In the Museum is also a pandemic chapbook. During the first fortnight of the lockdown I found myself driving to work in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children at 6:30 am through the I am Legend emptiness of a locked down western city. I often drove up the centreline of Yonge Street to spend my day amongst colleagues & friends doing pretty much the same work I always do (we went 6-8 weeks before seeing our first “+” child and even then they weren’t particularly sick). But I still went home in the evenings feeling drained and emotionally exhausted from leadership duties and managing the stress and fear of others so I found myself increasingly hiding out and writing during my ‘free time’. In those first few weeks I received word from Mansfield Press that they intended to publish my first collection, Recovery Community, and in those moments despite the headlines, deaths and overwhelming surge of anxiety that always occurs when one species attacks another, I was absolutely delighted and could not believe I had ‘done it’.
But I still continued to write. I was reading a lot of JG Ballard (plus Burroughs and Christopher Hitchens) so my worldview was turning toward the dystopian [Correction: my worldview has always been dystopian but now, in the way of what you read influences what you write, my poetry was evolving/metastasizing/deteriorating from ‘addiction, anxiety, loss and redemption’ to questions of what happens next and answers of nothing good]. I can remember the specific poem I was writing when I received the publication news, The Next Wave. I also remember my early interpretation of news and media coverage on the pandemic being very much about Trump, Trudeau, Ford and Johnson. I remember feeling a war was being waged on medicine, rationality and science by at least two of those four and I began to imagine a world where things continued to deteriorate disintegrate and devolve into factions, squabbles and mob mentalities. Knowing that ‘we are not the everything’ I do not imagine the death of the age of man to be the end of life on this planet, if anything it may be the planet’s only way out, and forward. So how do we exist or survive in this future? How would I?
A suite of poems began to emerge from this project, each dealing with museums or exhibits. Each had a formal structure & shape. Many lines were numbered or itemized and I realized that Ballard had begun to seep in; I was writing the obituary for that which brought us comfort: culture, music, art, film, photography, etc,. And where are these ingredients to be found? In the Museum of course, that building we ignore for most of our lives but which over time has served as sanctuary for many a lost and hungry soul. I noticed that some poems needed to feel a bit ‘looser with the rules’, and those were the ones that contained people, real people, survivors; we are the oxygen that brings a museum to life. But what if the museum could no longer differentiate between visitor and virus? If we stopped turning up one day, what would happen to the museum? Would it slowly give way to the weeds and wolves? Or go mad in the process, like the protagonist in so many ‘last man on earth’ scenarios?
The rest of the museum poems came together quite quickly and I have extracted them en masse from the full manuscript which is titled, This Insistent List. The last Ballardian touch is not necessarily one of his making but instead an adoption of familiar but uncomfortable architecture. As a physician and scientist, I have wanted to marry the creative and calculated for some years now, hence the notion of references and footnotes providing detail rather than dedication (more pervasive in the full MS than this chapbook).
People ask me how this work differs from Recovery Community which, despite its difficult subject matter, seems to have resonated emotionally with a lot of people. My answer is, I have taken all emotion feeling and empathy out of these new poems and the current phase of my work. Sounds unappealing to be sure, and I must say I’m a little worried as to how the work will be received; am I throwing out my best asset in order to move forward? I don’t know, but it’s what I felt compelled to do in my writing through 2020, hence the dedication at the beginning of the chapbook. What I can say is, I have had to do make that withdrawal frequently in my professional work just to be able to survive and get through some of the most difficult times and conditions I have ever faced (and not just in the last 2 years) so, this chapbook and the MS it inhabits are a reflection of an empathic anxious overwhelmed physician searching for a brighter future and exploring the uncomfortable hypothesis that in order to secure such a future there may still be a great deal more to lose…
2015: First published poems (The Fiddlehead)
2016: First Chapbook (The Book of Retaliations, Anstruther Press)
2017: Second chapbook (Safe Spaces, Frog Hollow Press)
2018: Short-list & Honorable Mention, The Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize
2019: Short-list: RawArtReview Charles Bukowski Prize; Runner-up Vallum Prize in Poetry
2021: First full Poetry Collection: Recovery Community (Mansfield Press)
2021: Third Chapbook (In the Museum, above ground press)
2021: Reader with longconmag
2022: … https://www.conormcdonnell.ca/
