Mingling with Caleb Parkin

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I wanted to start, Caleb, by thanking you for sharing Heather Davis’s brilliant essay, ‘Toxic Progeny’. Many of Davis’s themes seem to align with your new collection, Mingle. I was particularly struck by this quote from her discussion around toxicity and queerness: ‘queerness allows for an ecological understanding that we are not impenetrable… we are composed of what surrounds us… our bodies are permeable, they cross over in ways that resist categorisation’. Is this a description of Mingle-ing?

‘Toxic Progeny’ definitely tilted me into thinking about toxicity as a way of being, how we live with toxicity. My first collection, This Fruiting Body, was most concerned with the ecological body – you know Daisy Hildyard’s concept of ‘the second body’? – and the exciting possibilities of this mingling between bodies, so the poems were already concerned with mingling. But now, in Mingle, I focus more on the danger and darkness of mingling, the weirdness of it. And with toxicity there’s also too-muchness, in a queer sense, what does it mean to be too much? Who or what is considered too much? The Frank O’Hara epigraph – ‘I can’t even find a pond small enough to drown in without being ostentatious’ – introduces this in Mingle, a showy flamboyant excess…

That for me is an important aspect of queer ecology; excess, too-muchness, is often so value-laden, but queer ecology runs with this expansion, this interconnected abundance, and also there’s something about messiness in nature that I like?

Yes, exactly. A quote in the epigraphs to This Fruiting Body  is from Armistead Maupin’s Mrs Madrigal: ‘there’ll be no tidying up, dear’. And while we do need to tidy up in a sense or be aware of the damage we’re causing, at our messy edges, through our second bodies, it’s important to me that we don’t reminisce on some notion of pristine nature. That is gone: the plastisphere exists and, as Tim Morton says, ‘the end of the world has already happened’ – this nostalgic Earth never quite existed anyhow. We need to update ourselves to now, to what we still have. As Rebecca Solnit says, ‘the fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving’. For me, this is an antidote to ‘doomerism’, which I have felt, but there’s a danger we give up then, and that really suits the ultra-wealthy: capitalism has won, ecological destruction is a done deal. I hope this collection is a leaning into messiness and living with damage. It’s not anti-doom, but nor is it totally despairing.

Hope can be quite a toxic construct.

I am quite a doomsayer so I know it when I see it! I didn’t read much doom in either of your collections: more humour and a sense of continuing. But I do believe it’s ok, it’s sane to feel doom when you think about or learn about the climate and ecological emergency. Do you think there’s a place for doom in poetry or do we have enough?

There are brilliant poets who do explore the doom of it – Suzannah Evans, Tom Sastry – and that is essential, when done in heartfelt, interesting ways. But in my poetry I don’t want readers to feel totally immobilised by it, I want to allow space for staying with—

—hope?

For me, hope can be quite a toxic construct. It’s invested in a reproductive futurity that we don’t have to buy into.

You’ve read my note: non-reproductive futurity!

Yes, I read it upside-down. Have you read Lee Edelman, who writes about queerness which rejects a politics of ‘reproductive futurity’? He associates queerness with irony and joy in a way that challenges this idea of the future being necessarily about the figure of the child: an innocence needing protection, and so on. Hope is often invested in preserving the present, but what version of the present are we hoping to continue? Davis writes about toxicity and queer temporality too, which I see as connected to future and hope; how lingering toxins, forever chemicals, plastiglomerates, how these will outlive not just us but also the timescales of humans as a species. So there’s something about continuing on despite, or with this, but not necessarily buying into everything that often comes with ‘hope’ for a particular kind of future, or continuation

So an alternative way would be…?

Uncertainty. Living with uncertainty and toxicity. Robin Wall Kimmerer, when asked this question, she said love, and I agree; for people to find love for the human and non-human around them, whether it’s a window-box, a little pond, and not necessarily in a productive way – not to a specific outcome other than being-with, connecting.

I’m thinking about the various ponds or pools in Mingle and also the associated – in my mind – specular or, in some way, mirrored poems: ‘Waterlily House’, ‘Infinity Mirror’, ‘Narcissus Aesthetics’, ‘Ten Reflections on the Same Pond’…

Yes, there are various pools throughout. I’m fascinated by the image of pools, how they are received as symbols of the pristine, how they reflect, and of course the whole water table is interconnected, on the move, contaminated, and what we see reflecting back is subjective, distorted – the pool of piss in ‘What does cancer smell like to an ant?’. The mirror poems are a way to reflect this, these… reflections! I also find specular poems useful formally if I’m finding a poem does not have quite the right tone. For example, ‘Waterlily House’ became much more complex and ambiguous when I mirrored it and changed the pronouns in the process. I really enjoyed, too, writing the ekphrastic response to Georgia Robinson’s cover art, ‘A Pink Sink’, which finishes the whole collection: the end of the book reflecting the front. Also, formally, some of the poems in Mingle mirror each other when I feel they connect somehow. Or if, in the development of a poem, I was unsure of the form: ‘Alfresco’, in its cruisy, wandering, floating way responds to the form as well as the content and tone of ‘Queertopia’ so that the two, while not adjacent or continuous, are interlinked.

I often try to bring irony to a poem, especially if I feel it risks being too certain.

Interlinking between poems – also responding to other poets, musicians, to science – resists easy separation or categorisation. Is that an important aspect of writing ecologically for you? Particularly with normative ideas of nature which can often arise from well-intentioned mobilisation against ecological damage. How do you navigate that dilemma – not to dismiss the very real harm humans are causing whilst also not reinforcing, for example, heteronormative nature?

This connects, for me, to living with uncertainty, toxicity. Many of my poems respond to and, hopefully, enact uncertainty, mutability, mutation, and in doing so resist a simple narrative such as normative Nature. As well as form, I often try to bring irony to a poem, especially if I feel it risks being too certain. In Bad Environmentalism, Nicole Seymour writes about types of irony, especially in the context of queer environmental humanities, and I had a great discussion with her whilst visiting last year, about how I use or could use irony in my poetry; there’s the corrective irony of ‘Infinity Mirror’, taking aim at Elon Musk and his like, which of course is not going to do much against his colossal wealth or power, but I hope it does satirise his megalomania and prompt readers to question any straightforward acceptance of his mode. Or there’s thoroughgoing irony, with which I’ve tried to imbue this collection: toxicity can be horrendous and harmful but it can also be pleasurable, hilarious, beautiful, life-saving. And you and I are complicit in all these things. We can try really hard with our eco-washing liquid and our refill shop trips – I know we do – but there is a limit to what we can stop, but we are nonetheless still connected to contamination, toxicity. And some of the poems are about joyous intoxication or therapeutic intoxication – my family members being saved by chemotherapy. I think there’s also the way poems are positioned in a collection that can question assumptions, challenge a previous poem’s potential assertions, or expand on the queerness of nature. It comes back to the messiness we started with; staying with the complicity, that interconnectedness that is the ecological.

And Britney?

Of course I wanted to quote ‘Toxic’ in the epigraph, for obvious reasons, but my editor suggested this would be too expensive or else Britney might sue us – I’d like to think she would never do that to me, a fellow poet – but instead I found this quote about the opening of the song being a sample, the strings borrowed from an 80s Bollywood track. So it actually worked much better as an epigraph on toxicity, on intermingling, borrowing or taking – and no one was sued! Although maybe a ‘Toxic’ lyric did sneak its way into ‘Hotel Hydrocarbon’.

That was great, yes – that poem made me laugh a lot. Many of the poems in both of your collections are really funny. You mentioned Tim Morton earlier – I was recently reading their book, All Art is Ecological, and was struck by their advocating for humour in facing ecological damage, asking if anyone has yet told an ecological joke. What do you think about the role of humour in ecological poetry?

To say that because a situation is very serious we can never joke about it is quite dangerous: this can foreclose an open conversation, and we need to be conversing about environmental issues more openly than ever. It does depend on your positioning, of course, like a joke from a mega oil CEO might not be particularly welcome… but I think queer culture is full of dark jokes because that is how we survive through the painful and alienating experiences we’re subjected to when treated as abnormal, unnatural. Often this is how we make sense of the difficult or the harmful, or transmute it into something else – more often than not, this is not dismissal but rather an acknowledgement of its importance. In Mingle, I try to work with a range of affects; there are poems which really were composed and read as elegies – ‘Two Tablespoonfuls’, ‘Burying the Sky’ – but others I felt needed to be more weird, unsettling and, with this, humorous. At the launch of Mingle I was referred to as the “high priest of dark mischief” and I was really happy about that. I think in this collection I’m into mischief, fooling – less humourist, more fool!

Because a fool or jester has that element of satirising, undermining, speaking truth?

Exactly, yes. Humour can be really incisive and also be a way to package up, not evade as some people might say, but help us ingest something we need to hear when it might be difficult . Again, thinking of queer culture, I recently saw Rhys Nicholson and they were absolutely hilarious, but I was left afterwards thinking about very real and poignant aspects of queer life. And I think ecopoetry doesn’t have to be stuck in one modality or one affect, it can do both – be serious and funny, woeful and delightfully weird. It’s one of my frustrations that, in the ecological situation we’re in, ecopoetry has to be deadly serious as if that’s the only way people will listen. But I think we’ve done that and we need to continue to some extent, but seriousness has only done so much; perhaps we need to explore other affective states. Again, Nicole Seymour writes about how different environmental affects, queer cultural affects –  pride, excess, frivolity – can be evoked in art, in literature, and how perhaps these are needed to help people fully engage with the difficult aspects of the ecological.

Can poetry be activism?

It can be. I remember I saw Kae Tempest performing their poetry at a climate march and it was incredible, hair billowing in the wind, their voice and words rising through the crowd – that was poetry as activism for sure. Written poetry, is that different? There are many different poetries, not one monolithic Poetry, and I think many different types of poetry can affect readers in different ways, and surely we need all of those possibilities now. Where one reader might respond to the raw articulation of catastrophic doom in climate collapse, another might close down. That reader might respond more to celebrating the more-than-human, through giant isopod erotica, and feel motivated to protect the oceans. The response to environmental destruction needs to be collective and I think ecopoetry and ecopoets also can work in complex collectivity

Finally, do you anthropomorphise and if so, is that OK?

Yes, I do. I think writing a poem about a non-human animal is inherently anthropomorphising. I’m thinking about, for example, ‘SEXTANK’: the language I choose makes it very apparent I’m anthropomorphising. Some poets I love really work to get into the materiality of an imagined non-human language, attempting to embody the more-than-human. I think I’m more about a reflexive anthropomorphism; I’m writing a chapter on this for my PhD and what Lynn Keller calls ‘the self-conscious Anthropocene’. So, I make it clear that I cannot be this other creature, but I’m going to pretend to do it anyway. Similar to how a drag performer performs gender in such a way that it reminds us how we are all performing gender, all the time. Writing as a non-human is essentially an imposition, always anthropomorphising; that individual critter cannot tell you exactly their experience. So I acknowledge that and have fun with it. At the same time, I want to question how we anthropomorphise, interrogate different registers, for example the scientific – in ‘Whiptail Manifesto’, I play with some lovely biological language, like ‘obligate parthenogenesis’, whilst I centre the ridiculousness of biologists heterocentrically describing ‘male-like’ and ‘female-like’ whiptail lizards in an all-female colony.