Alice Major talks to Sharon Berg about her latest book of poems.
1. The title poem in your book Welcome to the Anthropocene is alarming in that it points out things that human beings have been doing, for generations, both to thwart and to control Nature. Many people are aware of the human proclivity for experimentation and “our compulsive drive to flout/ all-natural order” has resulted in “spider bits implanted/ in lactating animals”. In the 1990s, I housed a visiting Doctoral student from the UK, who told me she was studying such things as pig genetics being put into tomatoes. It seems the majority of us trust those with the power to do such things to do ‘just enough’ with ‘the common good’ and ‘a better future’ in mind. You describe our scientific history, but you also persuade us that “intelligence [is] Not a separate limb” but “a widening/ of memory, from simply recognizing/ patterns here and now to narratives/ of lived experience. In turn that gives/ an opening to calculate the future”. If I’m not putting words in your mouth, can you comment on your hope that this book awakens awareness in people who trust scientists are not tinkering with and damaging the natural order of things? I take it, you do not approve of our ‘rattling the Great Chain of Being’.
I’m actually less concerned with the genetic experimentation than maybe I should be. Life has been swapping genes around for billions of years—as I say in the poem, it’s not a chain or ladder culminating in the human, it’s a “horizontal loop that rearranges/life repeatedly.” I think it is ultimately healthy for us to realize how much of our DNA is already shared with everything from sponges to giraffes (or from tomatoes to pigs), and we do learn about that through genetics. A few decades back, we thought that mapping the human genome would give us a tidy recipe for ourselves. Now we know that the genome is far more complex in its interactions, and a single cell is an amazingly complex bionic system. That’s the awareness I’d like to awaken in readers. Maybe really understanding all this might teach us to respect life—including our own physical selves—more.
2. You see humanity so kindly, with a great sense of forgiveness, saying: “even if we walked in shoes of velvet – we disturb [the grid’s] threads with every footstep / and feel returning tremors from the web.” Yet, you argue we need to revise “that metaphor of ‘cosmos as machine’, asking us to see “we are each a lens / in [time’s] great compound eye.” Your vision is humbling, but in some sense scarier than the end of the world due to our tinkering with the patterns of nature. It seems contradictory, are you asking us to trust that all will be okay in the end?
The answer depends on what you think ‘the end’ will be. From what perspective will things be all right? You can argue that our small planet doesn’t matter much to the cosmos, which will trundle on regardless of what we do to ourselves and the planet, and sometimes this perspective gives me a kind of relief. Things will go on. Somehow this helps when we are looking at the stupid devastation we wreak on ecosystems around us. However, the cosmic view implies what we do as individuals and a species doesn’t matter, and I can’t quite subscribe to that.
From a more human-scale point of view, it’s hard to know what ‘all right’ looks like. If we manage to turn our planet into the equivalent of a termite mound in orbit, it will perhaps be fine for our species: fairly stable, homogenous, technologically managed to keep earth’s systems in balance, even peaceful. Could we achieve that? Is it that even what we want?
I don’t know if, through our human lens, things will be all right. The big complication is our capacity for tribalism and all that comes with it. On the one hand, it is the source of cooperation, and is built on a deep cognitive capacity for empathy. On the other, it’s what lead us to intense group identification, the resulting enmity against other groups, and a deep selfishness—an inability to understand that there are other lenses in the compound eye.
I do think we matter in ways we do not yet understand. We tend to think of the universe as this tranquil unfolding system that eventually got round to creating the earth and led to evolution’s leisurely process. In fact, the universe hurtled into being with the Big Bang, creating within minutes the hydrogen atoms that are part of our bodies today. Our planet is one-quarter as old as the universe itself, and the first stirrings of life are almost as old. To me, that says that life, animals, and intelligence are important and perhaps an inevitable outcome of the cosmos. So we should try to understand what is going on.
3. It is amazing to me, and has amazed many others, that you were able to contain your thesis so succinctly in verse. Long poems and dictionary words seem from most accounts to be off-putting for the general population, but you have both in this book. Patrick O’Reilly claimed in Maisonneuve “traditional and experimental forms which appear throughout the book reinforce Major’s argument … She excels at depicting situations when humans are themselves little more than kind animals, unusually intelligent but never quite intelligent enough, and often confounded by their own place in the ecosphere.” Kit Dobson calls it “a virtuosic, challenging book of poetry” in Alberta Views. You, yourself, say you offer “a response to Alexander Pope’s 10-part ‘An Essay on Man’. (Notes: Welcome to the Anthropocene). The book was published in 2018. Has enough time passed for you to calculate whether you reached the audience you were seeking with this book? If not, what would you change about it?
Poetry takes a while to find its readers—I often feel that publishing a book is like squashing a message in a bottle and hurling it into the surf. You never know who will pick it up, or when. After all, I picked up Pope’s Essay on Man nearly three centuries after it was written. (From this point of view, poets are hopeful creatures—there’s always that faint chance we’ll be noticed after we’re dead.) So I’m prepared to wait a bit longer before deciding whether the book has arrived on other islands.
As for making changes to this particular work, well, the saying goes that poems are never finished, only abandoned. I’m sure that if I read the book a decade from now, I’ll think “Good Lord, what did I think I was doing?” But I don’t think I’d go back in and edit. It is what it is.
However, I do feel happy that it has reached at least some readers who don’t normally read poetry. I had the pleasure of doing an interview with some young environmental-studies students at the University of Alberta and was so glad to know that it resonated with them.
4. What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?
I’ve been reading books about science since I was ten years old, and the poems are, in a sense, a culmination of all that reading. Some of the favourites that I keep going back to are Frank Wilczek’s book on physics, “A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design” and Alex Bello’s “The Grapes of Math.” But there are so many others on my shelves that have informed this book of mine!
One significant reference point, of course, is Pope’s Essay on Man. When I re-read it (after many years since plowing through it in university), I came to realize how he was doing something like what I am trying to do—to understand the information pouring in from the brand-new microscopes and telescopes of his time, and what they meant for humanity’s relationship to the cosmos.
5. How did you arrive at the title? What was your intention for the title to do?
I actually scarfed the title from an exhibit of that name at the Centre for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh. I liked the idea of welcoming everything to this point in the history of the world—not just ourselves, but all the species we have altered by design, or who have altered themselves to live with us. As well as all the plants and insects, bacteria and fungi making this journey with us—and even the planet herself.
I did get a call from the University of Alberta Press to confirm this really was the title I wanted to use. People kept asking “What’s an Anthropocene?” But I figured people were about to hear that word a whole lot more and start asking what it means.
6. How did you arrive at the form/structure of the work? Did you have a form/structure in mind when you started? What other forms/structures or shapes did you consider? What was driving the choices of form/structure – efficiency or something else …style, urge for innovation, compulsions of the genre, compulsions of a literary movement it aspires to connect with?
Shaping individual poems into a book is a fascinating and often frustrating process. (I have an essay called “Who’s Talking: Thoughts on structuring a poetry manuscript” which explores this.)
The title poem had morphed into a 20-page contemplation of where we find ourselves today. When I finished it, I started trying to find other poems that would combine with it to make a book. I had the usual miscellany of other poems accumulating and tried various groups in various orders. But I couldn’t find anywhere to plunk the long poem in the middle of them.
Eventually, when I looked carefully at the voice of the long poem, it gave me an idea. The narrative voice in that poem starts out as satirical, the voice of someone standing back from the vast canvas of humanity and shaking her head. But the voice modulates a little over the length of the poem, becomes less certain. The author steps down from the platform to join the reader, acknowledging that we are all in this together, all fallible. This suggested a possible map for the overall book. So, I moved the long poem to the beginning, where I think of it as being the blocky support for a cantilever, something that anchors a beam extending outward from it. The title poem sets up the big environment, the world we’re living in. From there, the book moves to how we live in that world as communities and as me, as an individual.
7. Are any aspects of the book autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoids the dangers of straight autobiography?
The most personal poems come in a section called “Long Division.” Sometimes when you want to write about the deeply personal, you need to move beyond just blurting onto the page. Finding the right metaphor can help me shape the experience into poetry and make it more universal. And I find that turning to mathematics can help—mathematical metaphors have the particular gift of coming from the intersection of the abstract and the real world, which provides some distance and structure for deeply felt human emotion.
For instance, to write about being terribly worried over my sister’s mental health during a period of great stress, I turned to the paradox that comes up when we’re trying to divide zero by zero. (Mathematicians have taken this quite seriously over the centuries.) One line of argument gives the answer as “one,” the other line of argument leads to “zero.” Both are completely logical. It seemed to work as a way of thinking about suicide—the question of existing or not existing.
8. Are there poems/ideas that were originally intended but ultimately not included in the collection? How did you determine what to keep and what not to keep in the collection?
I had to leave out one series of poems that I really enjoyed writing. I had been caught up by the wonderful language of heraldry and wrote poems imagining coats of arms for people who pissed me off. But I decided reluctantly they had to be left out—their snarkiness seemed to undercut the overall voice of the manuscript.
9. What was the most satisfying aspect about writing this book (other than perhaps the satisfaction of finishing it)?
The joy of form! The title poem is written in heroic couplets, a nod to Alexander Pope’s favourite form. You wouldn’t think that 20 pages of rhyming iambic-pentameter lines would be easy, but actually, the form became like a big engine pulling me along!
10. How would you like this book to be taught – as a historical document, socio-political document or as a document about a certain kind of taste in writing or particular aesthetic, genre, literary style or something else? I think I’d like it to be taught as a starting point for discussion—both about big issues (like the role of science and art or how the local and the universal connect), and also about poetic ones (like the role of form and how we can interact with writers of the past.)
Alice Major has published eleven collections of poetry, two novels for young adults and an award-winning collection of essays about poetry and science. She came to Edmonton the long way round. She grew up in Dumbarton, Scotland – a small town on the banks of the Clyde, not far from Glasgow. Her family came to Canada when she was eight, and she grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a reporter on The Williams Lake Tribune in British Columbia. She has been an active supporter of the arts and writing community. She is the first poet laureate for the City of Edmonton (2005-7), past president of the League of Canadian Poets, past president of the Writers Guild of Alberta, past chair of the Edmonton Arts Council and Founder of the Edmonton Poetry Festival.