My 2024 chapbook, Spectral Arcs, acts as a kind of appendix to my 2023 poetry book Sunny Ways. Spectral Arcs salvages poems from a manuscript I drafted in 2011 and abandoned in 2012. The manuscript, titled “Field Guide,” was made up of poetic entries from a guide to spotting extinct animals in the wild. Each entry catalogued an example of a plant or animal species made extinct during the Anthropocene, though I didn’t have that particular sense of time when I wrote the poems. I started by combing the IUCN Red List for examples. Some like the dodo or the passenger pigeon were obvious, but there were many others I had never heard of and many, many more that were near extinction. I read up about the history of extinction as a concept, about the nineteenth century impulse to collect and catalogue examples of the world’s diversity. Mark V. Barrow Jr.’s then recent book Nature’s Ghosts was particularly important. It was the first time I did significant outside research for a project, even if the research only appeared laterally in the poems.
To write the manuscript, I was lucky to receive a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts (as part of a temporary partnership with the Alberta Foundation for the Arts). My application was a mess, but the jury must’ve seen something there. When I look at that application now, I see a young writer looking for ways to address wider conditions in the world without fully understanding them. The application expresses a desire to use ecology and extinction as a lens to interrogate capitalist and colonial destructiveness, though my younger self is never all that clear about how to do that.
The draw for me was in the metaphorical idea of the ghost or the trace, the present absence, the thing that we know is there but can’t see. The original constraint, if I can even call it that, was to write poems “about” extinct animals without actually writing about them, skirting physical details and direct histories, pacing out the edge of a presence that had been cut out of the picture. What did it mean for something to disappear, to become imperceptible. I had been reading too much Specters of Marx. Or not enough.
When I picked up the manuscript again in 2012, I poured a lot of time into editing the poems, but I found them too thin, too abstract. I couldn’t make them sing with the urgency I felt in other writers’ poems that I encountered in my first year in Vancouver. I ended up shoving them in a drawer. Literally! The image on the cover of Spectral Arcs is the first page of the manuscript copy I was working with in that failed editorial pass. I held onto that paper copy of the manuscript for almost a decade, before pulling it out when I started work on Sunny Ways. An image of a lost book.
I returned to an ecologically invested poetics when I was commissioned to write a piece for Poetry is Dead magazine by Daniel Zomparelli to coincide with an exhibit of Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale photography at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Writing that piece made me think about the idea of the absent presence in a different way, through the problem of what is left out of a supposedly representative picture. Suddenly the poorly articulated questions of “Field Guide” gained some resonance. It took a while to circle back to “Field Guide” after that, but when I did, the work needed to be transformed, moving formally from individual prose poem entries to something lineated and continuous, from floaty abstraction to essayistic punch. The version of “Field Guide” in Sunny Ways primarily wades through the logics of climate change denialism, though it carries the earlier manuscript’s questions about extinction. It also carries much of the discarded manuscript’s language. Because I subsequently cannibalized “Field Guide” for Sunny Ways, you can hear echoes across the two texts many of the lines that originally appeared in these poems. If you read Spectral Arcs and Sunny Ways alongside one another, it could be fun to hear the threads of continuity.
The poems in Spectral Arcs are pulled from that long-shelved manuscript. I chose the ones I thought still had some juice and gave them a light edit. At worst, I think Spectral Arcs gives an interesting view into my interrupted compositional process. But looking back at its poems without the pressure of writing the perfect book, there’s something in the way the poems grasp at the inexpressible, grasping at disappearance’s presence. Something is there, even if it’s a buzz off in the distance. I hope you find it.
ryan fitzpatrick is the author of four books of poetry, including the recent Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023) and Coast Mountain Foot (Talonbooks, 2021). Their first creative nonfiction book, Ace Theory, will be published by Book*Hug Press in 2025. They are the 2024-25 writer-in-residence in the University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies.