Stephen Collis speaks with Shazia
Hafiz Ramji about his latest book of poems A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks), which explores the climate crisis, the
shifting meanings of “revolution,” and how poetry can bend time.
SC: I began the sequence of prose poems the book begins with a few years ago. I don’t recall anything special or specific about the context, but I had been pondering the bent temporality climate change discourse induces for a while. This is especially the case when the discussion turns to the Anthropocene—the idea that we have entered a new geological era in which human-made conditions shape the planet’s entire physical makeup. Incidentally, I don’t love the name “Anthropocene,” since it erases important differences (like, who really did this—spoiler alert, it was the privileged classes of privileged countries); I usually refer to the present as the era of Geophysical Capitalism.
So, climate science rightly wants to tell us to hurry up—the situation is urgent—act now (and it might already be too late—look how BC is cooking). But when the discussion is about the so-called Anthropocene, we are invited to imagine the present from the distant future, where we can see that this was indeed the start of a new era, and that “our” impact on the planet indeed left a noticeable geological imprint. The “vantage point” of climate science is often a projection into a deep future from which we have erased ourselves, and some imaginary time-travelling geologist (or Mark Fisher!) looks at a dark seam in an eroded cliff face and says, “see that? That’s us fucking up!” So this tension—between urgency and the distant and hard to imagine future—is fascinating and crazy-making, and I wanted to live and write from the heart of that madness.
I think it also calls for poetry’s particular temporal imaginary. My favourite formulation of this comes from a letter from Charles Olson to Robert Duncan (this is from the 1950s), in which he writes: “time is a concrete continuum which the poet alone—I insist—alone practices the bending of.” I like this idea that poetry might be a tool particular to warping time—but, if the times themselves are getting bent out of shape (accelerated, compressed by the climatic conditions being imposed on the planet), what’s poetry to do? Bend it back into its former shape? Twist it around like a mobius strip? I’m not sure—but in this book, I wanted to wade deep into our temporal problem and see what could be found there.
SHR: How do you think poetry bends time now, compared to previous eras?
SC: Good question. I suppose what makes sense to me, and maybe what Olson was getting at too, is the compression of poetry—the capacity poetry enables to leap, spatially and temporally, across great gulfs in just a few lines, to bring disparate elements close together via the magic of a line break or a subtle lateral shift mid-line. Or (and it feels more like the poetry of physics/the physics of poetry to me), to bend space-time back on itself or stretch the linguistic material so a dreamt future comes suddenly close and into clearer view. Concretely what is this? I think poetry is so often enlivening the past, bending it back into view—an example I love might be Hoa Nguyen’s recent book A Thousand Times you Love Your Treasure, where she warps her recently deceased mother’s life as a circus performer into view. Or Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy, where time feels entirely elastic, an effect she achieves, I think, largely via the address (“Dear Machine,” “Dear Southern Ocean”), which draws distance into the immediacy of discourse. (Another poetic “bending” here is of course the bending of agency—who or what is addressable?)
These are just two examples from my nearest shelf. What, in part, seems to define poetry is its quick-footedness. We don’t have to narrate the connections. We just warp something new into view. Homer, Shakespeare, HD—it’s been going on for a long time. I’m not sure what’s different now about this practice—other than that the world itself has got more bendy. Maybe that’s one reason I often find myself wanting to slow the pace down a bit now. Paradoxically, that’s another thing poetry is good for—slowing things down. So maybe time-bending relates to the poet’s toggling through phases of acceleration and deceleration.
SHR: I really admire your capacity for reinvention, and yet every time I read something by you, it seems very “Steve” to me (which is a compliment)! I’m thinking particularly about your thoughts on revolution and how what constitutes revolution for you changes with each book. In the second section, “Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written,” you propose that revolution “doesn’t have to be all / storm of bricks and tear gas clouds,” and that it can be “stillness” - “just the stillness / of potentiality / of bodies joining the mass / which starts to turn once / those stillnesses mesh […]” I love this idea of stillness as potentiality – not as an ascetic turning-away-from-the-world, but a receptivity to it. What does “revolution” mean for you now?
SC: These are great questions! I guess the image in this poem is relating the word “revolution” to its original meaning—to revolve in place, like a planet. So, at once spinning and still. But I think the poem is—playfully—trying to open up the concept of “revolution” for further questioning. It begins in a space of hesitation and self-talk: “I told myself to be revolution.” Like, the speaker’s not too sure they can live up to this (and neither am I!). But what if revolution was—“normal”? Part of daily life? A means of constantly turning over the social soil? Not dramatic and seemingly impossible—but almost routine. Something like that is being pondered here. The moment of revolution is also being zoned in on in the poem—time slowed down, the event about to happen, on the cusp where change—positive social change—is still the potential outcome. So much of what we call “activism” is lived in that moment—when you don’t yet know what will happen, but you are filled with the possibility of change.
There’s a lot of doubt here too. This poem pairs with another that also has the speaker “tell” themselves something about he word “catastrophe.” If “revolution” indicates a turning around, a “catastrophe,” etymologically, indicates a sudden overturning. When we use the word “revolution” in a political context, we usually take it to mean what “catastrophe” actually means: sudden overthrowing. There’s a lesson here—and it’s a sobering one. It seems more and more likely (to me at least) that revolutionary change will only come to our social order in the form of, or on the heels of, a catastrophe (I write this as the Gulf of Mexico is literally a swirling vortex of fire).
Another aspect of the “stillness” of revolution. I feel like, in my own life, I’ve shifted what I do in the world from what gets called “activism” (you aren’t very still when you are active) to what doesn’t always look very active, but might actually be more … sustainable. I’m not sure what to call this, but it relates to the work I do with refugee communities, primarily in the UK. We are working to build capacity in a terrible context. It’s slow work, about building relationships and trust over time. It doesn’t look very revolutionary, but it is life changing, and it’s about surviving catastrophe. This comes up in A History of the Theories of Rain via the persistent references to borders, movement, walking, etc.—it’s a key part of the climate catastrophe too—people, plants and animals, thrown out of their usual orbits and made exiles on their own planet. The climate’s “tipping point” pushes against the national “border” as two intersecting lines we have created.
SHR: I’m so grateful for the work you do with refugee communities and appreciated The Refugee Tales anthology immensely.
I think that acknowledging slowness is a crucial part of revolution now because this kind of temporal awareness emphasizes perspectives on the climate crisis and non-human kin. When do you think your activism began to embrace “stillness” and slowness?
SC: My sister, who died in 2002 and who had a huge influence on me, had this whole theory of the structure of sevens in our lives (my daughter, getting seriously into Tarot and astrology etc., also tells me seven is an important number for me specifically). 2014/15 fell on a seven year oscillation in my life; that’s when I got sued for organizing protests against the Transmountain Pipeline. For a variety of reasons, it was a bit of a soul-crushing time. But right then I got the invitation to write something for the Refugee Tales project, and to come to the UK in 2015 to perform it and walk with the group. No more life-changing thing has ever happened to me. And the whole thing was built on the idea that is wasn’t a protest march, but a movement (physically and conceptually) to support and sustain a community of some of the most vulnerable people in the world (the stateless). It was a project that demanded time, consistency, community building, and the sort of “stillness” that comes from a measured, seemingly perpetual walk—around, outside of, and in the gaps and lesions of the state. A captured walking—with people whose lives were often essentially frozen in time and place, whose movements were heavily proscribed.
I wonder if this makes any sense? One thing the pandemic did was enable me to be an even more closely involved organizer with the UK group, since almost everything we were doing was on Zoom. It’s all about capacity building in the midst of an open-ended struggle to legitimize people’s presence where they happen to be—ridiculous that this is even a question. People should always have the right to stay where they are or leave where they are. Climate change is one thing pushing people to assert this right.
None of this is to say anything against protest as such. But protest always needs a grounding in community and movement building, or else it can devolve into frantic thrashing around (and I’ve been a thrasher for sure). Sometimes that’s a long road to walk. And that ain’t easy in a world in crisis, a world where everything feels urgent, and you want to respond quickly.
SHR: Throughout the collection, you use propositions and the scientific language of logic. For example, in the opening pages, you write: “The possible is simply what either is or will be true. If it will be that p will never the case then p / right now / will never be the case.” And in the last section, “A History of the Theories of Rain,” you use the letter/symbol/glyph “x” to suture and mark fissures in line and sentence: “Spray of shrapnel across cosmos x fraction of stars spiralling planets x planets traipsing through Goldilocks Zones x chemical pathways out from mineral to bio …” I imagine it to be a kind of positionality: an intersection point, perhaps inspired by the graph/line chart you’ve included of the “Hutton’s theory of rain.” Can you speak about the “x” and the influence of Hutton’s theory of rain?
SC: I love this reading—it isn’t exactly what I had in mind—but I love it! I think this is how the back-slash works throughout the book—it’s the only consistent punctuation I use—an inflection point between different possibilities. In the passage you are referring to, the symbols are intended to be multiplication signs: this times this times this. It’s my rendering of the Fermi Paradox, the equation physicist Enrico Fermi came up with to explain why we weren’t being inundated by alien visitors—why the universe seemed quiet, and like we were the only ones out there. It’s an equation to explain why, if there are so many billions of stars and planets, and so many billions that could support life, we don’t hear from anyone else. Maybe what we think of as “advanced” civilizations are a rarity and a short-lived crap shoot. Maybe, like us, they tend to fry themselves before they get far out into space.
Happy, right? But I think the Fermi Paradox can also be used to remind us that, well, there’s no place like home, and we can’t just crash this planet and go buy a new one somewhere else, like the Elon Musks of the world seem to be thinking. Capital and privilege again.
As far as Hutton goes, well, this is all about the source text, which includes this graph. I’m using a 1960s meteorological text, from which I borrowed my title. And it’s all about time again too—planetary time and human time tripping over each other. The majority of the language in the title poem is taken from this source text, which I read vertically, across its lines, assembling what I could, adding little things here and there. I also saw it as a kind of divinatory practice—an attempt to read, against the grain as it were, news of the coming climate catastrophe back into a text written before there was wide knowledge of that problem. And, on top of that, it’s a sort of love poem: while it’s an older poem I first worked up some time ago, I re-worked it in the summer of my 25th wedding anniversary, so that’s there too—climate emergency + love in a dangerous time.
SHR: There were times when my throat knotted up (from the feels of scrying and love!) while reading A History of the Theories of Rain. That must’ve been the rain coming …
Thank you for writing such a wholesome, thought-provoking, hope-giving and hope-defying book, Steve. I’ve been changed by it – there’s nothing quite like your poetry!
Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks, 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions, 2006), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press, 2012). His memoir, Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, was published by Talonbooks in 2018. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
Collis was the 2019 recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which is given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.
Stephen Collis’s SFU website: sfu.ca/people/scollis/