Poetics of Place - Episode 8
Sensing like ticks, scaling like stars
This is my last reflection on the 8 week workshop, Poetics of Place, that I facilitated through the YMCA of Central New York’s Downtown Writers’ Center. Over the past two months, I’ve shared themes, information, and reflections from each session — from the first that focused on Indigenous Land (and specifically the history of the Haudenosaunee in modern-day New York state), to the seventh on the idea sympoiesis emerging from a flirtation between evolutionary and cultural studies.
In this week’s post, I share with you our focus of session eight, Poetics of Liveliness. In particular, we’ll discuss the ideas of scale and sense as it pertains to ecological poetics, reflect on the question of empathy and knowing, and I’ll give you a peak at what’s up next.
In session eight we built on the momentum from the seventh, which focused on acts of creation (poiesis) that occur within and between beings: the symbiosis of coral and their reef environments, kinship between humans and sheep on Black Mesa, and stewarding forest ecosystems in Madagascar through education. In each session, we work primarily with the ideas of one author in our effort to build a multivalent Poetic of Place. In session seven, that author was Donna Haraway; in session eight, we spent time thinking and writing with the poet-theorist Ada Smailbegovic.
I came across Ada Smailbegovic’s work for the first time while doing research at the MoMA’s Library & Archives last May. I was in New York for my research fellowship at the Center for Book Arts, exploring how book artists use their hybrid medium to create non-conventional representations of landscape — a thread I started pulling with Poetics of Place since 2022. Not really knowing what to expect, I requested 30+ titles from the MoMA’s Queens warehouse for me to review at their 52nd Street reading room.
One of these titles happened to be Grey Cobalt (Loose Joints, 2019), a photographic and archival artists’ book by Finnish artist Felicia Honkasalo with the chapbook “Descriptions of Invisible Objects” by Ada Smailbegovic sewed on the inside cover. I was immediately impressed by the visual range of Honkasalo’s images, which engage with metallurgical instruments she inherited from her grandfather, as well as archival photos from post-World War II Finland and new photographs recording fragments of the artists’ native Finnish industrial and rural landscapes.
Then, opening Smailbegovic’s Descriptions chapbook, I encountered a textual world that expanded the life of Honkasalo’s images. The triangulation between photographer-writer-reader made my imagination come alive with a flurry of connections that I find to be one of the greatest joys of photo-poetic work.
Back in Toronto in June 2024, I was working on a different project that afforded me a guest card to the University of Toronto libraries. I took that opportunity to see what else I could find from these authors, and I came quickly across Smailbegovic’s book Poetics of Liveliness at Victoria College’s EJ Pratt Library. In that book, I found the author’s compelling case for doing art that responds to and with the ecological systems within which we live. In this book, Smailbegovic looks at the cellular poetics of Christain Bök’s The Xenotext experiment, Gertrude Stein’s taxonomical inquiries in The Making of Americans, and the textural nature of text in John Cage’s Mushroom Book.
As this is a writing-reading workshop, and not a graduate seminar, I had the group only read the introduction to Poetics, which in itself gave us more than enough to chew on: the poetics of sensing and scale being the two key ideas we played with in session.
Sensing
As far as we know, the eastern black-legged tick (Ixodes scapularis) senses its world in three ways: the smell of sweat, the heat of blood, and the light of the sun. This tick species don’t have eyes or antennae like other members of their genus. Instead, they receive stimuli in what’s called the Haller's organ at the tip of their forelegs and make sense of this information in the tiny knot of nerves know as a synganglion. This is also the tick species well known as a vector for the scourge of rural workers and campers in eastern North America: Lyme disease. For more on Lyme and its relationship to climate change, habitat destruction, and maybe even military bioweaponry, I recommend the article “How Lyme Disease Became Unstoppable.”
We might be quick to judge the tick as some kind of dumb monster — unknowingly wrecking havoc on human life as it wanders blindly jumping between field and forest. But Smailbegovic begs us to think differently about this mighty insect: “these three aspects of sensation that flood its entire perceptual universe” come together to create a sensorium: an Umwelt, or perceptual world. To the tick, its sensorium is perfect — just like the human sensorium is perfect to us. “The challenge [in understanding this] lies in shedding some of our anthropocentric perspectives to realize that what may loom large in our world may not be significant or even perceptible to another organism,” writes Smailbegovic.
What might happen if we shed the anthropocentric worldview and start to sense the world as a tick does? How might it be possible to do this? What might we learn in the process? Smailbegovic provides us with tools to help respond to such questions.
The idea that we humans might be able to sense the world as other beings do, with their own particular anatomies and Umwelts, brings us to where modern science and poetry meet. Scientific uses of novel technologies that approximate how, for instance, a tick ‘sees’ its prey walking past have everything to do with the leaps of imagination that are so common to poetry.
A tick doesn’t process visual information the way we do; but, for us to understand the tick’s Umwelt we need to use the senses we’ve got. That’s where, as Smailbegovic explores in her book, poetry functions as an instrument in sensing outside our selves. What one workshop participant, Flip, referred to as the power of poetry to move its readers to empathize with the writer also has the ability to immerse the reader in more-than-human sensoria.
This idea that we might be able to ‘see’ like a tick by reading and writing poems might sound like romantic folly (and to some degree it is, and that’s fine and even important), but the urgency of this empathetic exercise doesn’t get lost on the author, who writes:
Acknowledging the sensuous worlds occurring beyond the scales perceptible within the human Umwelt may be particularly urgent in the present moment, when anthropogenically induced processes, such as climate change or globalization, have accelerated the speed of environmental transformation, affecting the spatial distributions and temporal rhythms of nonhuman organisms in ways that we may only be beginning to understand.
So what if we tried to sense the world as a tick?
Scale
If sensing is about shifting from the center to the edges of the human Umwelt, then scale is about zooming in and out of it. Scale has to do with the spaces that emerge from gradual levels of proximity and distance between a subject and its object. It is not the distance itself. Sliding scales, new and different and perhaps unexpected things come in and out of focus. The scale of the tick’s world might not include the starts in the night sky, but it does include the pulse of a heart and the heat of the sun.
Playing with scale is what Smailbegovic calls “amplification” : turning up the volume, so to speak, on the things we don’t or can’t usually sense, or what the author calls “rendering perceptible material scales that would otherwise escape the limitations of unaided human sensation.”
We can play the game of amplification in two directions — microscopic and macroscopic, in which the microscope and telescope are respectively two exemplary instruments.
When it comes to microscopic amplification, I think back to visiting the Museum of Nature’s research facilities with UKAI Projects last April during the Intelligent Terrain residency. Among seeing the museum’s collection of fossils, botanicals, and cryogenic chambers, we were offered a look into the tiny world of diatoms using a standard laboratory microscope (400x magnification) and a high-power electron microscope (2500x). These single-celled algae have a life span of about 6 days and possess walls of silica which allow them to act as minuscule greenhouses, mirroring the planetary greenhouse effect in their little body while also sequestering more carbon dioxide from the planet’s atmosphere than any other group of living things.
And as it pertains to macroscopic, the quickest examples are the images of faraway nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies produced by NASA’s Hubble and Webb spaces telescopes. These images provide us with views at distances imperceptible to the unassisted human eye while also providing insights one the history of our galaxy and universe — as (due to the speed of light) the further away we look into space, the further back we go in time.
For instance, to produce the below image “Webb’s First Deep Field,” the telescope focused on a tiny section of the sky to reveal a macrocosm of thousands of galaxies, the oldest of which existed 13 billion years ago.
Like shifting our senses, poetry is also a technology that allows us to amplify scale, or as Smailbegovic puts it:
. . . literary texts and artworks, but especially in this case poems, have the capacity to act as instruments of amplification, allowing us to in some way sense spatial and temporal scales that are relevant for other organisms, or the geological or climatic events occurring on the planet, that would otherwise remain sensorially inaccessible to us.
Empathy
After presenting these ideas in the last workshop, one participant poised the thorny question: How can we even begin to see from the perspective of non-human species when we have such a hard time at understanding members of the same species with whom we share the same senses?
This question sparks important considerations, one wrapped up in heated philosophical debate that has implications for pretty much everything and everyone. As one participant, Clo, responded, this question boils down to this uncertainty: Can we truly know each other and understand how one another feels?
On this subject, we can actually turn back to Smailbegovic’s introduction to Poetics of Liveliness, in which she identifies two camps in contemporary philosophy and history of science: Object- Oriented Ontology (OOO) and New Materialism (NM). In general terms, OOO responds no to the question previous question, while NM responds yes. More specifically, OOO starts from the self-differentiating characteristic of matter — the repulsive forces that always create a distance between me and whatever I ‘touch’ (in which touch is nothing more than the impact of the repulsive forces gaining strength with greater proximity, and thus I never truly make contact that which is touched). NM, on the other hand, begins with the idea that all things are connected to, if not made up by, everything else (see last week’s conversation on sympoiesis).
We can also look back to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation for a way to interpret this question. In Episode 6 I discussed Poetics of Relation and the concepts that Glissant developed under its umbrella, including opacity: acknowledging, respecting, and accepting the differences that we cannot understand or know directly. I will never truly know what it’s like to sense with the Haller’s Organ of a black-footed tick, nor will I ever truly understand what it’s like to look out the eyes of even my closest friend. This gap in knowing doesn’t mean that I can’t engage in a practice of empathy, however. To dare to empathize with the other is a worthy adventure because, though I will surely fail, it also has the ability to expand my world, show me things I never thought I’d see, and even engender unlikely affinities.
This iteration of Poetics of Place gave me my first chance to facilitate a learning experience longer than 4-weeks as a professional educator. Coming out of a Summer and Autumn of facilitating two different workshop (a landscape hosts something and chromocore), diving back into Poetics of Place this winter was a welcome return. Over these eight weeks, I got to meet people from different worlds than my own, which presented me new chances to learn and grow in each session. The length of this workshop allowed us to get to know one other, and it allowed me to adapt my facilitation as the weeks went on and what needed changing became clear.
I really cherished this experience because I don’t envision myself being able to offer long workshops like this for a while. I’m leaving Mexico City at the end of April. This Spring and Summer I’ll be busy travelling. I’ll be back in Toronto for a few days to launch the soon-to-be-published chapbook Edge Theory, then Venice for a fellowship at the Biennale, and then to Berlin for a residency at ZK/U. Thankfully many months of grant writing paid off and I got funding for these endeavours : ) After that, I’m planning to move to Paris to enrol full time at INALCO to study Persian. More on all that to come, and while I won’t be workshopping as much as I wanted the rest of this year, you can catch me here on substack sharing bits of my life and work along the way !
a whirlwind as always. but so beautiful to hear from ☺️