 |
| Adam Dickinson |
Arts funding in Canada has taken a turn for the absurd or perhaps just the predictable. Brock University English teacher Adam Dickinson has just received a $60,000 "Research/Creation in the Fine Arts" grant in order "to write poetry about the impact of environmental chemicals and other invaders on his body". As he's routinely tested for the presence of harmful toxins, bacteria & viruses in his own body, such as mercury, lead, West Nile virus, etc., he'll record his own personal observations in verse. His literary investigations will eventually result in a book entitled Anatomic: Semiotic bodies, chemical environments for which an additional "standard research grant" of $13, 568 has been awarded.
Parroting Christian Bök, Dickinson's dubbed his work "a poetry of science". While not as outrageous as the goal to program bacteria to write poetry ( I wonder whether Bök's grant for 'Xenotext' fell under the same "Social Sciences and Humanities" funding rubric ), Anatomic is certainly another example of the fashionable arts and science mergers to be found these days in most Humanities departments. On its own merits the "poetry as science" idea is food for the imagination but as a source of funding it's certainly a intrusion of the arts into areas for which they're laughably unsuited. The language arts instructor as microbiologist seems to be a growing trend out there! Subsidized projects of this wildly implausible kind may be what's fuelling the recent anti-Arts funding sentiment everywhere: just this sense of a joke gone too far.
Now that poetry's to be recorded in DNA for posterity or used to gauge the impact of synthetic chemicals, arts funding can now be justified as "interdisciplinary": and not one but two grants are to be awarded in this case, one each for the work's "science" and "poetry writing" components. Government agencies can say they now distribute monies more equally among competing research proposals & avoid the accusation that they favour only scientific initiatives: a sad concession, of course, to the gross 'capitalization' of education. Again, as interesting (even avant-garde) creation in its own right the "science of poetry" genre will certainly have a long shelf life. Yes, long live creativity attuned to globalized forces!
But in a climate of applications & "literacy by bureaucracy", Dickinson can no more "explore how our bodies are impacted medically and culturally by the world we live in" than any poet or any book of verse. To my mind, it's more of the usual brash brand-labelling of poetic genres meant to attract a lucrative undergraduate market. The public shouldn't have to pay for something that by nature has always remained 'free' & potentially liberating: a lovely "strange manuscript found in a copper cyclinder" to be entrusted always to the gifted few and generously transmitted through a "collective recognition" (Antonio Negri) of poetry's own humanizing power. And the poet ought never to be a research 'body' in this ridiculously self-absorbed sense.
6 comments:
Jesus, Conrad, you would think with a last name like his, Dickinson would have thought twice before subjecting his body poetic to such nefarious toxins, bacteria, viruses etc.—all in the name of “poetry” (can’t you see the tomes haphazardly but still neatly stacked?)—but the rigged Madison Avenue chic picture of Adam in deep concentration before his potted plants explains it all: Emily was a poet; It looks like Adam is a $70,000 research plant.....or is that “grant?”
Well said, Vassilis.
Well said.
Conrad,
My own sense of the matter is that "funded art" has never been, is not and never will be art.
(Oh well, not that impoverishment is such a rich source of inspiration either.)
Thanks, Tom
I think the "impoverished artist" is mostly a mostly self-inflicted condition. Section xv of "The Massey Commission" that led the way to the so-called arm's-length "Canada Council for the Arts" perpetuates the myth: "No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer, or other writer of non-technical books can make even a modestly comfortable living by selling his [or her] work in Canada".
No writer is entitled (as they certainly are still) to make a "comfortable living" by their works. An enlightened (well-read) literary community and readership should be the final arbiters of literary success.
Conrad:
Wow. I had to shake my head and rub my eyes to see if I weren't dreaming.
They actually gave this guy money?
In America, degree programs seem now to be regarded primarily as engines of social mobility--rebalancing through raising suppressed members.
Environmental problems need to be seriously addressed. Distractions like this undermine efforts to expand awareness about what's really happening.
Curtis,
this kind of outrageous arts funding is par for the course in Canada. And postmodernist theory is to blame: it's got a stranglehold on academia you wouldn't believe.
You can't go wrong if you're a minimalist or conceptual artist: and the more "the cosmic-artisan" viewpoint you promote, the bigger the audience and the arts & science grant you'll get. Art can now be said to be tapping into "fields of forces" with the potential to give to verses (or visual image or installation) the very powers of genetic and evolutionary processes.
It's no accident Silliman, always the clever culture entrepreneur, marked his arrival at the recent Bury text festival with neon installation.
Post a Comment