Erin Robinsong Discusses Her New Collection, Wet Dream, a Clarion Call of Climate Poetry

As a species, we've been staring down the barrel of the climate crisis for some time, and yet it often feels like little action, or even attention, is being mustered up to address such a cataclysmic disaster. Which is why it's so affirming to see thoughtful explorations of where we've arrived at this point of environmental history, as in Erin Robinsong's powerful new collection, Wet Dream (Brick Books).

Robinsong, a poet who has established not only her talent, publishing widely and winning prizes and acclaim, but also her dedication to environmental causes, returns with perhaps her boldest collection yet this fall. Wet Dream is dizzying and meditative at once, terrified and fiercely hopeful, filled with equal parts erotic pleasure and climate horror. 

Resisting the capitalist framework that has brought the climate crisis to a fever pitch, the collection shows Robinsong elbowing through violence, doublespeak, and ignorance to connect with the natural world, and in particular the fresh water on which our existence depends. 

She joins us today to talk about Wet Dream, telling us how she coped with writing while living with post-concussion syndrome, how she arrived at her cheeky title, and what her advice is for emerging and aspiring poets getting started in a writing life. 

Open Book:

Tell us about this collection and how it came to be.

Erin Robinsong:

Wet Dream had a few origins that met and fused. Some of the earliest poems in the book were acts of witness. It’s such an intense time to be alive, as so much is burning, melting, storming, and churning – elementally, socially. What does it mean to be here for the onramp of climate chaos with whatever amount of agency? A lot of these early poems contain snippets of conversation I had with friends, strangers, whoever, as we would discuss, say, the smoke blanketing our home. So there are relational maps embedded in these early poems, of things people said to me as we tried to wrap our minds around what we were witnessing.

Nothing about turning your planet into an oven makes sense, and yet this is the situation. What is it like to live in an oven as it pre-heats? Is there still pleasure and joy there? Yes! Is there anxiety? Yes! Is there anger? YES! Is there an intense need to imagine how else to live? Yes! Are there clues and advice we can find by looking outside of petrocapitalist culture, and deep in its folds and roots? Yes! By looking to other organisms? Yes! By listening to our own bodies and the elements that compose them? Yes. These and other registers move through the book, as I tried to document the contortions my thought went through trying to stay with the shitshow. So that’s one origin, and these poems became a chapbook with House House Press called Liquidity (2020), edited by David Bradford.

Then the pandemic happened, and Zoom-everything happened, and I spent a lot of time alone and in some pretty weird states of consciousness. I have post-concussion syndrome, a major trigger is long hours looking at LCD screens, especially with lots of little moving boxes, as I found out. Switching to Zoom classes, Zoom meetings, Zoom socializing, Zoom readings – my concussion symptoms flared: split vision, spatial difficulty, difficulty reading, remembering, or prioritizing. Everything would get really soupy, to the point I thought I probably could not continue with most of what I was doing (a PhD, conference organizing, editing work) because they all involved screens. I was forced to take major breaks, while in a state that felt like dreaming or tripping, but not fun, and this made me have to think about brains, my own brain, with that very same fucked-up brain. Via this mindfuck, and my attempts to heal it, the book then became about consciousness as well: where is it, and who supposedly has it and who not. Is water conscious? Since I am about 80% water, and the brain is a very wet organ, floating in cerebrospinal fluid, it became hard to separate thought from water. I saw an old-school herbalist who told me that the reason my brain was triggered by screens is because they dry out the brain through the eyes, which felt right to me :) So I became really interested in listening as closely as I could, somatically, to the flow of elements through my body, especially water.

All water is really old – over 4 billion years old. When you drink a glass of water, it’s been so many places – it’s been in the sky, deep underground, potentially in other bodies, throughout deep time as well as recently. So what has it seen and what does it know? Could I tune in to that while writing, since water is what I mostly am? Intimately, vastly, in constant dispersal and exchange.

OB:

Can you tell us a bit about how you chose your title? If it’s a title of one of the poems, how does that piece fit into the collection? If it’s not a poem title, how does it encapsulate the collection as a whole?

ER:

The book really named itself. At first I protested – like, I can’t call my book Wet Dream, that’s ridiculous. This is not a book about teenage boy sexual awakening. But it is an erotic book, an erotics of liquid interconnection, about imaginal and material realms in concert together. Reductive materialism, the Enlightenment worldview that extractive capitalism is built upon, separates mind and body, spirit and matter, dream and wet, all those dualisms. But in fact, as a wet dream of any gender so beautifully demonstrates, moisture can and does spring from dreams, and likewise dreams spring from moisture. Where do thought and imagination come from? Not from nowhere, not from solitary brains – but from this gorgeous and inextricable interplay between matter and imagination, wetness and dream, moisture and consciousness. Life in a body here is wet. Even rocks are formed from liquid processes. And we’re perceiving reality through this mysterious stuff called consciousness, so no two realities are the same.

Consciousness is a big word, and people can mean really different things by it – I mean it in the sense of agency, sentience and subjective experience, to whatever degree. Birds make choices, vines make choices, can wind decide? Can water perceive? I think so. Panpsychists or animists would say that you can’t grant humans consciousness while denying it to other self-organizing systems, because the logic falls apart. If consciousness exists, then it can’t just be a special quality in humans and not in trees or rivers.

So, with all these senses of the phrase ‘wet dream’, I started thinking of the brain as a wet dream, and the planet as a wet dream in space. Water which cycles around and around the planet through different bodies, places, times, transforming from liquid, to vapour, to ice, and back again for the last 4 billion years – what traces of these different lives, different perspectives, hormones, toxins, information, does water carry? Nightly dreaming might be one of the closest things we can experience to what water is always doing as it shapeshifts – becoming, unbecoming and rebecoming, entering and exiting so many different ways of being alive.

OB:

Was there any research involved in your writing process for these poems?

ER:

For me, the main research in poetry is always situated – the situation and body and time and culture and relationships and entanglements I find myself in. A lot of my “research” was what I didn’t want or intend to have to think about, described above. Poetry for me is a process of metabolizing and letting seemingly disparate things find their relation again.

I was also deeply influenced and schooled by many thinkers, many of whom are quoted in the book, or resonating in its fibres. Cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis’ writing on water was a major inspiration and guide. angela rawlings introduced me to Astrida Neimanis’ essay “Hydrofeminism: Or, on becoming a body of water” while I was writing some of the earlier poems for the book, a paper that fundamentally changed how I thought about the political, ethical, feminist and material implications of water. This led me to Neimanis’ other writing on water and watery embodiment, which had a massive impact on the rest of the book and inspired much of my interest in and ways of thinking with/about water as a medium of connection, that we are both composed of, and constantly exchanging with each other and the planet – for good and for ill.

An underlying question in the book was how did we get to this absurd, tragic point where we are barreling ahead with the project of making the earth basically uninhabitable, knowing what we know? It’s a cosmological problem, as VK Preston has said. Whose imagination are we living in? This question led me to a lot of intersectional feminist, queer, Black, and Indigenous theory and philosophy. Gloria Anzaldúa, Donna Haraway, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Stacy Alaimo, Dylan Robinson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kathryn Yusoff, Aimé Césaire, and adrienne maree brown were some of the thinkers I was engaged with, who all helped me think about the colonial, extractive, racist roots of the moment we find ourselves in – the climate crisis, yes, the sixth extinction, yes, and the slavery, land theft, genocide, and cultural domination that the history of extraction is imbricated with. It became clearer to me than ever that ecocide is a symptom of the many ‘cides this violent form of relation engenders, they are bound up from the start and can’t be solved without addressing these roots. As poet/scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes in her gorgeous book Dub, “you noticed already, that what they do to water they will do their mothers and you.” These were the waters I was marinating in while writing this book, and I’m deeply indebted to these writers, and the people I was reading them with.

In my poetic research, I developed embodied writing practices to try and perceive in ways that weren’t brain-centric. Instead of writing ‘about’ water, I wanted to write with water, as water (which anyway is already the case). So I developed a practice to hook up with the hydrological cycle by collecting rainwater on my balcony in Montreal, and ‘dosing’ myself with it before I began writing each day.

I wanted to scale down the often depersonalized immensity and generality of meteorological cycles of water, weather, and the things they carry to waters I could personally gather. A glass of water became a collection of raindrops from the sky immediately above my apartment. When I drank them, I felt implicated in the immense and deeply personal meteorological cycle. I felt specific coordinates of sky inside of me. This sky water tasted very different from tap water, which I suppose comes most recently from underground. The complexity of water was grounded by these and other basic sensory informations: I would sit down at my desk, drink the water, feel a coolness spread down my throat, into my belly. Writing in the morning, it was often my first liquid of the day, and I could feel water being taken up thirsty tissues, absorbing, flushing, reconstituting me, or so I imagined. The simple mundanity of drinking a glass of water became an event. The idea was to write under this water’s influence, to see what this imbibed, embodied substance might say through and with me. I would write until I had to pee. Then I would gather the urine, and water my plants with it in a 10:1 dilution, which they quite liked, and that water would then continue on its way, now laced with me, through the roots and transpire out the leaves, and back into the air where it came from. That was the idea 

Despite how I’d conceived of the project, I was not at all convinced anything special would happen when I sat down to write, in fact I was nervous it wouldn’t. But in fact, the watery flood of material that emerged felt written by much more-than me. Writing is always an exceeding of ‘oneself’ I think, and this process intensified that.

OB:

What advice would you give to an emerging or aspiring poet?

ER:

I don’t know who else needs to hear this, but here’s a comment I received in a dream the other night: I was in a college of some sort, and as I passed the open door of a classroom the professor said, “Poetry means that life can either take you for a ride – or you can talk back to life. Poetry is talking back to life.” It’s not advice really, but points to the potential of poetry for conversing with reality, which I find more suggestive than advice :) 

Here are some other things that have been helpful for me, many of which I have learned from poets I admire. Poetry is access to information – to your own knowledge, to the knowledge that is available through your particular tunings. You have to learn to trust yourself even if it takes 20 years or your whole life to just say what you know and what you see. For me that’s been really hard. And the most worthwhile practice for being a person.

Being a poet sounds really romantic to some people, and in my experience it’s pretty much the opposite. A life in poetry hopefully puts you in touch with reality in a way that many other vocations don’t ask of you. Sometimes it’s the reality of being broke, which is no fun, but can be a good way of seeing the underside of capitalism’s shoddiness, its boring criteria for worth, and the necessity for inventing and perceiving other kinds of value. Poetry always feels risky to me, and anti-mastery. It’s hard on the ego, it’s embarrassing, and that’s a great thing about it. It puts you in touch with something both outlandish and necessary, related to faith, curiosity, and not being in control. Because you aren’t. But also, you are free in poetry, you don’t have to back up your theories with citations. It’s a really good place to think and to find out what you know and can perceive.

So my advice is – stay close to your reasons for poetry. Whatever ‘good poetry’ supposedly is, don’t listen to them, find out in your own body, your own thrill. Like any practice, it can get messed up by external validation or lack of, so stay as close to your own current as you can. Don’t be fooled into thinking being a poet is just about what you produce. Poems on the page are one expression of a much bigger practice of responding to the world with your particular blend of genius/wounds/obsessions. We’re all so contingent so we really need our spirits, our imaginative capacities, our language and the spells that only we can make from it, and our ability to feel and be real – and poetry develops these muscles.

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Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her debut collection of poetry, Rag Cosmology, won the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and her chapbooks include Liquidity (House House Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Lemon Hound, Vallum, The Capilano Review, Effects, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, and many others. Collaborative performance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. Originally from Cortes Island, Erin lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.