ÉMILIE: At the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed like time was happening differently, and it did not only seem to be affecting humans. Time and temporality took on aspects of speed and slowness and there was a kind of “adaptation” period occurring in the natural world. It felt, at times, that all life forms were responding to the event of the pandemic: an overall sense of quiet. Even squirrels in urban settings seemed more at ease—more free to run in multiple, nonlinear directions.
SEAN: Perhaps our “human” “cities” could become more nonhuman—a sort of nonhuman socius. This sensation was like, but not exactly like, a post-apocalyptic movie where large segments of the population have died.
ÉMILIE: There has been a lot written about
how people’s “sense of time” was altered, affected. Many people actually
worried about this and experienced this as something particularly
destabilizing, scary even, but also disruptive of one’s sense of “grounding”
and even perhaps “identity.”
A
bit like something played with each of our forms of “proprioception.”
I
felt the need to think about this, but differently than solely through hyper-cognitive mechanisms. To try to
explain everything, to make sense, to give
sense, to everything. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like trying to make sense of all this doesn’t always
feel like the right call.
Poetic
writing appears more suitable. More connected with what I, personally, was
experiencing.
SEAN:
For me, writing the poetry of this chapbook was the expression of a desire to
be with words and also outside of them—to dive into oblivion
and a sort of negation of self by experimenting with the words and sounds and
imagery that I heard all around me at the beginning of the pandemic alongside a
new sense of silence, quiet.
The writing process was largely unfocused
and featured a series of e-mail exchanges between two voices and the editing of
the poems reflected the sonic preferences of each voice.
ÉMILIE: And now that I think about it, that I
try to think about it, I can’t even
quite recall how it all played out. How we decided on this project.
For
me, there definitely were events. For
one, I recall—like so many other people—“discovering” my neighborhood. It was
also, in truth, a “new” neighborhood, as I moved to this new locale about 6
months before the pandemic. Still, I’ve walked these streets so many times by
now. About 2 weeks into the pandemic, I went up this little alleyway and
discovered a series of very large and tall trees whose trunks were
indissociable from the fences that run along the alley. It mesmerized me, these
“city trees,” and I felt this was a true expression of the Anthropocene, where the metal, the “human activity,” had become
intricate and inalterable to the trees’ “being,” their form, this form of life.
SEAN:
Both of us were trying to come to terms with the new “pandemic reality” beginning
in 2020 and, for this reason, the poetry is phenomenological in some ways—it
dealt with individual temporalities—almost a form of sonic autoethnography. As Émilie
says, we were both walking around our respective cities (Toronto and Montréal)
and experiencing the absence of the streets and a natural world held often at a
divide as it took up greater residence in urban settings.
Microbial Soup Kiss was like any
poetic or artistic collaboration in that it reflected a sort of rhizomatic
tension and unity that was a reflection of the complexity of the world as such—a
reflection of the panoply of voices and schisms of natures/cultures, especially
as that nonhuman “interloper” known as “COVID-19” disrupted the perceived
(although strictly idealized) “normality” of human life.
ÉMILIE: And, to me, this experiment—or experiments (perhaps ongoing)—is in itself a lifeform, a new life form. Re-reading it creates ripples—in me, my mind. It provokes, invites, entices; new voices, images, “tunes,” feelings (e.g. shivers, warmth, etc.) in me. It is a gift from the past where the past comes alive and engages a conversation with the present, and serves to recall the past, but also to give it new meanings. Earlier, I spoke of “sense-making” and how uncomfortable I was, and still am in many ways, with this compulsion, throughout the pandemic and the multiple other events that happened in the past two years—culturally, politically, environmentally, socially. Yet poetry is, to me, an undeniable force to make sense, to make sense matter differently, and that all matter, where we think both in discursive but also material terms (or “configurations”) about what happens, and what we allow to happen, or “participate” in shaping.
SEAN: I agree with Émilie on this point, but I would slightly alter my own poetic commitments to be an attempt to make nonsense matter differently and I see poetry as a force that can sometimes unearth the profound disequilibrium and absurdity that exists behind concepts like “normalcy” and “reality.”
