Recently, when I was scrolling on Facebook, I saw a good example of what Jean Baudrillard would call a simulacrum. It was a screenshot of a tweet that included an image of a person holding a white mug. On the mug there was an image of another mug, this one in the shape of Gromit’s head, with two handles, a reference to the character from the claymation series Wallace and Gromit. Gromit is a beagle. Between beagles and this image of a tweet, there were so many layers of separation that the symbol had lost all relation to the original reference. Simulacra like this are fundamental to Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality, which describes the state of our world where we drown in media but lack true information, and live in a place where the concept of "real" no longer exists.
Baudrillard's theories of simulacra and the hyperreal have inspired me to write. As I was reading his work, I did something that Baudrillard would likely disapprove of, and wrote surreal, dissociative poems based on my lived reality. Enter the Hyperreal is an accumulation of those poems, written over the past four years.
I have found that writing ekphrastic poetry inspired by visual art allows me to easily enter the flow state I covet when writing these poems. One piecefrom this collection was inspired by the work of Diana Lynn VanderMeulen. I have a number of her fantastical neon landscapes hung up around my writing desk. Other influences on the collection include the poets Barbara Guest and Mark Strand, Stardew Valley, Dr. Strangelove, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and intellectuals like Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler.
A number of these poems were written while I was enrolled in Stuart Ross' inspiring course, Poetry: Introduction, in the summer of 2022. Reading Stuart's own poetry in the years prior was the beginning of my realization that writing weird poems could be a thing. It fueled me to write weird poems of my own.
Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young femme writer, living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like learning theory and writing speculative poetry. Their debut chapbook, Claw Machine, was published by Anstruther Press in 2020. Their second chapbook, Water-Kin was published by Metatron Press in 2024. Their novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is forthcoming with Stelliform Press. You can find more of their work on their website: mahailasmith.ca.
photo credit: Curtis Perry [Smith reading at the Riverbed Reading Series, Ottawa]
