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| 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.
