¶ Q & A … at 3 A.M. (Dramatis Personae: The Director of Insomnia & Don McKay.)

Director of Insomnia: Well, well, here we are again, right on schedule. One assumes you are eager to discuss this weird book, All New Animals Acts?

DM: Not with you, and not now. I know how these sessions go. Root canals are more fun.

D of I: Listen to you, Earth’s only insomniac. This is the thanks I get for bothering to relieve the tedium of wakefulness with sprightly discourse and critical commentary. I’ve a mind to abandon you to the ministrations of magnesium citrate, warm milk, and counting sheep.

DM: Well don’t let excessive hospitality stop you. Besides, no one counts sheep anymore. It’s all chemicals, herbs, and relaxation techniques devised by your enemies, the therapists of sleep.

D of I: All testimony to the enduring hegemony of our regime, as they say in critical theory. Which I see you dabble in at several points in this strange tome. Trying to be ‘with it’ are we? Leaving the safe harbour of rocks and birds for a few forays into cogitation? Or did you just wander off when your minders weren’t watching?

DM: You know perfectly well that wilderness poetics has been the issue underlying all four of these essay collections, going back to Vis à Vis in 2001. Sometimes they tell it slant, sometimes head on. And, since you bring them up, birds and rocks do get featured; there’s a nameless bird singing a lead role in “[ ] or Iconostalgia,” and, in another piece, a revival of the ancient folk science of Visageology, linking rock faces with human ones. Also in the rock vein, there are two poems on fossils of the Avalon Zone. One of them is the very first evidence of muscle in the rock record—an all new animal act that’s half a billion years old, and virtually unique. The other fossil is so common that specimens are regularly dug up when putting in hydro poles or sewers in St. John’s. And besides such familiar subjects, this book includes an essay on lichens, a “cogitation,” as you put it, showing how these amazing lifeforms prompt us to question all the usual biological—

D of I: Sweet Jesus stop him somebody. Is our mute button out of order? They made a big mistake when they vaccinated him with a phonograph needle.

DM: —categories. That essay also makes a case for bewilderment, which lichens always induce, as the left-brain companion to the epiphanies of Romanticism, and so one potential bridge between poetry and science. And, speaking of building bridges and mixing modes, let me also say that it’s been great colluding with Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau on all four of these “strange tomes,” crossing back and forth over that great divide between poetic and discursive modes. All New Animal Acts even includes a couple of ‘stretchers’—kin to tall tales and the Newfoundland ‘cuffer’. One presents a long overdue account of the correct usage of the F-word, a timely contribution to the disciplines of grammar, linguistics, and anthropology.

D of I: Lord spare us. How many trees were destroyed in this bent enterprise? The whole thing seems gro—

DM: Go on, out with it. What were you about to say?

D of I: I was merely commenting on the incommensurate nature of the elements and—

DM: Bullshit you were. You were about to label the array of animal acts in the book as “grotesque,” but realized after the first syllable that you were playing into your victim’s hands. Am I right?

D of I: Listen, the way this works is I ask the questions and you try in vain to answer them. You don’t get to deal the cards when you play blackjack in my casino. Now, about the doomed trees—

DM: Grotesque: that’s the word you nearly said, and that’s the subject of All New Animal Acts’s title essay, a theme that runs right through the book. I’m saying that it’s the artform that identifies the Anthropocene epoch, the equivalent of permanent plastics and rising sea levels. It’s the spoor of the big-brained species that simultaneously laments the catastrophic erasure of others and persists in the carnage. And—are you listening—O Captain of Questions?—this artform is exemplified in the “incommensurate nature of the elements,” as you so ponderously put it, which structures the book. Thanks for the set-up. You’d better hope that this Q & A is not being monitored by your superiors at Insomnicorp. Could be trouble.

D of I: Yadda yadda yadda. To hear you talk, you’d think a desperate dodge was a knock-out punch and a lurch was a dance step. Don’t tell me you’re presenting this hodgepodge as some sort of assemblage. By those standards, my dog’s breakfast is a collage. I see you’re trying to pull off the same intellectual judo in that final essay, making out that memory lapses have a positive value.

DM: I don’t believe you have a dog. A hyena, maybe. I do like that bit about a lurch being a dance step though—could be I’ll come back to it later. As to the “[ ]” of that last essay, it’s a reminder that meaning precedes and exceeds words, that it’s the parent of language, and not, as is sometimes claimed, vice versa. Iconostalgia should be some consolation to you, as you reflect on your own screw-up over “grotesque.”

D of I: Grotesque schmotesque, you smug bugger. Don’t forget that 3 A.M. recurs every twenty-four hours. And still so much to discuss! Typos, misquotations, misanthropy (try dodging that one), comma splices, missing Oxford commas, appropriations, exaggerations, lies, solecisms, false analogies, malapropisms, bad taste, bad jokes, egregious errors, split infinitives, dangling modifiers—the list goes on. See you tomorrow night.

DM: [ ].