Rigged Poetics

In 1913, a thirty-five-year-old engineer from Nova Scotia, Sidney Clarke Ells, travelled to Alberta’s Athabasca River valley as part of an exploratory team sent to report to the federal government on the springs of bitumen that had been seen seeping freely from the ground. It would have been a journey of some mystery and adventure, and Ells seemed particularly suited for the task. An eager-minded man of both arts and sciences — he had undergraduate degrees in each from McGill University, as well as experience in the oil fields of New Brunswick and Trinidad — he produced, besides a detailed account of Athabasca bitumen, photographs, sketches, stories, and poems of his time in the hinterland. He included some of this work in Northland Trails, from 1938, his attempt “to convey something more vital than mere statistics — the atmosphere of the great North land and the spirit of its people.”

Although he is now barely a footnote in Canadian history, Ells’s work in the Athabasca region was the genesis of Alberta’s oil industry. And although he desired to be known as the “father of the Tar Sands,” the artistic footprint he left behind paints a rather different story. In pieces such as “The Trapper’s Farewell” and “The Athabaska Trail,” Ells writes of portages, fur trading, and Indigenous cultures with elegiac zeal. His work in surveying, mining, and experimenting with bitumen is absent from Northland Trails.

Melanie Dennis Unrau uses Ells to open The Rough Poets, positioning his blend of environmental (one might almost say conservationist) writings with his industrial work as foundational to Canadian petro-poetics: literal-minded, contradictory, dissociative, heavy in rhetoric, and full of romantic notions and “extractive logics.” She then appraises six poetry collections, published between 1981 and 2019, whose authors were, in some way, directly connected to the oil industry: Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time.

The Rough Poets is inescapably an academic work, and there is rather less poetry in it than this reader, at least, wishes. We’re encouraged to complement the criticism by buying the source material, but Unrau first wants us to know where the theoretical rubber hits the practical road. Despite plumbing deep into the well of poetic theory, she comes across as a classical music fan trying desperately to enjoy a Black Sabbath concert. Her criticism and analysis, at times snippety, shows a great desire for these artists to refute and chastise their world rather than to describe or reflect it.

Unrau wonders whether Christensen’s “minimalist and masculinist poetry,” for example, “is critical of or merely complicit in the ecocidal, racist, and toxic-masculine discourse and culture he portrays in Rig Talk.” In the poem “Blue Collar Mayhem,” Parkin writes, with reference to himself, “Naden’s tainted / Can you blame him?” Unrau responds with a reluctant yes, but only in a way that “respects Parkin’s vulnerability and intelligence.” Elsewhere, she considers Dronyk’s and Henderson’s styles “stuplime,” meaning simultaneously astonishing and boring, and maintains that both Parkin and Battler play a little too loosely with colonial and racial themes. (The claim fits especially with Battler, who describes oil workers as slaves in her poem “Pax McMurray.”) Bird’s work portends the dark end of our petro-state; it is the depressed “blighted back-loop” that closes the circle opened by Ells with optimistic naïveté. Above all, Unrau cannot hide her distaste for Ells, taking issue with him more as a person than as a poet. Her offhand description of him as a privileged, neglectful spouse drips with modern presumption, even as she sees his art as facilitating “his flight from responsibility and accountability” for the world he created.

In other words, Unrau focuses less on form than on context. She declares her perspective (“anticolonial feminist”) so often that it becomes a rock that these poets either break upon or move around, as she seeks to justify their work through what she imagines to be a psychologically hobbling environment and history: for instance, as purveyors of “White Geology” and “racial capitalism” and as victims of “petrocultural disidentification.” It’s a world Unrau seems slightly uncomfortable in. A post-doctoral fellow at the University of Regina and a poet herself — certainly not an industry insider — she explains that her insights are drawn from visits to oil-producing communities and museums as well as from popular culture: books, the internet, reality TV. While reading The Rough Poets, I thought repeatedly of a line of dialogue in Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, from nearly a century ago: “They don’t know it themselves — except dimly. It is something you have to live.”

I suspect that Unrau was disappointed to not find a rough art (or rough artist) that jived with liberal urban academic views. To salvage something for herself in these examined texts and in petro-poetics writ large, she leans heavily on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “poor theory,” the idea that art can come out of ignorance of a form — which is to say there is something mysterious and preternaturally original about the poems. They are not monumental, to be sure, but they are flares in a darkened field that has received much attention but little artistic insight.

Unrau is hard on these poets, but then they offer themselves as hardened artists. Is she simply not positioned to understand how Christensen identifies with oil workers “by going along with hazings, abuse, and homophobic jokes; and by showing disdain for the land that he and other workers live and work on”? Or was Christensen right when he wrote, in response to poor reviews of Rig Talk, that academics “quickly pass moral judgment on all those heathen folk who dirty their hands”?

If these poets feel isolated, it is not only academia’s fault. The pursuit of arts within the world of oil production can leave one feeling exposed and pilloried by the very people it is ostensibly for. During my time spent working in the Alberta oil fields around Elk Point, Bonnyville, and St. Paul in the early 2010s, I found an environment in which poetry was seen as rather pointless and effete. I hadn’t yet formed a notion of writing, but as I wasn’t a very committed employee, nor well supervised, I would often read at work. One day, a Playboy dropped into my open book. “There’s what men read,” the magazine giver said. I later found my book torn up and thrown into a puddle. If someone had told me then that there were poets scribbling away in this land of labour-worship and bottled emotion, I’d have taken it for a joke. I’m happy to know that somewhere nearby, in not too dissimilar a situation, someone may have been contemplating what it all meant. But I do wonder who they were scribbling for.

What Unrau gets very right — admittedly, the examined poets wear it clearly on their sleeve — is the inner conflict of Canadian resource workers. Theirs is “an ethics of hard work, responsibility, and care” that mixes with “a sense of entitlement to abundant and cheap natural resources.” That, in no small part, plays into their vision of the future, where “just energy transition includes a good, sweet life for former extraction workers.”

His poetry may have been antiquated even in its day, but in other aspects, Sidney Ells had a keen eye for where his work in the oil sands was leading. “Modern civilization and every aspect of community life are so intimately dependent on the condition of our highways,” he wrote after his first exploratory visit, “that almost any method devised to measure the benefits of good roads is incomplete.” Car ownership was rising (over the 1920s, it went from 4 to 16 percent in Canada), and more roads were being smoothed with tarmacadam, a petroleum by‑product. In 1927, the country had 1,091 kilometres of bituminous macadam road, some of which, in Edmonton and Jasper Park Lodge, had been paved by Ells himself. (“Give us roads, oh! Give us roads!” he implored in “Trails.”)

Few people today worry about what the farriers and wainwrights of a century ago turned to when their lines of work dried up. (Wondering what these professions are only adds to the point.) The thought that in a century hence our fossil fuel economy will be so far in the rear-view mirror that we won’t recognize commonplace jobs — refinery operator, derrickman, rig welder — may be a comfort to some. To others, it is an existential threat.

The movement for “just transition” seeks to protect the rights and livelihoods of workers in a fading industry. It is a union-born framework, premised on the idea that, in a world built on speculation, investments, pensions, and an increasingly high standard of living, an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Workers need more than their daily bread; we all live in the future now.

Unjust Transition, a collection of essays by academics, journalists, researchers, and activists, addresses the labour implications — political, social, economic, media, personal — of the ongoing shift away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable energy production. Using the fulcrum of the 2019 labour dispute and lockout of Unifor 594 members at the Co‑op Refinery Complex, near Regina, the essays show how, if left unchecked, big businesses will transfer the costs of sustainability to their employees. The refinery workers quoted in this book are less contradictory, rhetorical, and romantic than their poet kin, but their sentiments are largely the same. Most recognize that even while climate change or economics makes a transition inevitable, fossil fuel workers — a group that in this case falls somewhere between urban and rural, between Liberal and Conservative, however much due is given to the NDP — will be the first to be tossed to the curb. In the meantime, phrases like “house of hatred” (the workplace), “class traitors” (used to describe police working the picket lines but a term that could be extended to scabs or even the fossil fuel companies themselves), “green capitalism,” and “proletarian ecology” ring with a kind of proletarian poetic ethos. This is what one can imagine Langston Hughes and Kenneth Fearing would sound like if they had actually worked with their hands. The move to sustainable production will be difficult for what the petro-poet Lesley Battler calls “the gentle colony / of bitumen worshippers.”

Beyond the language, the outlook proposed in Unjust Transitions is like a silver cloud with a black lining. Yes, many might be saved by a transition away from fossil fuels — but not all of us. That should be cause enough to pause and look before we lurch into the future. Labour books have a tendency to tap into a dark vein, and in both The Rough Poets and Unjust Transition, the atmosphere of a singular landscape and the spirit of its people are there as Ells intended: uneasy, angry, writhing anxiously in the pre-light of tomorrow.