This piece originally appeared in Geoffrey Nilson’s above/ground press chapbook Light Makes a Ruin (September 2022).
Poetry doesn’t exist to represent the poet; the poet exists to present poetry to the public. Poetry isn’t an expression of the poet but an expression of natural and architectural space. The poet is “digested” by architectural space, to evoke John Hejduk, and a building transforms the poetic body within it. How and what the poet composes is determined to a large degree by the space(s) they choose, are placed in, or have the privilege to occupy.
Every space is a voice amplifying the poem as I receive it. Starting March 2020 in Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns meant millions either laid-off or forced to work-from-home. For a time, orders to “shelter in place” meant even the public parks in my neighbourhood were empty. This limitation of space emphasized the relationship my poetic practice has with architecture, between my spaces and my ability to compose different kinds of texts. My job writing advertising and website copy entitled me to ergonomic office furniture and a 360-degree-view of North Burnaby, panoramic windows all-around the sixth floor of an entirely forgettable office tower. Postmodern and asleep, the tower glows with one redeemable quality: a foyer atrium in golden wood and Carrara marble. The sound of feet moving from the elevator would echo softly in the glossy sheen, the lift of light pulling as you enter late-morning, early-coffee. I miss that building, that atrium.
The pandemic is not over and experiences of this global trauma
have not been shared equally. Inequalities of class, race, and wealth are more
obvious than ever as barriers to total health. I am still alive and so are my
family. I have been incredibly lucky. Still, confined to a rental apartment, a
healthy human quickly becomes sick. Anxiety, panic, insomnia, depression.
Loneliness arrives with a 26% increase in risk of premature death. While my job
afforded me the option of work-from-home, I was confined to a tiny apartment,
without any of the technology or ergonomic support I required to do my job to
the standard my contract required. I have no home office, no elevated dual
monitor apparatus, and my laptop is arranged at one end of the kitchen table, books
and papers spewing out across any nearby horizontal surfaces. Since copywriting
depends on productivity, my body paid the price: in back pain, arthritis in my wrists
and fingers, and oftentimes severe eye strain from the heavy increase in screen
time for all day-to-day business activities. The corporation takes government
aid and shed expenses in real estate while the pandemic worker is expected to
carry the investment cost like a good team player. Save your receipts for a tax
credit. Work-from-home represents a promise of social and bodily protection and
the failure of that promise, because it aims to protect human beings from a
deadly COVID-19 virus but in turn forces workers to labour in situations which
do real, lasting harm to them.
Spaces are life; spaces make up a part of personal identity; when spaces are removed from our lives, part of our existence is also removed. The pressures of productivity invade the home through work-from-home transitions, but also through the writer themselves. The writer must speak (somehow and always) to the contemporary moment. Light Makes a Ruin writes the bound, painful, and isolated space of pandemic lockdown as an extended series of visual poems. A creative practice of necessity where poetic limitation is an expression of architectural limitation. The five-inch-square of the page becomes the claustrophobic, seven-hundred square-foot, one-bedroom apartment I share with my teenage daughter. Without additional space(s), my small apartment becomes the site of work, family, education, artistic practice, and all aspects of my daily life. Open-source typography and free online design software create the illusion of control in an uncontrollable situation. The digital text recognizes that supply chains have been crippled by the pandemic’s effect on international trade, and analog materials (like paper) are increasingly expensive and difficult to acquire. The text depicts a spatial reality of lockdown writing practice where I am unable to hear the signal of poetic voice, so I enact limitations on form and technology as procedures to enable composition.
Jeff Derksen writes in Annihilated Time: “Economic determinants are not abstract…we see them, walk through them, live through them daily” (251). Light Makes a Ruin walks through the daily economic determinants of work-from-home for a poet and father of limited means, as he struggles through pandemic space to access poetry itself. If an architectural photograph is like a dream of space, as Hélène Binet suggests, then my visual text is a dream of the poem from behind a single closed door.
Works Cited
Binet, Hélène. “Composing Space.” Lecture to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 19, 2012. Harvard GSD. https://youtu.be/YkpeFr87wOo
----. “From John Hejduk to Nicholas Hawksmoor.” The Journal of Architecture, 21:6, 939-963, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2016.1217555
Derksen, Jeff. Annihilated Time. Talonbooks, 2009.
Notes
Visual poems typeset in EB Garamond. Paratext typeset in PT Sans and PT Mono. Digital design enabled by pixlr.com.
Geoffrey Nilson was born in Duncan, BC on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Cowichan Tribes. A poet, editor, and literary critic, he is also the founder and publisher of micropress pagefiftyone. Nilson is the author of four chap-books. In 2020, his poem “The Sound of Cellulose” appeared in the anthology Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press), and his critical writing has appeared recently in Canadian Literature and Arc Poetry Magazine. He holds a BA in Creative Writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University and an MA in English from Simon Fraser University, where he is at work on his PhD studying the contemporary long-poem in Canada. In a past life, he was musician, songwriter, and recording engineer for various solo and collaborative projects. The BC-YK Representative for the League of Canadian Poets, Geoffrey lives with his daughter in New Westminster on the unceded territory of the Qayqayt nation. Website: www.vcovcfvca.com