by Allie McAllister (Penn State University, Class of 2020, Environmental Studies major), with Professor Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, PPC Ambassador
When Penn State English professor and poet Julia Kasdorf challenged her undergraduate students to compose a poem based on a work of plastic art from the Plastic Entanglements exhibition at the university’s Palmer Museum of Art, she did it with a specific intention, both pedagogical and provocative. According to Kasdorf, “the dialogue between the visual and verbal arts is as old as Ancient Greece,” and she wanted her students “to see how looking hard at a work of art can enable them to make discoveries and write some of their own true poems.”
Kasdorf herself is a long-time environmentalist, particularly passionate about fracking, and of course the production of plastic is part of that story as well. The Plastic Entanglements was a framework for thinking about a different aspect of today’s petro-culture, and encountering the many dimensions of the crisis of plastic pollution as both an ecological crisis and as an ethical challenge.
These four poems here are haunting literary transformations of art observation into personal meditation, emerging from a deep inner reflection of what it means to be human in the time of “the Plasticene” period of our history (or more broadly, “the Anthropocene”). Each student presents a unique response to a chosen work, and thinks through the relationship between image and word. The poem complements the art work, and vice versa, while also drawing the reader/spectator through their own emotional and imaginative thought process. Writing and reading a poem about a work of art can push one past the passive “spectator” role, and beyond the apparent “face value” of the art work. The poet and reader, as spectators alike, experience how words conjured in the observing of the work can create imagery of their own, giving a shape to feelings, hopes, and fears about a damaged world.
Take a look at these moving poems by Penn State undergraduates Will Campbell, Talley Kaser, Brandon Neal, and Megan Deam, whose reflections call into question the value of life and ecological balance, compared with imbalanced economics of materialism, and rampant consumerism. Kasdorf’s writing assignment is grounded in the belief that “the process of looking and thinking that produced these poems required a deep level of engagement with the work of art,” and she, like us, “hopes that readers of these poems will share that experience.”
To a Dead Albatross, Will Carpenter
(After Body Bag for Birds (Polyethylene Terephthalate / PET), 2013, by Marina Zurkow)
Funny isn’t it?
Isn’t it? Do you know
why we bother
to bag you up?
You will sustain us
like leftovers, plastic wrapped
in the refrigerator, recycled.
In just tens of millions
of years, you will be
oil, be useful.
All we ask
is that you decay
until the bag is no longer full
and wait for temperature
and pressure to work
their miracles.
The plastic inside you
remains;
The plastic enveloping you
remains — holds you close
as you decompose –and will do so
for over a thousand years,
ensuring you are not eaten,
displaced — wasted.
You may complain,
as you pool into black gold,
that your prospects
seem lackluster.
It’s true, we proffer only one solution
(CnH2n+2)
but let us assure you,
your possibilities are limitless:
you could fuel an oil tanker,
taxidermy a polar bear,
bind together a family of canned
sodas, soar in a hot air
Balloon, balloon into a five gallon water cooler spout into a mold for eyeglasses,
so don’t label us nearsighted.
Who knows?
Maybe you’ll even grow into
Another body bag for birds.
Albatross Ekphrasis, after Chris Jordan
By Talley Kaser
how unlike me
to look at a bird
and think of myself
and not the bird.
but still I wonder
which bright bits
stab jagged
through my even
Most silversoft lining. which
is the biggest bolus
drawing the eye
when
I am
opened
*
my little brother
is a doctor. my little
brother cut open a person.
cadaver corpse — for a
full year he teased it
into pieces. he says
they start you with
the back. the face
comes last. the face
is difficult. one morning
he gently lifted
a bright now tie from
the neck of his
corpse. he walked the scrap
of plastic to the trash
then turned to his lab mates.
we’re not doing that
again. he says
they covered her
hands to hide the color
of her nails, which was too like
someone’s mother’s.
*
the photographer’s hands
(bare) teased from the
dark bile of the bird that stuff
which cut and
lodged and
crowded but never
fed and therefore
killed. the photographer scrubbed
each bright piece clean
and lay it back against
the opened body
riddle: my father
is like unto or not
the photographer
*
much of my mother
has been removed
but lucky she
remitted. I made
the mistake of googling
tumor. I am no doctor but
they don’t appear to come
in a wide variety
of colors. my mother
is farm-raised and
well bred. also uneasy.
and diseased. my mother
fed on food fresh
from the garden
which they sprayed
same as the cotton.
*
the birds swallowed
the bright bits on the sand, as they
have always done.
as they have always done,
they offered from the depths
of their bodies those same bits
and fed their children, tell me
what I’ve swallowed. tell me
how it’s killing me. given the chance
I would prefer to slough in the dirt
without particular color — no pink
clinging to my nails, no strange red
bulge collecting in my thigh, no evidence
of which stray memory choked
my growth or stunted flight,
which sadness I was fed
and ate. I would prefer
earth swarm what’s left:
an opened harmlessness,
soft, gnawable flesh
and clean, bright bits of bone.
Walden, by Brandon Neal
In the woods
Lies a pond deep and dark
It overtakes you
Splashing through your eyes
Drizzling through the filtered
Cracks in your skin
It calls to you.
Each step you take
Flows into the next
You Sweep along
All the mud choked reeds
And plastic
And cigarette butts
You crash.
Into this world
Where children sleep in their beds
With your icy soft words
You fill their lungs
With the entangled mess
Of everything that you
Became.
They choke.
Origin of Species, by Megan Deam
(After Institute for Marine Invertebrates, Mark Dion)
I see the irony:
Crustaceans crowned at the bottom of the ocean,
tucked under plastic eyes, rubber toys
Intermixed
with deathless colors
History — do we want to go down like this?
Will we be remembered as murderers?
Poachers of natural landscapes?
Our cabinets of curiosities are landfills
what we’ve collected in our
anthropomorphic thirst.
And we will continue to temporarily quench
our needs
while permanently infiltrating
the sands
Sea
Seagulls
Gills
Breathing in our scrap
We will discard our excess,
extra expensive
exotic and erotic
aphrodisiacs turned abstract
now
man-saved, manmade, once again
coral contamination
fluorescent fossils
Preserved in their own synthetic
man makes us think there are no consequences.
We present our trash on shelves and make it a trophy.
Have we won?
We’ve only taken
the prize
so durable,
indestructible.
Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials features sixty works of art from thirty international artists who are exploring both the nature of plastic as a material, the role of plastic in our world and its implications, and finally how art can be used as a form of science communication. Proposed by PPC ambassador and Penn State professor Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, and co-curated along with the Palmer Museum of Art’s curator, Joyce Robinson, and New School assistant professor Heather Davis, the exhibition has finished its four-month run at Penn State, as well as a second run at the University of Oregon. It is currently showing at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. through July 2019. It travels finally to the University of Wisconsin, opening in fall 2019. For questions about the exhibition, contact Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, jaw55@psu.edu.
