5-6) or even being “exploded, chemicalled, dredged, / mined, bombed, sheared, made a monument of” (ll. 8-9). Nonetheless, negotiating the disparate influences requires a readiness to wrestle with all the implications of recognizing predecessors.

Queyras’s “Whose Genealogy” creatively completes the “Manifesto in Progress,” by recognizing the difficulties of acknowledging an inheritance. What unites the list of acts of objectification and aggression in “Whose Genealogy,” is the overall goal, expressed in the simple opening phrase in the sentence, “to claim genealogy” (l.1). This accords the speaker an active role as the first performer of a present-tense action in the poem. Despite the onslaught of relational violence listed, which could validate eschewing genealogy altogether, the speaker still exhibits some agency, because the unnamed subject/artist stands firm, willing to claim lineage in order to change it, to question what is considered familiar matter and how it is framed. Wunker says in the introduction to the anthology that: “Queyras’s poetics pay dogged attention to questions of both representation and genre. In each of the collections of poetry [they] inhibit tenets of the traditional lyric, while also leveraging the genre open and letting conceptualism in” MELS 135

(xi-xii). The closing images of “Whose Genealogy” suggest that even while a poet may look to the past for precedent, the poet will not find even a complete person there to model oneself on or to rebel against, and is left: “to mourn the drying up of milk, the / tumourousness of nurture, the arms that surround / nothing, the zero of once was” (ll. 16-18). In Queyras’s poem, a poet tempted to retreat into a poetic past arbitrarily divided by genres, will encounter only a past stripped of the naïve and divisive nostalgia that neglects the interconnectedness of poetic influences. The poet must leave the old, uninhabitable home of genre nostalgia, the previous contexts understood, but navigate to a new unknown, not expecting to find an easy welcome elsewhere. Moving is uncomfortable and uncertain, but necessary.

The innovative practitioner must both claim and repudiate poetic genealogy, then. In the words of Perloff “[w]hen lyric is construed, as it has been since the Romantics, as the art of self- expression, of the private language of a subject overheard while engaged in meditation or intimate conversation with another, conceptualism would seem to be, by definition, its enemy, relying, as it so often does, on words not one’s own or submitting ordinary words to elaborate rules” (7). Conceptual poetry uses formal rigour to highlight the beauty of the idea behind the poem, demanding both new structures and new rules for the act of creation. Conceptual poetry, in the words of Marjorie Perloff happens when “Context replaces content as textual determinant”

(5). To claim a poetic lineage, or, in the case of lyric conceptualism, to separate and reimagine the precedents of lyricism and conceptualism, by necessity, involves grappling with the greatness, limitations, variety, and complexity of available sources. Because, as evolutionary history has seen, a change in metaphor and perspective makes possible the transmission of new information, it can be understood as a meaningful component of thinkership. “Thinkership” is a term developed by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman in Notes on Conceptualisms to indicate a MELS 136 connection of poems to concepts outside of the text: “one does not need to “read” the work as much as think about the idea of the work” (27). Or, as Queyras states “Mud is mud is mud, or the thinking of a poem is the poem” (Queyras 62). In this case, the poems of “Smutty Alchemy” suggests a practice or craft which looks outside of the poem to traditional scientific language and documentation to see how reflective practice, using technical language outside of strict scientific notation, can enlarge science’s sphere of communication. If the thinking of a poem is the poem, then perhaps the thinking of science is, in its own way, science. Such practice also alters science’s perspectives: such as fossil reclassification, expansion of the genetic pool for homo sapiens, or even redistribution of mismatched fossils that were treated as one creature with its own taxonomy, such as in the case of Eoanthropus dawsoni, or the Piltdown Man. Charles

Dawson presented the Piltdown Man as an important discovery in 1912, a “missing link” which remained popular evidence for decades. and unquestioned due to Western culture’s racist failure to accept that fossils of contributing ancestral hominins were being discovered in Africa (De

Groote 2). Decades later, it was proven to be a grouping orangutan and human bones, orchestrated by Dawson. Information can seem conditionally and temporarily correct until the historical context changes, meaning that the idea of what constituted the fossil was more at stake than that particular collection of materials.

Harold Bloom’s 1973 arguments in The Anxiety of Influence operate from the position that poets spring directly from and out of the generation immediately previous to them, carrying with them the attendant anxiety that they will be consumed by that legacy or influence or, like the Children of Saturn, be forced to commit a violence against those artistic forerunners in order to create their own influence, their own poetic legacy. The precursor and the poet tend to face off in terms of the predecessor’s legacy, creating a duality or urge to separate which tends to end in a MELS 137 duel. In Queyras, lyric conceptualism allows multiple, simultaneous collisions and more abstract, more dialogue-based, confrontations without distinctly polarized winners and losers. This indicates the difference between patrilineal authority and Queyras’s messiness and entanglement true to authentic relationality. Inheritance becomes dependent not on overthrowing but selecting and synthesizing the dense, complex and rich pool of possibilities to look for material and techniques not immediately associated with artistic production in a game of literary tag, not leapfrog. Marjorie Perloff and Vanessa Place, in “Towards a Conceptual Lyric: from Content to

Concept,” question the ability of lyric poetry to say anything new if its structures are not adaptive or meaningful, and trying to find fresh intersections between form and subject matter pushes a poet to reconsider past conventions and structures in the light of new information. This, in essence, is the task of lyric conceptual poetry. Part of what makes poetry with scientific subject matter so apt for discussing lyric conceptualism is the rotating door of new information that de-stabilizes our notions of facts: one can never fully predict what facets and traits will contribute to knowledge, or shape our perceptions of the utility of the past.

Section V: Scientific Epistemology and Feminist Reactions

Smutty Alchemy” echoes ongoing questions from within the scientific community about the epistemology of the scientific method, stressing how facts are provisional and constructed rather than final. The etymology of epistemology comes from the Greek words episteme and logos: “’Episteme’ can be translated as “knowledge” or ‘understanding’ or ‘acquaintance’, while

‘logos’ can be translated as ‘account’ or ‘argument’ or ‘reason’” (Steup & Neta 1). The inclusion of the words “knowledge” and “understanding” mark the discipline’s fundamental concerns within scientific epistemology to find and evaluate data in order to construct information. But MELS 138 strikingly, the inclusion of the term “acquaintance” within this provides a sense of malleability and distance. This allows the construction of epistemology to include an openness to acknowledge that to understand is looser than certainty and yet to be fully explored. In these ways, this collection is interested in the deconstruction of inflexible positions within the sciences, corresponding with the work of philosophers such as Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, and Sandra Harding, all of whom question absolutist positions. Harding’s work on ‘strong objectivity,’ which requires engaging with critiques of thinkers from marginalized positions, has made possible subsequent work in the humanities, like the speculative feminism of Haraway.

In the article “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ‘Strong Objectivity,”

Harding takes on the notions of what is truth and falsehood. She argues: “[e]ven if the concept of absolute truth could not be used to characterize the results of scientific research, it still could function as an ideal toward which science was moving as long as absolute falsity could characterize ‘bold hypotheses’ the science tested. But once the idea of absolute falsity also becomes indefensible, what could be the use of the concept of truth?” (Harding 586). Continuing her thought, she summarizes that the notion of truth becomes “inextricably linked to objectivism and its absolutist standards. ‘Less false’ are all the procedures of the sciences (at best) can generate” (Harding 586). The notion that science tested produces “less false” information breaks the binary of truth and falsehood, and so the focus shifts to whether the methods of testing questions consider multiple positions to account for the potential for personal bias encoded within the research. Harding argued that “value-neutral research” constituted “weak objectivity” as “the neutrality ideal provides no resistance to the production of systemically distorted result of research. Even worse, it defends and legitimates the institutions and practices through which the distortions and their exploitive consequences are generated. [. . .] It functions more through what MELS 139 its normalizing procedures and concepts implicitly prioritize than through explicit directives”

(Harding 568-569). Consequently, “[t]he neutrality requirement is not just ineffective at maximizing objectivity; it is an obstacle to it” (Harding 580). Harding’s critique of neutrality as an ideal connects feminist critiques of scientific information to the work of poetic theorists such as Dorothy Wang and Michael Leon when they interrogate the effects of the ahistorical stance in

Conceptual and Experimental poetics. By recognizing that “neutrality’ masks a bias or privileged position that weakens objectivity, Harding’s theory advocates that successful research considers a multiplicity of perspectives and acknowledge the implicit biases that all researchers bring to an experiment “because it already structures both [a preexisting ‘pure’ social order and its sciences]” (568).

Harding’s claim that what experiments and research produces are “less false” findings connect to the poetics of the collection: while the poems represent scientific concepts and findings, there is the risk that part of the collection will eventually prove false, whether that be through qualitative or quantitative analysis. The George Soros introduction to the 2020 edition of

Karl Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper x) says “our understanding of reality is inherently imperfect, is valid. Those who try to prove it wrong by claiming to be in possession of the ultimate truth are doing tremendous damage to humanity.” Soros’s use of humanity suggests the collective human race, but further implies the exemplary humane qualities of empathy, compassion, or kindness. And, to extrapolate, to claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth equally does damage to the humanities, and potentially would block the need for another perspective, preemptively dismissing other works of literature. Popper says that “it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience” (Popper 18). There is MELS 140 a push to have embodied knowing recognized for its validity and let experience effect the way reason works.

Also advocating for the consideration of the effect experience should have upon knowledge is Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies (1994). Grosz says that “[t]he body has been regarded as a source of interference in, and danger to, the operations of reason” (47). She cites the Cartesian notion of duality being responsible for posing “irresolvable philosophical problems” and also being:

at least indirectly responsible for the historical separation of the natural sciences from the

social sciences and humanities, the separation from physiology from psychology, of

quantitative analysis from qualitative analysis, and the privileging of mathematics and

physics as ideal models of the goals and aspirations of knowledge of all types. Dualism,

in short, is responsible for the modern forms of elevation of consciousness (a specifically

modern version of the notion of the soul, introduced by Descartes) above corporeality.

(48-49)

The timeline that Grosz lays out also aligns with Douglas Barbour’s analysis of Easthope’s outlining of transcendental thinking and complications of the I/eye within lyrical poetry, suggesting a cultural shift away from a belief in mind-body unity. In the poem “Venus Among the Atoms,” Venus, seeks an explanation for Lucretius’ De Natura Rerum, which should not contain the invocation of Venus, or any god, due to the associate of Epicurean philosophy his work builds on with atheism. In this poem, because although her conventional domain is the goddess of love and carnal relationships, and yet she is born outside of carnal or love relations between or among mortals or gods, and she becomes the goddess of objectivity. “Smutty

Alchemy” relates to the current discussion surrounding “situated knowers” in feminist theory as MELS 141 applied to scientific epistemology. This poem celebrates the corporeal and resists the desire to treat an experience as transcendent. One such moment is the mention of Supernova 1987a in section v. of the poem. While Western mythology associates supernovas or “new stars” with important births, the voice of the Smutty Alchemist reveals that the event aligns with a birth, but refuses to fully adopt that mentality. Aligning the birth of this voice in the collection with a celestial event would entail embracing the cartesian duality Grosz eschews by locating the self outside of its body and suggesting notions of pre-determined fate, grandiosity, and fame the likes of which Cavendish actively sought. Rather, the Smutty Alchemist says “i am no general savior / despite the heralding of burst / star light, / except to those that love me” (p.105, ll. 8-11). Here, the lower-case first-person singular pronoun nods to the collected works of E. E. Cummings, and his use of “i” to signal an ability to locate the self without making it the most prominent subject in a poem. The experiential shapes how reasoning moves and importance and meaning depends upon its context.

Section VI: The Forms for the Voices

In “Smutty Alchemy,” a distinction exists between the “Margaret voice,” which is influenced by the work and opinions of Margaret Cavendish, and the dissenting persona built into the other poems, which will be called the Smutty Alchemist. The two voices exist to sustain open dialogue rather than debate, as if to model conversation. The Cavendish persona, which either influences or appears in poems such as “Microcosmscope,” “The House of Fame,” and

“The Marriage of Hermes Trismegistus,” specifically reflects her critiques of science’s experimental model, and proclaims a tone of confidence in the collection, consistent with the historical Cavendish’s certain belief that she can achieve a complete vision of the world. As a member of the Lucas family by birth, Cavendish exhibits a background which was steadfastly MELS 142

Royalist, upper class. Like the rest of her family, she believed in the divine right of kings and

Christianity, and this set of beliefs was so indelible that her brother Charles Lucas’s death became part of the Royalist “Martyrology,” when he was killed, and the family crypt was razed

(Whitaker 106). As Whittaker notes in Mad Madge, Cavendish often complained of a lack of formal education in her upbringing in the Lucas family of Colchester, which she attributed, in part, to a climate where “King James I hated learned ladies,” so that she “never learned the Latin and Greek beaten into boys from an early age” (Whitaker 15-16). These factors both situate and limit her, as does her belief in her own singularity and excellence of achievement. Consequently,

Cavendish not only retains a bias against ever admitting her sources, claiming to be wholly original in her forays into scientific investigation, but she also seems heretical, within her time frame, due to the subject matter she chooses to investigate and the conclusions she does draw about science itself. For example, she makes it clear in her poem, “Nature calls a Councell, which was Motion, Figure, matter, and Life, to advise about making the World,” that the world which she explores she believes to be created whole, and is representative of a divine mystery through which humans are able to think and which they can see unfold (ll. 1-4). In her own collection, Poems and Fancies, Cavendish riffs on a classical tradition, however, and casts

Nature as the female force which creates the world. This personification may “Make some things to adore us, worship give” (l. 3), but Cavendish also substitutes a more general creator instead of specifically of the Judeo-Christian god. The construction of the cosmos both harkens to a classical tradition, with Nature working as a Gaia figure, but also to a religious allegory which gestures to the notion of God as the World Architect, creating life in a logical, thoughtful, and articulate way in which language becomes world-building. Simultaneously, Cavendish’s research into atoms leads her to conclude that they are self-propelling, which denies the mythology of a MELS 143

Christian god with total and absolute autonomy of creation and mastery. This provides an example of her willingness to pursue paths down which her peers were unable to see or were afraid to travel, and the “Smutty Alchemy” collection re-iterates the spirit of some of her most famous critiques, which sometimes positioned her to question prevailing, accepted contemporary methods of scientific inquiry. Additionally, in poems such as “The House of Fame,” this formal plea to the many-eyed goddess Fame also brings attention to the personal promotion that accompanies this discipline which champions empiricism, objectivity and peer review. The

Cavendish persona, therefore, preserves the right to question and to remind the reader that historical critiques such as Cavendish’s still have a place in contemporary thought. The persona, however, also reminds the reader of the dangers of self-satisfaction, of resting, even for a moment on your own or others’ conclusions or position. Cavendish remains transparent in what she hopes to gain personally from her pursuit of science and the publishing of her philosophy; she represents a time when there was a face to research, which speaks to this collection’s interest in the potential accessibility of science for a population invested in self-education.

The Smutty Alchemist’s voice in the collection demonstrates the conflict of desire when assembling the building blocks of knowledge: understanding is built on logic, study and rigorous process, but discovery elicits a frisson of joy and amazement. McKay in the essay “Ediacaran and Anthropocene” says that: “geology, or broadly speaking natural history of any kind, brings the rigour of the scientific frame; poetry brings the capacity for astonishment and the power of possibility—or, perhaps more accurately, legitimizes them” (104). The Smutty Alchemist looks to Cavendish and makes poems out of scientific material, but with a layer of earthy, sexual, and sometimes bawdy humour not present in either Cavendish’s printed works or her private correspondence. For example, the cursed sonnet, “Against Microscopes,” mounts a critique of MELS 144 the microscope as a short-sighted invention, which Cavendish, as persona here, dismisses as a faulty apparatus which produces an artificial situation with “hyper-focused eyes stretched, intimately distanced” (l. 13, p. 64). The poem also posits that scientific curiosity can border on prurient curiosity, as she describes the sub-atomic particles as being notoriously hard to observe, almost “winking” in and out of existence and encouraging the voyeuristic delight of the “physics joes” at this scientific peep show (l. 9, p. 64). In comparison to Cavendish, the Smutty Alchemist accesses information and thinking from a higher and broader formal education, common to many twenty-first century Canadian citizens, and available through both the academy and popular culture. The Smutty Alchemist, being furnished with a spectrum of popular scientific information and search engines, then raises current topics and concerns, such as that humans are part of an evolutionary history that begins with the Cambrian explosion, most clearly expressed in the opening poem, “The Pikaia.” Technology entangles itself with personal desire rather than scientific advances in “Autoerotography,” and scientific advances resist being completely understood in the three “Quantum Entanglements” Cursed Sonnets. The Smutty Alchemist persona is aware, as well as self-aware, of her role as projector and spectator, as investigator and instigator. She is motile and mobile, moving between what she discovers and is told and what she creates and suggests. She provides a critical lens to survey Cavendish’s surveying.

Cavendish serves well as a model, because she blends the personal with the philosophical, in works such as her genre-bending novel, The Blazing World (1666), and her scientific poem which touches on satire, “A World in an Eare- Ring” (1653). The poem that precedes that one in her collection is “Of many Worlds in this World,” which makes the point that there are small worlds that “are not subject to our sense, / A world may be no bigger than two-pence” (ll. 5-6). A two pence piece would not be a radically different size than an earring, so MELS 145

Cavendish does not initially appear to need a second poem to drive home her point when the poem “Of many Worlds in this World” closes with the lines: “And if thus small, then Ladies may weare / A World of World, as Pendents in each Eare” (ll.15-16). So, by taking the time to expand this concept in a second poem, she maneuvers to adjust the world of the microscope so that she can contemplate another level of material reality and then turn the jewelry on this woman’s person into a site of world-building. This poem specifically forms a link between materialistic ornamentation with the creation of worlds, within the existence of fashionable female clothing, binding the profound with the decorative. This choice is a nod to Cavendish’s aristocratic upbringing, familiar to readers of Alexander Pope’s mock epic “The Rape of the Lock,” (1712), so that she shows a woman self-creating and demonstrating control through the act of dressing.

While whimsical, it suggests more seriously that, within the structure of a god-directed world,

Cavendish as scientist and poet believes she has agency only with that construct of social placement and order. When she studies science, as an aristocrat and natural philosopher, she enjoys a small degree of certainty of her position within the world. She assumes an outsider’s position while she maintains her rights within her context to contemplate and judge at will. She does not fully comprehend the enormous accessibility granted to her through birth and marriage; she presents as a Hobbesian Leviathan, the head of her small discovered worlds, a prescient

Gulliver incognito in Lilliput, but she never questions her right to own or rule those tiny domains, just as she does not probe the colonial role of the Empress in Blazing World, where she discovers a world within our world in the Arctic, and immediately and without hesitation presumes that her estimation of her own virtue and beauty gives her the indelible right to rule and to call up the spirit of Margaret Cavendish to give her counsel and validate this entitlement.

Cavendish believes that there is no end of what she can learn about an intact, cohesive world; the MELS 146

Smutty Alchemist lacks the colonial impulse to rule and control; she is a true explorer, moving from adventure to adventure, navigating what she finds, not expecting to chart a permanent, definitive course to find fixed stability in subject matter or style.

Section VII: The Pikaia

In “The Pikaia,” which opens “Smutty Alchemy,” no human heroes act as subject matter or the main focus in the poem: fragmentation of both subject matter and form are evident from the beginning of time and of the poem. “The Pikaia” takes its name from an animal that appears in the Burgess Shale fossil record in the Rockies during the Cambrian period 500 million years ago and is thought to be a common ancestor for any creature with a spine. Edward Hirsch in A

Poet’s Glossary defines the epic as a

long narrative poem, exalted in style, heroic in theme [. . . the] epic is inherently

nostalgic. It looks back to greater and more heroic times—the emergence of tribes, the

founding of countries, the deeds of legendary figures. It is removed from the

contemporary world of the audience and looks back to what Goethe and Schiller called

the vollkommen or ‘perfect past.’ It moves beyond individual experience. It binds people

to their own outsize communal past and instills a sense of grandeur. (208-209)

The rhyme scheme of “The Pikaia” modernizes the epic form by using many slant rhymes to compensate for the use of multisyllabic, and potentially cumbersome, scientific terminology included in its language. Writing in heroics propels the reader and maintains the momentum of action through words such a “bilateral” or “Ediacaran.” However, to make this formal structure seem less restrictive, the syllables do not have a strict rhythm or alliterative-accentual patterning, nor do grammatical structures necessarily coordinate with the end of the poetic line. The MELS 147 enjambment allows the poetry to sound more prosaic, as do the pieces of scientific terminology, and modernizes the heroics so that emphasis is not always placed at the line’s end. To further that quality, the rhymed couplets do not use perfect rhymes, but sometimes also include repetitions and vowel rhymes. This strategy aligns the form more with how rhyme is understood in contemporary popular music, but it does not use strophes. This is done to keep the couplets distinct from conventional ballad structures and allow for irregular ending points to each section which echoes an evolutionary process which also moves in fits and starts as it reacts to environmental changes, only some of which are known to humans due to ongoing gaps in the fossil record. The poem’s elliptical take on the epic poem, with its conventions partially removed, is designed to present a discontinuous variant of the form.

Another traditional element of the epic which has been purposely removed from this poem is the human hero, here replaced by a prehistoric animal of miniscule size and primitive biology. This substitution plays with the epic trope of establishing the ancestry of the hero, in this case pointing to the Pikaias, an evolutionary ancestor common to all humans. “The Pikaia” moves into what McKay might call “deep time,” and so, rather than overtly upholding the traditional expectations and values of nation-building, it tracks the emergence of an evolutionary ancestor and prehistoric structure. This poem concentrates on a common ancestor, the first one with a spinal structure, which both privileges the human and also humbles any anthropocentric view which would separate and elevate humans above other life forms. Rather than nation- building, the investigates the biological landscape, as genus and species building. Despite the sometimes ironic anthropomorphization, the “heroes” remain Cambrian sea dwellers, and their

“heroic deeds” are encapsulated solely in their survival in a Cambrian climate and the development of intentionality as shown in predatory feeding and hunting. Rather than quests, the MELS 148

Pikaia overcomes a series of climate shifts, and that resilience provides an appropriate image both for the Pikaia’s own Cambrian era, but also hints at the sort of hero that current humans will need as they face radical climate change: the heroic trait in this poem is the ability to adapt to instability and survive. This version of epic heroism also promotes the rapid development of new species which will displace and replace them. This epic conceit heightens the interplay between

“cold” geological terminology and emotionally charged figurative language, to keep the intersection between subject and process evolutionary, and in a state of being present. The assertion of a communal, evolutionary past is supported by the various discoveries of fossils in the Burgess Shale within the last century. These findings altered not only the knowledge that all humans share a common ancestor, but also that all creatures with spines share this ancestor. This reminds the reader that humans are not a species inherently superior to other animals, but only a dominant species, and only temporarily so. Furthermore, an epic centred around evolutionary history does not perpetuate creation stories involving gods, supernatural influence, or the notion of fate, which is seen even in Alexander Pope’s mock epic “The Rape of the Lock.” To invoke

Don McKay’s notion of deep time, this miniscule and geographically defined fossil record’s indication of the ancestors of the human species generates an imperfect communal past – sixty examples from the same location in the Canadian Rockies define current knowledge of an essential species.

The challenge of removing the human hero from the epic and replacing him with a chorus of primordial creatures shifts the notion of the hero as an individual who survives nearly insurmountable odds to survival itself no matter who or what is enacting it. This notion of empowering entities beyond the human purview is critical to the thinking in the entire collection in other poems, especially to the poems in the Elements section. The poem maintains Hirsch’s MELS 149 definition of the epic that the narrative moves the reader beyond individual experience. “The

Pikaia” maintains a sense of collective history by taking the narrative to a moment where all of the humans shared a common ancestor in one known place, but does so without the layer of idealization that comes with nostalgia. “The Pikaia” employs images of cultural constructs such as dance, cuisine, music, and household labour power structures, to act as the vehicle of metaphor describing a prehistoric environment, its plants, and its animals. This also points to the notion that Pikaia lived in the Cambrian period, but their unearthing in the 20th century make them a part of that recent time frame as well, meaning they are simultaneously prehistoric and present, and an epic does not need to adhere to a strict time setting to function. While the Pikaia is an organism with a relatively simple body, the collection uses this creature as a core image which allows the reader to develop an intimate acquaintance with an ancestral animal. The Pikaia also stands in the collection to push the reader to consider how the codex form of the spine of a book, as well as of an animal, harkens to a bodily structure integral to human identity, and how that identity can shape and limit our presentation of knowledge. The focus of the form of the long poem showcases the tenacity of animal survival, a Deleuze and Guattari-style rhizomatic movement towards survival and innovation within the evolutionary process.

The wording of this long poem reflects the agency of the Cambrian environment and its inhabitants by describing their self-propelling movements: “Stagnant dulse, / stabilizing ocean’s floor, pushed aside / by burrowing proto-mollusks, disrupting / thick bacterial layers, supping / benthic-style” (7). The variety of seaweed known as dulse and the proto-mollusk Pikaia are each the subject of their own sentences, which means that these organisms have been given the value of a subject in their respective sentences. While the long poem structure might suggest a linear narrative, “The Pikaia” instead allows for multiple viable origin stories, in keeping with the MELS 150 several theories which have been advanced to account for the Cambrian Explosion of life forms.

The experimental structure of this long poem invites competing explanations by beginning with the new theory of the shift in animal lifestyles away from sedentary existence to animals eating other animals for nutrition; to the development of bodily features designed for both defence and attack; and to increasing mobility and size, with the tantalizing idea of simultaneous action saturating the word “meanwhile.” The previous Ediacaran period in geology, recognized in the

1960s and officially named in 2004, has been nicknamed “The Garden of Ediacaran” because it is seen to be characterized by animals co-existing and eating plants rather than competing for resources and eating each other (Edwin and Valentine 13-14). In the Cambrian’s violence and fierce competition, by contrast, animals move from vegetarian diets to preying on other species, distant from a state of innocence to “the era of claws and shells” (McKay 103). Dorion Sagan’s

Foreword to The Garden of Ediacara: Discovering the First Complex Life explains that this overt reference to theological imagery is invoked because “The Ediacarans’ global ‘garden,’ more than a cryptic play on Eden’s idyllic and instantaneous fertility, refers to their largely vegetative existence [. . . ] Harmless antecedents to Tennyson’s bloody nature tooth and claw, they were eyeless representatives of a victimless Edenlike world” (x). However, in terms of how the fossil record is now interpreted, the identifiable changes marked by the Cambrian Explosion indicate an emerging diversity in body types and behaviours.

Another common tendency of the epics is that they begin in medias res. “Smutty

Alchemy” attempts the opposite, beginning with the origin of origins: “the Pikaia, oldest of human life’s line, / separates, distinct by novelty of spine” (ll. 1-2, p. 7). The poem does not pretend to be a conclusive origin story: it begins with the Cambrian explosion, a moment in evolutionary time, which is also not the very beginning of time, nor the time on earth, nor even MELS 151 the beginning of life on earth. Cavendish, by contrast, personifies Nature, and then has her call a council of spirits representing natural forces, an orderly and civilized gathering, akin to

Chaucer’s anthropomorphic birds in “Parliament of Fowles,” in a very definite beginning sequence. “The Pikaia” is deliberately transitional. As noted in the Preface to The Cambrian

Explosion by Douglas Erwin and James Valentine:

The Cambrian explosion is one of the major evolutionary transitions in the history of life.

From a meager and only dimly perceived beginning from single-celled ancestors nearly

800 million years ago (Ma), early animals spent over 200 million years in which their

evolutionary changes chiefly involved the development of different cell types in

relatively simple organism, but patterned by increasingly sophisticated gene programs.

(v)

In “The Pikaia,” the trope of in medias res works very differently, therefore: a flurry of miniscule creatures adapt and evolve in a fight against the instability of an oceanic climate, in a struggle that far predates all human cultures, blurring the distinctions between humans and animals.

Without the focus of an enemy, but with an adversarial environment, this heroic quest suggests survival of a very different degree.

Section VII: The Elements

In Poems and Fancies, Cavendish describes the substances that fill the earth, their qualities, and how they interact, and “Section II: Elements” of the collection details the elements, here divided into the four Early Modern categories of earthly substances: fire, air, water, and earth. These molecule poems use the recognized Bohr molecular shape but simultaneously include alchemical history layered onto our perception of those elements and how these elements MELS 152 interact, either in observable or testable situations. As an atomist, Cavendish subscribed to the vitalist material philosophy of her time. This means that she accepts the distinction between living and non-living matter; however, she endows atoms with human qualities and renders them as the subject matter of poems. The Devyn Remme’s entry for “Vitalism” for the New

Materialist Almanac considers the that current theories such as the “becoming together” of sympoeisis comes from vitalism as it continued through Deleuze’s contemplation of Henri

Bergson and the work of Elizabeth Grosz. Remme says that “by stressing the self-organizing vitality of all living systems it is possible to decenter the anthropos, replacing species hierarchy with decentralized immanence.” This recognition that Bohr’s diagram of atoms’ self- organization also informs the Element section of “Smutty Alchemy” because chemical elements demonstrate their individualized qualities, characteristics and behaviours. Translating the discipline of science into poetry permits subatomic particles to be expressed as syllables in larger words, with the nucleus containing whole words to give that crucial centre more weight metaphorically and give a condensed heaviness to those nucleii. This subsection of Element poems aims, in part, to look at contemporary science with reference to its history and historiography to see how anthropocentric and mystical origins highlight the idea that information remains largely generated for the edification and benefit of the human species. By personifying the elements, plants, and prehistoric animals in this collection, science acquires an accessible context for readers who want to connect with new information and who may need the veneer of humanity to bridge and to attach to the science and to the poetry. All this is in service of the intentionality of the collection towards an openness, towards a consideration of how scientific information can disrupt our linguistic clichés and idea ruts. Given that Lucretius’s De

Natura Rerum, which was translated into English first by Lucy Hutchinson and then by John MELS 153

Evelyn in the 1650s, significantly influences the questions of atoms moving by themselves, the

Elements poems respond by translating atomism into a poetic form that encourages multiple directions and simultaneous readings. The cursed sonnet “Entropy,” as with the rest of the

Cursed Sonnets, employs thirteen lines, at the same time as it maintains the one hundred and forty syllable count of a typical Spenserian or Shakespearean sonnet. Because entropy describes the miniscule amount of energy leaving an energy transfer interaction, the last line of the poem only contains nine syllables, so that a little bit of the meter seemingly disappears from what could have been a standard iambic pentameter line. The shift in the form of the sonnet here responds to the shift in scientific understanding about thermodynamic energy transfer and entropy, so that the sonnet is not destroyed but redistributed like atomic energy.

Another parallel to Cavendish’s work occurs in the structure of the Elements section.

Since Cavendish embraces the notion that earthly substances can be separated and are separable as the four observable elements of air, water, earth and fire, this section of the collection divides along the lines of the four traditional elements in: The Fire Suite, The Air Suite, The Water Suite, and The Earth Suite. The naming of the sections as “suites” draws attention to the idea of collections within collections, like the traditional poetic sections that reference microcosmic musical movements within larger compositions. This translates practically into discrete works within larger works, where the small components can stand alone meaningfully but can also benefit from and contribute to a larger work. This casts the feeling of fragmentation into a more positive position, and again places these poems within the lyric conceptualism movement.

Instead of the linear ordering of something like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, this section of the

Elements arranges its components based on the appearance of the elements as they emerged on

Earth. In this case, then, the alchemical taxonomy aligns with contemporary theories as to how MELS 154 the Earth developed its elements. The process begins with molten materials, then develops an atmosphere, followed by water emerging to cover it once a cooled layer forms. Finally, cratons harden and float to the top of water, followed by the plates shifting to create continents and orogeny. This data, as well as that concerning the movement from molten material to landmasses that later foster land-based animals, informs the ordering of the elemental suites in Section II of the collection to mirror this chronology. The opening pieces in Poems and Fancies describe how the elements come together after Nature calls a council to create life, which gives the Smutty

Alchemist a precedent for calling upon the taxonomy of chemical elements to generate a sense of order in the second section of “Smutty Alchemy”: it suggests a form for the forms.

This second section also builds on the huge event of “The Pikaia,” which has already provided the geologic background to the Earth to create a point of reference to which a reader may attach, and which allows for the analysis of the Earth by its chemical components. The

Elements section takes the dramatic action of “The Pikaia” and probes the immense energy of the event, but on the microscopic scale. The Elements poems do follow a Bohr diagram format, but, because of the electrons, there are multiple entry points into each poem. Because an atom pulses and remains in constant flux, the human eye has no set order in which to read an electron sequence, which, in each poem in this section, translates into each electron being represented by a syllable which builds into a larger word, in combination with other electron-syllables. Further, each subatomic unit is given its own syllable count: there is one syllable for each neutron, proton, and electron that appears in the element being described.

Some poems also feature fabricated words to indicate this mutability of elements, based on their situation and our perspective, as conveyed by the slipperiness of the coinages

“volublemishless” within the poem “Oxygen Fig. 2” or “primordialways” in “H2O Fig. 1.” The MELS 155 element poems act as foundational pieces upon which the larger collection is built, but even at the atomic level, there is no permanence or stasis, even in these smallest measurable units, only variability and flexibility in molecular life, so these foundational pieces represent the known but not necessarily the fixed. Consequently, the Element poems strive to mimic the energy and constant motion of atoms and their subatomic particles by creating a shape, based on Bohr diagrams, but which moves the eye around the page in multiple possible directions, and yet maintains a stable presence contained by the form of a page.

Niels Bohr represents atoms as two-dimensional drawings with neutrons and protons as the middle of the atom, and with rings of electrons surrounding this nucleus, like rotating planets.

This model shows that the neurons and protons of a cell, which account for most of the mass that give elements their distinct numbers, are at the core of the element, like a sun in a solar system.

Bohr’s method of representation is too compact to be factually representational of atomic spacing and the constant motion of its elements, but that limitation actually opens his work up for artistic representation. In Discussions about Language (1933), Bohr responds to criticism that his diagramming method is not sufficiently representational of three-dimensional molecules in constant motion by replying that: “We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections” (Giles 28). The only other currently popular method of atomic representation is the quantum physics method, yet the Bohr molecule diagram remains employed to this day in public schools and university textbooks. In spite of the limitations of this mode of representation, a form which is credited as being Bohr’s invention, the Bohr diagram remains a commonly used teaching tool after one hundred years. Its MELS 156 accessibility, its visual potency, renders it as an imperfect model which still works well and speaks out from science to an audience needing connection and context from which to operate.

This also fits with the ethos of lyric conceptualism: although a form might be inherently problematic or limited does not mean that it cannot continue to exist and function. Part of the appeal of using the Bohr diagram as a poetic form is that Bohr’s conversion of representing molecules lines up with scientific ekphrasis. Conceptual poetry already allows for the co-opting of publicly available material of text as poetry, but here, part of the appeal is that if scientists have critiqued work of their peers as poetry, it allows poets to appropriate material with permission. As with McKay turning the early critique of plate tectonics into “geopoetics” in

Strike/Slip, this portion of the collection takes a negative critique of a form in the sciences as an art. While McKay turns “geopoetics” into lyrical subject matter, the conceptual impulse in this section takes McKay’s collection as a prompt and expands it further to translate information from content alone into set form as well. For example, because neutrons and protons are denser than surrounding electrons in molecular structures, hard consonants in the Elements section give spoken weight to the nucleus portion of a molecule and convey the atomic density of that subject matter. As this representation of molecules is conveyed through image, this allows for its treatment in poetry to borrow from concrete poetry, such as George Herbert’s poem, “The

Altar.” Bohr’s method for conveying the positions and tensions of chemical makeup consequently shapes these poems but does not constrain them. This allows the physical appearance of each poem to resonate with both the chemical makeup and the position of electrons, using each element written about as subject material, and referencing the potential for combinations with other elements: relationships are intentionally open-ended, by nature changeable and changing. MELS 157

Section IX: Experiments

“Section III: Experiments” shifts focus to describe and twist the scientific practice of the experimental model into a moment of inquiry into the scientific format of the experiment itself.

The Experiments section turns to scientific methodology. Specifically, it addresses the ways in which experimentation constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs scientific thought, testing not only how a fact is defined and seen, but how scientific debate itself is a form of discourse.

Cavendish’s open critique of the experimental model and its introduction into the scientific world, which includes the discovery and use of equipment such as the microscope, provides an impetus for the voice in Section III, which is often but not always the Cavendish persona, to grapple with “tools of the trade,” both scientific and poetic. This is a preoccupation the

Cavendish persona shares with a number of Canadian poets. In this section, these tools are put at a remove, and often at an elitist remove, while the straightforward, firsthand observations of a

“true” Natural philosopher or a poet working from and with the personal register are moved to the forefront. Poems such as “Microcosmscope,” “A Priori,” and “Measurements,” which are all thirteen-line “Cursed Sonnets,” consequently see the microscope as a limitation or intrusion, a mechanism which distances the observer from the observed. Cavendish was someone who was repeatedly frustrated by studying science with instruments, specifically the microscope, which acted as distancing lenses and barriers to immediate engagement with subject matter. This dichotomy of wanting to learn more fully but being wary of how the learner uncovers cinformation is echoed in poets such as Zwicky and McKay, who artistically discuss geology based, not on second-hand information, but on their first-hand physical immersion in their subject matter, the geological landscape. Section III, then, while dealing with the equipment, with the continually developing apparatuses of an always increasingly technological scientific MELS 158 practice, mounts an inherent critique of the limitations and even distortions of the objective view point which clinical, experimental models supposedly provide to the discipline. Equipment such as this, after all, answers to the human body and its shortcomings or limitations: its invention responds to the human desire to experience more, to observe beyond natural capability. It also presumes that an entity will function as it typically does without its context. Therefore, artificially enhanced observation can taint its subject matter. Again, like Zwicky and McKay, the

Smutty Alchemist stands aware of the danger of the first-hand observer being swayed by the inherent anthropocentric bias that can too quickly start to filter and shape perceptions.

Just as Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing puts forward the notion that the poet’s style is present even in the most rigorous of experimental poems, so does “Smutty Alchemy” suggest that the human remains present in the objective voice science attempts to use. This collection sustains a collaborative, polyvalent sound which emerges from the juxtaposition between the voice of the Cavendish persona and the voice of the Smutty Alchemist, playing out against the background of the reader’s understanding of current scientific practice. This combination creates tension which supports the notion of fact and scientific certainty as temporary states of being, malleable and inconclusive. This is particularly emphasized in the poems employing the Smutty

Alchemist. In Section III then, the poems look at experimentation through the lens of failure, as a thematic shortcoming and as a breakdown in form, as a disrupted and disruptive communication.

The flip side of this position is that abandoned constraint does not constitute failure in the lyric conceptualist philosophy when the point of the poetic investigation is to look closely at failure, to which the Salt poems gesture. The Cursed Sonnets, which include the “Quantum Entanglement” poems, nudge the reader into a position where it becomes clear that any hubristic impulse must always be inadequate: complete knowledge continually evades all human experimentation, no MELS 159 matter how extensive or intensive. In this suite of three poems, the reader is left to conclude that there can be no meaningful conclusion to investigation, since no explanation exists as to how the titled phenomenon allows two photons to communicate seemingly faster than the speed of light.

In this way, “Smutty Alchemy” responds to recent conversations in the Canadian poetry world.

Zwicky, for instance, has said:

I know next to nothing about quantum superposition and entanglement, nor about Rupert

Sheldrake’s morphic fields; but I’m struck by the fact that these allegedly inexplicable

phenomena appear to be characterized by the kind of whole / part relationships that

characterize gestalts. Perhaps we find these phenomena mysterious (or specious) because

we’re trying to cram them into an epistemic box into which they won’t fit: maybe their

apparent parts aren’t like independent billiard balls, maybe they’re structurally connected

aspects of complex wholes. The exercise of cramming everything into the piecemeal

thinking box is, however, an enterprise to which this culture is profoundly dedicated. (94)

By describing these phenomena within sonnets without a fourteenth line, the collection seeks to suggest that knowledge will never be complete, by resisting closure through the expected completion of form.

The Cursed Sonnets of “Section III” pursue this topic of failures within the sciences through moments where progress, understanding, or meaningful development is thwarted or prevented from coming to the expected fruition. This sonnet variation is a form invented specifically for this collection, where each example contains the one hundred and forty syllables of the standard sonnet, but lacks a fourteenth line, instead dispersing the remaining ten syllables throughout the rest of the poem. This displaces the conventional syllable usage in iambic pentameter, to create, in turn, a rhythm-based kind of enjambment because the rhyme does not MELS 160 necessarily follow the anticipated rhythmic pattern. In the Shakespearean tradition of the sonnet, with which Cavendish would have been well acquainted, the last two lines are a rhyming couplet that should include an epiphanic turn in perspective. The lack of epiphanic turn in the Cursed

Sonnets, emphasized by this disrupted rhyme pattern, signals the inability to solve a problem, to recognize the limitations imposed by the imperative to finish an experiment, to define an entity, or to draw a meaningful and lasting conclusion. Consequently, the thirteenth line of these poems sometimes uses a final word that rhymes with nothing else, suggesting an incomplete thought within the sonnet’s framework, while offering a rhyme which extends the rhyme scheme beyond the couplet pattern, again emphasizing the inability or unwillingness to move onto a new thought or point. The effect of this “hanging” last line may also suggest more positively that scientists, poets and readers alike are perpetually on the verge of another investigation. This ambiguity plays into the polyphonic voice: there are clearly rules, but they are immediately open to interpretation, part of soft grid poetics, so that the poems are technically complete, but tinged by the uneasiness that attends the tweaking of the expected form. Some Cursed Sonnets, such as

“Quantum Entanglements II,” end with a word connected to the opening rhyme of the poem, to force the poem to circle back on itself, and not to progress to another conclusion. Or, as in

“Microcosmscope,” some Cursed Sonnets repeat rhyming words together, also signifying being caught in a loop, refusing to provide an epiphanic moment of closure.

These poems, spoken mostly through the voice of Margaret Cavendish, but sometimes through the voice of the Smutty Alchemist, directly dissect and reproach both the notions which inform the sciences and the experimental model upon which they depend. The lack of epiphanic turn in the Cursed Sonnets signals an inability to problem-solve conclusively and questions the narrative structure of scientific information which treats the academic pursuit of knowledge as MELS 161 objective information. This guides the reader back towards another look at the subjective tendencies inherent in humans and their systems of knowledge. This is consistent with

Cavendish’s distrust of the machinery of seventeenth-century science, which removed specimens from their context. Cavendish represents this as a flea magnified into a monster in her text, The

Blazing World. How these sonnets move more deeply into the lyric conceptualist movement is through the revision of form. They are called Cursed Sonnets, in part because a curse prevents progress, such as the time freeze of sleep which blankets Sleeping Beauty’s castle and keeps the court suspended in time. A curse is a deviation or a variation like the smut again: something has gone awry; something has not gone as expected. Smut and curse are both about script-breaking by refusing to deliver a clean or “pure” result. They are both disruptions. As with Wunker’s notion of feminist killjoys, or Roland Barthes’s ideas about jouissance, as it pertains to the writerly text, this “cursed” sonnet form challenges the reader’s assumptions through the

“sub/versifying” of the literary form. But, true to the real excitement of Science, which

Cavendish and others richly enjoy, this lack of closure in the Cursed Sonnets also leaves open the possibility of ongoing, unfettered discovery: a curse is a construct, representing an ongoing investment in magical energy. It disrupts linear structures, and often exists outside of time. It is deliberate; it is intentional; it is meant to challenge and to resist easy resolution. It comes with a myriad of repercussions.

Queyras defines lyric conceptualism in various ways, but the following speaks to intentionality coupled with motility: “Lyric Conceptualism imagines herself a boat, fluid without handles, able to slip through definitions, anchor at will” (63). The accepted term for a collection of fourteen sonnets which speak on the same or related themes is a crown or corona of sonnets, a collective noun which implies sovereignty as a measure of success and based on the Greco- MELS 162

Roman laurel of poets. These Cursed Sonnets present a different collection, which has been labelled a Girdle of Sonnets, a choice celebrating and insisting on double meaning. A girdle is a piece of fabric which covers briefs or panties, to bind the lower abdomen. Functionally, girdles keep up stockings, usually with garter straps, or, as trusses, serve a medical function to deal with conditions such as hernias. Aesthetically, girdles, or replacements such as Spanx, are associated with the streamlining and restrictive containing of the sexualized female figure particularly in formal wear, or in the indulgence in the contemporary burlesque thrill of lingerie in pin-up culture. However, the girdle has other antecedents, as part of a European suit of armor to protect the lower abdomen, hips, and loins in the battle gear typically worn by male warriors. Given that feminist work is so often tasked with defending its own existence, it seems appropriate that this collection of poems bolsters itself with verbal armor. Furthermore, in a conventional crown of sonnets, the master sonnet stands as a sonnet which is composed from one line of each of the preceding sonnets. This requires the master sonnet to be in the poet’s mind as the organizing principle from the onset of the sequence, so it provides another example of structure within structure, with each of the sonnets in the crown answerable to the content and message of the master. This collection moves from the often masculine “Master” to the femininity of a girdle, with the intent to feminize the concept of structure as malleable. The two female narrator personas, Cavendish and the Smutty Alchemist, reinforce this movement away from male sovereignty towards female covalence.

While the Lyric Conceptualist movement need not necessarily use the feminist label,

Queyras does state that it does have “irreverence for the master” and the master’s rules, as a tribute to their respect for Lorde’s work and influence, so the manifesto takes up a feminist dedication to meaningful irreverence in effect (63). The statement that the lyric conceptualist is MELS 163

“feminist in construction” became an opportunity to apply feminist theory to constructions of poetic shape (Queyras 63), such as in the Mistress sonnet. By allowing the words from each line from the other Cursed Sonnets to be anagrammed, a playful space opens within the form, by introducing the game of word recycling in an unpredictable pattern, offering the reader a chance to be complicit in the construction of meaning. This permits flexibility in a space which is no longer dependent on serving the content of a master sonnet or the strict repetition of lines from previous sonnets verbatim. The anagrammed words disrupt the traditional form without totally dispensing with the structural consonance and logic at the heart of the original Master sonnet and its feeder poems, as a tribute to the girdle which simultaneously supports a set shape, but allows moveability.

“Light from Cucumbers” speaks to the problem of form divorced from real functionality, and uses irreverence to puncture the myth of the scientist as a irrefutable model of enlightenment achievement, as someone whose knowledge and achievement elevates him or her to some untouchable, omniscient, incontestable status. It opens that question through its direct reference to the Laputa section of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, in which Swift satirises academic elitism and ineffectiveness by portraying addled academics on a floating island, setting up experiments so deeply entrenched in the abstractness of academia that they defy natural law. The reference to Swift in this section anachronistically disrupts the current poet’s use of the seventeenth century and its scientific revolution as a historical reference point, and his satire provides the impetus for further critique of the experimental model being employed, in this case, for a task which is both impossible and unnecessary. This poem models the sort of experiment that might be hosted by “the Department of Pottasons, whose project is to satirize the other projects” (Corbyn 2). The College de ‘Pataphysiques is a movement begun by the Surrealist, MELS 164

Alfred Jarry, that promotes pseudo-sciences, and as with this French surrealist poet, who later inspired the conceptual poetry movements, “Light from Cucumbers” makes light, not from the cucumber, but rather from the sometimes ridiculous quality of scientific experiments. The

“Quantum Entanglements” poems critique scientists trying to employ a phenomenon without fully understanding how it works, and “Light from Cucumbers” skewers experiments done only for experiment’s sake. The Smutty Alchemist’s voice then takes the commonality between

Cavendish and Swift-- their shared concern with the myopic focus of experiments which are unattached to pragmatic, societal application-- to revisit the topic through the valence of poetry and philosophy, since both do share the impulse to critique the scientific form. The Smutty

Alchemist resembles Cavendish in her choice to use rhymed couplets with a focus on scientific subject matter, but like Swift, is prepared to weaponize humour to create a more contemporary tone. For instance, physicists are portrayed as ungratified sex-work clients in “Microcosmscope.”

The Smutty Alchemist supports a bastardization of form and tone for effect and affect – the puns, the wordplay, the slang, all intend to render bathetic what Cavendish would discuss seriously in service of exploding the myth of the exalted academic or the great mind who produces

“monumental” work with a pontificated arrogance. This kind of irreverence for the master culture adopts an attitude and practice which lyrical conceptualism encompasses, with its “stink of the impure” (Queyras 63), referencing the feminist critique of exclusionary notions of purity.

Both the Cavendish persona and the Smutty Alchemist remain intrigued by Science, excited by it, but are cautious and suspicious about practitioners who look at experimentation as a means to an end-stopped process. They see Science as providing a way to fend off insularity off in the

Arts, as a way to build an interdisciplinary bank of information available through Science and made palatable through the Arts. MELS 165

As a continuation on the theme of irreverence, Queyras specifically cites constraint and appropriation techniques as part of the lyric conceptualist’s toolkit, which originate in conceptualism: the tools can be re-worked and changed by the way in which they are used in lyric conceptualism. One of Queyras’s last tenets states that: “Lyric Conceptualism’s goal is to create openings rather than closures. It offers itself as a courtyard, stadium, meadow, and variously, a reclaimed parking lot, a battlefield made food co-op, a factory turned performance space, a transitional space, reclaimed land, an idea with no end” (64). The expectation that science be presented in an objective voice has been turned on its head when used as subject matter in a poetic project. Perhaps, with an awareness of and a commitment to open communities, sometimes enacted with humour, what was once taboo or forbidden can be seized and re-purposed. Some subject matter in this section is treated with absolute seriousness; however, this same subject matter still operates with the discriminating but also curatorial eye of the lyric conceptualist supervising it. “The Lark’s Lament,” for example, approximates the process of a famous experiment used to prove that air consisted of a substance, not an absence of substance, by creating a vacuum and letting a bird die in a container in which the air has been totally suctioned out. While this promotes empathy for the bird in the experiment that voices the poem, it also pushes this experiment to an extreme to illustrate the idea that the desire to know may too easily become divorced from Einstein’s “holy curiosity” (Miller 62), or McKay’s astonishment and wonder: knowing just for the sake of knowing can readily fall into experiments that cost lives. In the case put forward in “The Lark’s Lament,” an experiment that kills a bird to prove that vacuums exist, privileges human lives over animal lives in a very material way. The scientific theatre becomes a theatre of cruelty in this poem, and the experiment becomes a very self-aggrandizing act of performative power, devoid of consideration for the subject material. MELS 166

Section X: Conclusions

The final section of “Smutty Alchemy,” simply titled “Conclusions,” is anything but conclusive, as it deals with the human anxiety felt around the questions of object permanence or lack thereof, the imperfect and incomplete transmission of knowledge, and the allure and illusion of personal fame. “Smutty Alchemy” celebrates the energy of discovery, the “present-ness” of newly formulated knowledge. Being caught in that epiphanic moment redefines notions of success: the poems’ experiments never reach a static, definitive end, but maintain a necessary tension. This tension generates a tenuous balance between new areas of investigation which enhance the knowledge of the discipline, and those endeavours that may eventually displace the knowledge that launched the inquiry. Every answer to a question introduces other questions.

Categorizing this poetry has been made purposely difficult, echoing the feminist joy of refusal, of not following a scripted interaction. Not only does this section shift voices between the Cavendish persona and the Smutty Alchemist, but it also intentionally confuses which voice is speaking in some of the poems. As with Alchemy, sometimes the collection keeps its secrets: the codified forms do not always reveal clearly who is speaking. The Cavendish persona often presents quite distinctly, such as in “The Margaret Cavendish School of Thot,” but the Alchemist can mimic, can appropriate, can debate and can subvert, such as in “Venus Among the Atoms.”

In alchemical texts, it is often noted that after alchemical processes are complete, the perfected human frequently presents as a new form, a hermaphroditic or angelic human, a fusion of male and female. In this collection, however, two voices are employed and maintained, refusing any neat amalgamation, but instead projecting as blended, confused, or overlapped. Even in “The

Margaret Cavendish School of Thot,” a Cavendish persona poem, a third person narrator is employed, again blurring the idea of a completely distinct and separate voice. “Smutty Alchemy” MELS 167 does not promote narratives of achieving perfection or even definitive progress, but seeks instead to expand vocal range, by employing a small “dramatis personae,” of which one, the Alchemist, inserts herself into Cavendish’s role sometimes, or engages in internal debate with her.

Margaret Cavendish herself explicitly and repeatedly expresses that as a woman without children, her books alone bear her name and are her offspring. While one avenue to fame is to invent, celebrity does not guarantee the longevity of that fame, the durability of the invention, or in Cavendish’s case, of the survival of her poetry or the books in which they live. Words on pages are fixed but aesthetic movements fall in and out of favour. Therefore, the first three sections of the collection either play with recognized forms, or invent new forms, but “Section

IV: Conclusions” initially appears to be a departure from attention to structurally regulated poems, since this last section contains more free verse, more open-ended poems than the other sections do. These poems signal visually, as well as by subject matter, the looseness of interpretation in the creation of and commitment to conclusions. Facts serve instead as a resting point, a pause to recognize that some moment of reconciliation or resolution has come into play, but it is only a pause, an interval between one discovery and the next, existing only until new knowledge furthers, or even contradicts, information currently used. The use of free verse signals a deliberate shift into a more lyrical mode to correspond with the malleability of “truth” or even

“facts.” It allows this collection additionally to focus on Cavendish in a different way, and to use

“personal” subject matter as a springboard for topics of current political concern, especially those which deal with previously denigrated, silenced, or marginalized voices, but which are now set in the lyrical conceptual framework.

In “Conclusions,” there stands the one unaltered Shakespearean-style sonnet of this collection called “Hand Bound.” This love poem harkens specifically back to Cavendish, who MELS 168 was the recipient of love poems from her husband, and whom she affectionately and respectfully acknowledges in her dedications in her books. Although Cavendish frequently credits her husband, William, and her brother-in-law, Charles, with equipping her with a knowledge of science, she also pursues that knowledge independently and confidently publishes works based on her own readings and observations. William is responsible for the prefatory pieces of many of

Cavendish’s works, but not for her first Poems and Fancies. This work she publishes with neither his permission nor his prior knowledge, while she is in the midst of petitioning the

Restoration court and King Charles II for the return of her husband’s estate. In his introductory notes written for her later works, and in her own works, this unorthodox couple acknowledge each other as intellectual peers and partners. Looking at this relationship from the twenty-first century, the success of their marriage and love for each other is celebrated by the conceit of a relationship measured by the books they bring into the world, and by the ideas and conversations they foster. This is intended to contrast to the reproduction-based “success” of a couple, commonly lauded in Cavendish’s own time, and which eludes her as a childless wife and marks them as a desexualized couple. The poem in this collection, therefore, combines the image of

Janus, the two-headed Roman god of doorways, with the transmuted figure of Hermaphrodite from alchemy to project the idea of a superior being with a perfected sense of spirituality. This conceit tells the reader that a book is analogous to a human body, in this case the body of an offspring, because if the book persists, the creation may far outlive the corporeal existence of its author. “Smutty Alchemy” instead sees the body as a site of collaboration between what the self wants, and what environmental factors exert their presence and influence at any given moment.

The collaboration may not be a willing one, however, such as in “The Marriage of Hermes MELS 169

Tristmegistus,” where the Smutty Alchemist is faced with the passing of time and ageing, but then chooses to grow “sage” and find a partner.

Another invented shape from this “Conclusions” section, aimed at disrupting and subverting the expectations of form, are the tardigrades. The form is inspired, as the molecule poems were in Section II, by some of the tenets of concrete poetry. The tardigrades, in fact, act as poetic interlopers throughout all the sections, even to the point of one “swimming” through the middle of the Pikaia, but provide both disruption and connection in this last section. In the midst of a number of free verse pieces, the tardigrades offer consistent structure, which is suggested by the science attached to this microscopic animal: the miniscule tardigrade exists as possibly the most indestructible, resilient creature known on the planet. Its actual body shape inspires the formal qualities of the titular at the same time as the poems act as puns. The name

“Tardigrade” was given to the creatures by the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani in 1777, and translates from Italian as “slow footed” or “slow stepper” (Fox-Skelly 1); accordingly, these poems add extra feet to the poetic lines. Additionally, the “body” of this form consists of ten syllables, which is a fairly common line length for English poetry; however, there are two feet added to either side of these ten syllables which consist of four syllables, a dactyl followed by a stressed syllable, with each added syllable representing one of the four claws found on each foot of the animal. In traditional Western poetic forms, the dactylic hexameter remains a commonly used long line structure with sixteen or seventeen syllables per line, such as in ancient Greek and

Latin epic poetry, such as Homer’s or Virgil’s. At eighteen in the first three lines, the tardigrade poems have more syllables per line than do the epic poems of the Greek and Latin poets, maintaining the regular pattern, but also slowing down the pace of the reader. MELS 170

Tardigrades can be found in Mariana’s Trench, the Antarctic, the Sahara Desert, on every continent, and even in space for short durations, so the poems do infiltrate the collection, frequently but unpredictably appearing in various sections: they make cameo appearances which cannot be specifically foreseen or regularly anticipated. Tardigrades—the creatures—have been a recognizable animal form since the invention of the microscope, but first appeared on earth in the Cambrian period of geologic history. This aligns them as contemporaries of the Pikaia and secures their place as living fossils. This classification defies the notion of evolution as a linear process – new information has not simply enlarged knowable details about the tardigrade but has changed its location in the geological hierarchy: this primitive life form has endured, unnoticed, while others, like the Pikaia, have not. While the popularity of a new poetic form cannot be guaranteed outside of this collection, the tardigrade poems are structurally subversive, existing within all the other sections, not as a part of the narrative of the scientific project which organizes the four sections. These poems are also resilient in that they do not tie into the linear structure that these sections build. They are semi-detached from the subjects which construct this collection’s chronology and offer an alternative to the evolution process that brought forth humans from Pikaia. The tardigrades are singular, and accordingly take on a conspicuously different form which fuses concrete poetry with a set syllable count for each line.

One poem in this section which works against the section heading, “Conclusions,” is the poem “Margaret the First, Not the Last” (114). This poem simply lists all the female fellows inducted into the Royal Society, and then adds the names of deceased female members, all of which is copied from the Royal Society public directory of its members and available on its official website. In contrast to the number of entities in this collection which exude energy and which take on personality, this poem lists real humans in a very dry way: it is the least poetic, the MELS 171 least lyrical of the collection’s poems. It is most obviously generated by someone else, and not by a poet, but by a pragmatic lister of names for a directory, so that the accomplishments of these women are reduced to their names only, placed within an institutionalized context. The poetic impulse here, then, by the Smutty Alchemist, is to recontextualize information, to point out the disproportionate under-representation of women, compared to the inclusion of men, in the Royal

Society over its full history. This poem is an “Enough Said” commentary, without any traditionally poetic embellishment: it stands as a “let the numbers speak for themselves” moment, and again, one of the collection’s “smuts” that write against the text presented. It simultaneously, however, takes Cavendish to task, gently, for thinking of herself as a grand exception to her gender’s supposedly limited ambitions, with the humbling detail that she is not even the only Margaret to step foot in the Royal Society. To emphasize again that one can draw

“conclusions” about women daring to talk about science, the poem, “A Visit to the Royal

Society.” (91) takes the historical records of Cavendish’s visit to the society and combines them with the negative reports of her behaviour to flesh out the beginnings of an anti-woman bias that meant no female members were again inducted until 1900. The poem opens from the position of

Cavendish’s detractors: “they have every intention of holding this academic hussy / to the standards of a society worth a king’s return, / and a narrative fitting science faction” (ll. 1-3). The mention of “science faction” is meant in this case to be the opposite of Haraway’s multivalent

“SF,” standing for “speculative feminisms” as well as “science fiction,” among other things – the scientific experience into which Cavendish entered, and into which many women have entered, is defined by faction-driven attitudes and practices, so that while the collection moves always towards opening up the investigation, transfer and transmission of information, there remains a culture of conclusion, which does not reverberate with inclusion but exclusion. MELS 172

Section XI: The Collection’s Context

“Smutty Alchemy” pulls together recognized forms, such as the sonnet, the epic poem, and the triolet, but considers new shapes to deal with the more scientifically aware notion of the subjects at hand. The poetic forms change just as what it means to be alive has radically opened up: to be an animal, any animal, is no longer about being a pure species with a singular makeup and highly identifiable traits, but to be a walking biome and an environment. Humans too are now understood to be hosts, not just individuals—walking bacterial colonies, or even “holoents,” as Donna J. Haraway says in Staying with the Trouble, a term which she uses as “a general term to replace ‘units’ or ‘beings’” (60). Haraway invokes the term to describe a mode of living beyond the host/symbiote duality, and to mark a situation where “all of the players are symbionts to each other” (60), unlike in Cavendish’s poems where the human body seems its own biologically independent and intact structure. In other words, humans are no longer considered the exalted and isolated top of the Golden Chain of Being but are now seen rather as a compilation of elements and microscopic beings such as bacteria, which are embedded within our bodies and functions, and not just existing on our surfaces. The human body is its own small ecosystem which participates in larger ecosystems and structures, so that, as Jane Bennett says,

“perhaps the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating” (37). The voice of the Smutty Alchemist is aware of and attempts to be sensitive to a complicated, pluralized notion of humanity, which is now considered to be capable of making connections outside its species, which Haraway would term “oddkin” (2). Canadian poetry has, in recent decades, seen the contemplative observations of landscape poetry broaden to match the ecological concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but it has also provided a gateway to other sciences as poetic subjects, MELS 173 including: biology in A. Rawling’s Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (2006), medicine in Jennifer

Still’s Comma (2017), geology and ecology in Christopher Dewdney’s Permugenesis (1987), and chemistry and genetic sequencing in Christian Bök’s Eunoia Part I (2015). Scientific knowledge may add to or provide a focus for personal and experiential subject matter, and it has accordingly become an increasingly topical concern within Canadian poetry in the last twenty years, as it has broadened observation in the larger population, and not just in the scientific community. Science, through interdisciplinary interests and greater availability of information to the public, although it may be disseminated and reworked for that public, has become accessible in new ways, and is no longer the provenance of exclusive, aristocratic societies.

In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett states that she is “looking for a materialism in which matter is figured as a vitality at work both inside and outside of the selves” (62). She contrasts her work to a history of materialist thinkers that includes Epicurus,

Lucretius, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Denis Diderot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry David

Thoreau, and others: “[in] that tradition, the distinction between life and matter, or organic and inorganic, or human and nonhuman, or man and god is not always the most important or salient difference to recognize” (62-63). But even contemporary scientific poetry finds it difficult both to relinquish the notion that humans are self-determining and accept the pervasiveness of nonhuman influences. In Anatomic, for instance, Adam Dickinson starts his collection by randomly and voluntarily sending off a series of his own bodily samples to have them analyzed by a lab.

This becomes the basis for a perceived fight against the pollutants in his body. Bennett’s remark that vital materialism recognizes the potency and agency of matter “without being purposive,” pertains to contemporary poetic work, including “Smutty Alchemy.” To say that Nature is indifferent would be to start from an anthropocentric position of offence: the world as we MELS 174

understand it was not constructed for or by the arrival of humans. We are byproducts of circumstance and shaped by evolution. In Dickinson’s collection, the biological precariousness that comes with constant flux manifests itself as human anxiety when the very existence of microbes and contaminants threaten humans and their quality of life. This stands as a reversal of

McKay’s Deactivated West 100 or Zwicky’s “The Geology of Norway,” which both consider the human mind envisioning its own body and self-consciousness as situated within an environment.

Dickinson’s work imagines a body as a border that one should have some control over, whereas

“Smutty Alchemy” sees the poet existing within a context that is not designed specifically for an individual’s body.

Anatomic chronicles the author’s decision to send away samples of his own bodily tissues and fluids to gain a better understanding of his own chemical composition. However, the test results are rife with indicators of environmental pollutants, symbolic of the problematic number of choices that are made for humans by the political climate and cultural norm. These manifest as unnecessary extra chemical presences within individuals. This begins his process of trying to understand, control and expunge the environmental contaminants which he discovers have invaded and compromised the body he inhabits. This new knowledge subsequently

“infects” his perception of bodily autonomy. What often in Dickinson’s collection seems to be a fact-finding mission becomes instead a recognition that factual information, like the body’s chemical makeup, seldom makes possible any feelings of certainty or closure because permission and autonomy has been circumvented: “I didn’t consent to carry these chemicals inside me” (75).

His collection’s focus treats the human body as being capable of a chemical purity, which plays out when he walks twenty kilometers a day to purge his own body of those contaminants of which he was unaware and which he did not personally consent to harbour (55). His subsequent MELS 175 purgation mounts a defence against the unsanctioned chemical changes made to his body by a government and a culture which have assumed a right to affect humans at the microbial level.

Dickinson’s “Specimen” poems enlarge on this theme to express a threatened sense of personal and poetic autonomy, by describing his body as “a spaceship designed to optimize the proliferation and growth of its microbial cosmonauts” (42). A sinister symbiosis exists here whereby the microbes and the author’s immune system feed and change one another, and the author does not have control over either, saying: “these organisms enact a form of biochemical writing through their involvement in the metabolic processes that fuel my life” (42). The knowledge of the microbes inhabiting his body presses upon Dickinson’s identity to the extent that the microbes sometimes challenge and usurp him as an author. The notion of the microbes engaging in “biochemical writing” resonates with the feeling of powerlessness that Zwicky expresses in the poem “the Geology of Norway,” when she admits to wanting to write something comparable to the Earth’s core or to find a choice of words which can bend light, but knowing she cannot do either of these things. Landscape is perpetually other, Bill Brown’s thing which will not exist for human necessity or purpose. Landscape has found other meaning and remains impenetrable; it is not required to be accessible or translatable. The microbes which live on and in Dickinson’s body, as part of his collective and yet fractured sense of self, activate and, in true post-modern awareness, all things are “text,” so they engage in “biochemical writing,” which reverses assumed positions of power: Dickinson, as an author, makes the choice to cede some of the creative control one associates with being a writer who creates literary worlds over to microscopic beings who are pervasive in the human world. He works within the conceptual poet style when he uses textual appropriations of his lab results to create a literary form. In doing so, the body of the writer becomes the text constructed by chemicals, and Dickinson acknowledges MELS 176 this level of influence upon his existence by including lab findings in the collection. Queyras asks “[a]re you writing it or is it writing you?” (62), and while this could refer to the use of form, it also could apply to subject matter, such as Dickinson’s realization that his sense of autonomy is displaced as the body of his work is writing his perception of his body, with the action that he takes and writes of demonstrating an attempt to regain some control over his body, over his self.

Lisa Robertson in Nilling has said of the reading experience that: “As I read, my self- consciousness is not only suspended, but temporarily abolished by the vertigo of another’s language. I am simply its conduit, its gutter. This is a pleasure” (26). He allows the self to become the specimen, something “other,” with himself as the poet surrendering the illusion of absolute control and control over his body. This, in turn, complicates and questions the self as subject material.

Queyras asserts, “Lyric Conceptualism accepts appropriation and recontextualization as useful, if not essential gestures but does not confine her process to these gestures,” and operates as “a voyeuristic mode” (62). Dickinson’s appropriations of medical reports and lab results as poetry constitute the willingness of the lyric conceptualist to select atypical text sources but connect and investigate them with poems responding to this inclusion in a lyric, narrative register. The “Specimen” poems speak both to the opacity of medical language and to its prose stylings, even to the point of using margin-to-margin presentation reproduced in the poetry collection. This has the effect of posting a veritable wall of information about the bacterial and microbial inhabitants of human bodies. The series of “Specimen” poems make the reader a scopophiliac or witness to the author’s typically confidential medical information, which normally is unavailable to a patient. With this conceptual inclusion, Dickinson reveals that he, as the author, has turned himself first into a specimen, and then into an observer of his own life. MELS 177

Simultaneously, he invites his readers to participate with him in this uncovering, analysis and manipulation of usually confidential and sequestered information. Rather than making this a collection of lyric poems which analyze the poet’s situations and realizations, Dickinson is inviting collaboration in the reclamation of personal information and medical data. There is a conceptual-style appropriation of medical reports, but it exists in tension with a poetic voice which wants to detach from the initial impulse of the author, who requested these tests voluntarily. The poet is accordingly isolated from the thought process which first initiated a desire to have a medical reading of a bodily composition— the collection starts from a place of choice and self-initiation, and fights against the effects of societal choices that the poet is not willing to permit to happen to his own body. It ends with another set of choices and further self- initiation, as he responds to what he has found out which he would never have found out, had he not chosen to appropriate medical information not usually generated without an instigating problem. Other Canadian poets engage with different non-human subjects, again to look at complex relationships which may not be human-centric but still adhere to Haraway’s notion of

“oddkin.”

This impulse to merge inanimate subject with expressive poetic voice resonates in the work of Canadians such as Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, Jan Howard, and Lorna Crozier. McKay, in his “Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time,” says of writing poetry about natural marvels that:

natural history of any kind, brings the rigour of the scientific frame; poetry brings the

capacity for astonishment and the power of possibility—or, perhaps more accurately,

legitimizes them [ . . . poetry] counteracts the tendency, perhaps most common in

scientists in the grip of triumphant technology, to reduce objects of contemplation to MELS 178

quanta of knowledge. Astonishment, humbling our pride in technique, impedes its

progress into exploitation and appropriation. In the astonished condition, the other

remains other, wilderness remains wild. (104)

McKay observes how contemporary poetics which engage with geology, and more broadly, with those sciences which once fell under the intellectual banner of “Natural History,” form a partnership between poetry and science which neither reduces knowledge to information nor promotes poetry which transcends the object being observed. In just such a way, Cavendish’s work fits well with the thinking and practice of contemporary Canadian poets.

While John Donne’s metaphysical poem, “The Flea,” suggests, by its title, a focus on the life of a flea, it instead mounts an elaborate conceit about a young man attempting to persuade his lover into a sexual coupling which surpasses the sharing of blood through the bite of that flea.

By contrast, the title of Cavendish’s poem, “Of many Worlds in this World,” indicates that the author will not draw conclusions for her reader – the poem is not, for example, about human beings; there is no metaphorical conceit. Instead, the imagery gives the reader a better understanding of the subject matter she discusses, such as when she compares a microcosm of the world of atoms to a “two-pence” (l. 6, p. 44) and says that “if foure atomes a world can make, then see, / What several Worlds might in an Eare-ring bee” (ll. 11-12, p. 45). The two-pence and the earring are concrete objects used to assist the reader in navigating the complexities of minute structures, based on what the eye can observe. She is stating that she can see a tiny world without the use of a microscope, but also leave it in its context by applying logical reasoning. Cavendish does not bring the poem back to her feelings about the idea of another world existing in her earring, nor does she explore how this idea might have an impact on humans. Similarly, in the poem, “A Fire is in the Centre of the Earth,” (36-37), she surmises that heat is essential to the MELS 179 creation of life, even though the sun, the source of heat, is not always shining on the earth. She continues with “But Fire within the Earth gives Life, no doubt./So heate within begets with

Childe the Earth” (ll.8-9). Her findings are presented in just four lines, and she resists mythologizing this deduction, or suggesting means of harnessing or re-creating these conditions.

As with McKay’s state of astonishment, Cavendish refuses to project human concerns onto this microcosm or attempt to control it.

Zwicky’s poem, “The Geology of Norway,” from her 1998 collection, Songs for

Relinquishing the Earth, investigates the experience of a poet expecting to define environmental surroundings by substances which behave according to their innate qualities. This is reminiscent of Cavendish’s treatment of the elements in the Elements section of “Smutty Alchemy.” The first stanza of Zwicky’s poem begins: “I have wanted there to be / no story. I have wanted / only facts. At any given point in time / there cannot be a story: time, / except as now, does not exist [.

. .] I have wanted / the geology of light” (ll. 1-22). This poem goes on to speak to the interplay between facts about and observations of the landscape, and also to the persistent and unavoidable intrusion of the subjective voice into the poem. Despite the poem’s title, a personal pronoun immediately opens the poem instead of a description of the country’s rocks. The subjectivity applied to landscape undergoes a slow transformation as Zwicky continues to re-shape her thoughts, as she contemplates in Stanza three:

And the fact is, the earth is not a perfect sphere.

And the fact is, it is half-liquid.

And the fact is there are gravitational anomalies [. . .]

And the fact is,

the fact is, MELS 180

and you might think the fact is

we will never get to the bottom of it,

but you would be wrong. (ll. 33-36)

Zwicky, like Liz Howard in “Terra Nova, Terra Formed,” describes the poet’s reaction to the landscape as a collision of memory with the present sensory experience of the environment.

Zwicky’s observations treat thought as a by-product of the mind’s preconceptions meeting stimulus, almost like a chemical reaction to the landscape within the mind, saying that the

“process of compression gives off thought” (l. 20). Zwicky says that “compression is: a geologic epoch / rendered to a slice of rock you hold between / your finger and your thumb” (ll. 10-20), describing impressions so strong that they almost seem to be the external forcing its way into the poet’s personal thinking. But that permeation can change, and conclusions are tentative – one cannot get to the bottom of understanding what the earth is in a meaningful way which will also last forever. This contrasts to Cavendish’s linear and end-aimed process of making observations, applying her logic and individual genius, and reaching a firm conclusion. Zwicky’s writing stems from a time when it is now known that homo sapiens have only inhabited earth for thousands of years, compared to the billions of years in which the planet has existed; Cavendish remains part of a world which sees itself as complete, a mystery to be unraveled but which is solvable.

Zwicky’s world is about probability and the ongoing process of problem-solving and factoring in new variables; Cavendish’s was presumed to be made and fixed in place by a creator.

Another example of a poetic voice which collaborates with its surroundings comes from

Liz Howard’s collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent. This collection combines

Indigenous knowledge with Western European scientific information in a way which also recalls

Cavendish’s “Many Worlds within this World,” but with a fluidity reminiscent of the language MELS 181 poets and a three-line stanza structure which touches on the idea that the paragraph is a container of quantity, inspired by Ron Silliman’s “the new sentence.” Both Howard and Zwicky examine the relationship between the self and the environment rather than isolating the one from the other to promote environment to be valued as being a part of the personal sphere of being. With a trained university background in neurosciences, Howard displays a finely-honed balance of scientific terminology, spirituality, and a playful and permissive approach to blending languages from different strata of life. This is evident in the first poem of the collection, “Terra Nova, Terra

Formed,” which also builds on work like Zwicky’s and McKay’s, where the speakers ventured into an ungroomed environment only to bring cultural constructs and memories with them unexpectedly. Paradoxically, moving into a wilder landscape brings about a parallel interior journey where different registers of language collide, along with memory and perception. The resulting spiritual dimension is mapped onto the landscape, so that the landscape and the poet’s and reader’s perception of the landscape are layered together. In the first stanza, Howard goes so far to as to even situate the “tent / in a deep time course, in Venus retrograde” (ll. 2-3), a phrase specific to both McKay’s critical and creative work, and signifying an awareness which allows the poet and the reader to step outside of the anthropocentric stance and to activate a sense of wonder.

In McKay or Zwicky, one often has the sense of a “Rückenfigur,” a contemplative trope or device used in German Romantic painting, such as in Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of

Fog (1818), in which a person is seen from behind but positioned as if viewing a sweeping, sublime landscape. The Rückenfigur acts as the blocking figure, which means that the direction of the figure’s gaze delimits what a viewer of the painting sees of the subject landscape, and that qualifies the viewer’s perspective on the painting. At the same time, this faceless figure, with its MELS 182 back turned towards the viewer, offers a filter or focus for the landscape. For readers of poetry, the subject matter is always being framed for them; there is always a remove inherent in the lyric tradition, no matter how the poem presents itself, but contemporary poetics are moving towards acknowledging the slipperiness of voice within poems themselves. Lyric conceptualism allows for the figurative expressions of lyric poetry; lyric conceptualism does not require the voice to achieve a fluency which would disguise the problematics of suggesting presence and transcendence in what is always an experience filtered through the poet.

Howard’s first poem of the collection, “Terra Nova, Terraformed,” lays the groundwork for Earth to be viewed as a new world and a created world simultaneously. The first term, “terra nova,” translates literally to “new earth” or “new land,” which suggests the absence of identity or authenticity until someone comes from outside to name, to label, to colonize what has been known and experienced by Indigenous culture, and which has existed as a place and as a space capable of supporting human life forms. Dara Culhane, in The Pleasure of the Crown, notes that the term “terra nullius,” Latin for “nobody’s land,” was weaponized in law cases where British colonies stood to gain land when “already inhabited nations were simply legally deemed to be uninhabited if the people were not Christian, not agricultural, not commercial, not ‘sufficiently evolved,” or simply in the way” (48). The term “discovery” assumes that Caucasian occupations are privileged in North America, and that the earth’s existence does not matter before it is

“discovered” by those entitled humans. In other words, nothing exists until it is discovered, written upon, and studied by the “right” humans, with the very restrictive notion that white colonizers have been recognized as having “discovered” a land and have been deemed worthy of being called “discoverers.” The term “terra nova” additionally invokes the image of breaking new ground, which often acts as a metaphor for innovation, because breaking new ground refers MELS 183 to digging and constructing something in a place which does not have a binding record of previous building existing on the site. On the other side of the comma in the title, the word

“Terraformed” is a compound of Latin “terra” and the English verb “form” in the past tense, which suggests that the Earth always exists first, an idea central to McKay’s and Zwicky’s ecological poems. And yet, “terraforming” is also the term used to describe the hypothetical alteration of other planets to make their surfaces and atmospheres comparable to Earth. The paradox of the titular worlds, “Terra Nova” and “Terraformed,” then suggests that the physical world, and the way in which the speaker perceive that world with its many layers of culture, can co-exist and maintain tension. This can carry over into a balancing of disparate or distinct poetic influences, conceits, and by extension, genres. It seems that Howard’s work, as forecasted by

Queyras’s manifesto, pulls from lyric structuring of stanzas, but with language poetry’s ability to pull language from multiple registers without the constriction of grammatically correct sentences.

When the Howard’s speaker begs for more sleep, it is not to a deity, a muse, or her companion traveler that she addresses her plea. Instead, she applies to the “creek, bleeding hills, census inveterate” (l. 22). The closing lines of the poem speak to a moment informed by a poet who cannot deliver a single poem which will last forever: “let me sleep five more minutes just five / minutes more before we default on / eternity” (ll. 23-25). While not a direct reference to

Howard’s work as a research officer in cognitive psychology, this moment speaks to her academic background: how can a mortal brain trained by education in the sciences not be aware of the irony of aiming for art that will be eternal? Hers is a mind which is acutely self-aware of its material existence, and she is equally cognizant of the limitations of the bodily medium which lives but cannot maintain any state forever. The last stanza of this poem then functions as a MELS 184 deferral of the inevitable, starting with the call, “let me sleep five more minutes just five” (l. 23), and deflates into bathos, as if eternity holds a lease or is owed a debt which the artist cannot, and should not, pay off. Again, Howard does not invoke a muse, nor address the bone collector, nor invoke some deity, but she does stop to address her fellow artists, saying:

sons and daughters of the liberal arts

all my life has spurned a desire for more than

a power line of injured transistors

fetal alcohol syndrome, oil drums sunk

to the bottom of every lake, the aurora borealis

an overdose along the magnetized pole

what we are offered in lieu of a soul

another paper cut of lambent plasma

thickening the wound bed of release (ll. 13-21)

The speaker refuses to adopt a position of despair or accept removal from the complications in this material world as an inevitable conclusion, despite living in a world in which the aforementioned ills prevail. Yet, there is no tangible proof of souls either or any spiritual escape chute. Although the material reality of a body seems finite, this speaker’s finite life has yielded a hope that there is more to hope for in this world than “injured transistors.” Transistors often are used to amplify an electronic signal, or generate a switch, and the poem is expressing a longing through an “Infinite Citizen” expressing a desire for more than what lasts “all my life,” what goes beyond one life. The use of this technical language in the poem points to a desire to have MELS 185 more means of communication, to amplify what already exists. Howard is also potentially including the word “sisters” to call and ask for a world where there are more possibilities in life than being hurt or traumatized, where there is the possibility for a reinvigorated sense of community.

In a published conversation with Sina Queyras in 2018 called “There’s Always More

Freedom to Go After,” Canisia Lubrin recounts the place she was when she first read Audre

Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” The clarity of detail in this recollection, such as the kind of tea she drank on the occasion, is profound, akin to the minutiae used to note with authority one’s personal experience of a historical moment. Queyras then goes on to expand on the idea that poetry happens vividly but every day and in a personal context, as Queyras and Lubrin detail the community service which Lubrin both witnessed and participated in. Queyras says: “Poetry was not about prize culture. Poetry was certainly not a luxury; it was about surviving” (43). In a move echoed by Wunker’s version of the feminist killjoy, the lyric conceptualist refuses to separate the voice from the unavoidability, but also necessity, of the gendered body (Wunker 184). This maintains an authenticity in poetry, not by transcending but by inhabiting a nuanced understanding of the everyday – tea drunk, for example. The body is this moment writers itself onto knowledge. What the reader sees in both Howard and Dickinson then is a refusal to treat the body and the poetic voice as mutually exclusive elements present in the poem. Dickinson maintains a position where the body should be a place of authority and self-determination, where an individual can choose to some extent what components build the self. Howard sees the body as capable of taking its culture and its environments and being a site of constant interplay between the languages which come from its collection of experiences. “Smutty Alchemy” denies a separation of the body from the poetic voice, and aims to see the body as a structure that MELS 186 celebrates survival, with a spinal structure which has changed, but which has remained central to our species since the Cambrian age. “Smutty Alchemy” sees poetry as a celebration of the ambition inherent in the incredible unlikelihood of the human species’ development.

Section XII: Conclusion of the Exegesis

The impulse to appropriate the information and style from scientific disciplines and translate into one’s own creative writing practice may have begun with Margaret Cavendish in the seventeenth century but remains pertinent to the spirit of investigation that questions whether processes themselves need change. Poets, in this vision, will be producing works in recombinant genres. Marjorie Perloff, in her response to a White House poetry day hosted by Michelle Obama on May 11, 2011, points to the lack of originality in the confessional poems produced that day.

She says of the event that the “voice that comes through these recountings of ‘unique’ experience turns out to be surprisingly uniform, despite the differences in ethnicity and gender” (20). While

Perloff is critiquing the work of children, this points to her assumption that the danger of focusing on confession and human relation in the lyric can be incorrect assumptions of universality and relatability of experience or viewpoint. And yet, Dorothy Wang, in Thinking Its

Presence, enthusiastically supports hybrid poetic forms as a site of innovative potential:

“Contemporary experimental minority writing proves there is no either or choice between ‘bad’ identity poetry and ‘great’ purely literary poetry” (303). Wang further says that a poem’s “formal and rhetorical properties are, like those of other poems studied in this book, not separable from, not reduceable to, the social and historical conditions of the works’ making and the authors’ subject formations” (328). Cavendish critiqued the harm caused by the construct of experiments, and lyric conceptualism similarly seeks within experimental models of poetry to curtail the harm MELS 187 caused by hurtful appropriations and constructs from institutions that are, as Lisa Robertson says in the “Manifesto of Soft Architecture,” “all doors, no windows” (21). By capitalizing on the strangeness of scientific advances, “Smutty Alchemy” explores the ongoing need to express the desire behind epistemology through a controlled, sensual engagement with elements of the world. Mitsuru Tada speaks in his article, “Combining Poetry and Science to Create Scientific

“Thesis Poetry” as a Tool for the Communication of Science,” to the value of interdisciplinarity when communicating findings through poetry at the publicly accessible “Kankyo [environment] café” [which] aims to promote understanding and empathy through dialogue between experts and the public” (521).

The inference is there that science benefits from reworking its language from the highly technical which creates distance and detachment towards idiom and expression which is much more “user friendly,” much more accessible, much more pertinent. A number of instances illustrate this trend. Within the scientific community, for example, metaphors of evolution have gradually morphed from “the missing link” of nineteenth-century orthogenesis to “the family tree” of phylogeny, and now to “the braided stream” of gene flow hybridization theories favoured by contemporary biologists and geneticists (Finlayson). The PBS Eons documentary piece, “The Missing Link That Wasn’t,” investigates this shift in the language around evolution, and highlights how such a modulation or refining of terminology or concept can change scientific approach to a topic. The piece concludes that with this linguistic re-framing, scientists have also changed their investigations: metaphors, language choices, and imagery have all refined the actual study of humans’ evolutionary history.

Queyras’s statements and questions with regard to lyric conceptualism move the discussion surrounding poetic influence and literary inheritance away from the issues of the MELS 188 combative relationships and clannish behavior surrounding the lyric and conceptual divide in

Canadian poetry and towards the complexity of inclusive poetic relations.

The feminist interest in conceptual poetry’s breaking of arbitrary rules is central to this collection, as is Wunker’s proclamation “Refusal is a feminist act when you forge new lines of flight – away from what is into what might be,” whether social or literary (204).

“Smutty Alchemy” employs two voices, one historical and situated in a time when women were less than the exception to the rule in science, and the other, an imaginative persona, situated in the present day, both of which not only react against Queyras’s identified “dominant values” but also offer alternative avenues towards conversation and discourse, argument without rancorous, indelible finality (23). Like Lucretius’s “swerve,” the sometimes slight change of course which occurs when something falls through space (42). As Queyras says:

[m]any conceptual poets are models for Lyric Conceptualism [. . .] Many lyric poets are

models for Lyric Conceptualism [. . .]Lyric Conceptualism, then, is not new [. . .] Lyric

Conceptualism is a poetics of the sentence, but it does not turn its back on the

relationship between words, nor the power of prosody, nor the possibility of lyric

propulsion. On the other hand, nor does Lyric Conceptualism shy away from the knotted

and the complex. (Queyras 62-63)

Like Cavendish, I have been interested in exploring the segues that can occur when the personal voice does intrude, or at least interacts with, objective, scientific findings. This collection, which is of poetry, focuses on how the enthusiast writer, the lyrical conceptualist interested in science, can interpolate her understanding of science which interests her into her text. The poetry here, then, endeavours to create “smuts,” interruptions in the traditionally clinical language of science, and to use “mark-making” on previous forms, so that those forms remain visible, undisguised, MELS 189 and present, but with lines of connection drawn between them and to the lyrical conceptualism of this collection. This is not about erasure; it is about supplementation.

MELS 190

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