Eastern Comma writer-in-residence gets back to nature
There is no getting away from nature at North House. Originally created by students of three Canadian universities for the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon and brought out of storage years later for installation on the rare Charitable Research Reserve in Cambridge, the cube-shaped, hyper-efficient, and easily transportable dwelling is practically a glass house. Close to half of the walls are windows made from thick, insulating glass, giving anyone inside a terrific view of … not much, really. A scrubby hill. A shaggy willow tree. What used to be a road.
The panoramic perspective, however, makes it impossible to ignore the weather. It would have been nice to simply draw the curtains and get cozy on this particular cold and drizzly Saturday afternoon, Nov. 8, the occasion of a “reading and walk” with poet and philosopher Karen Houle, who has been living in North House this fall as the inaugural “Eastern Comma Writer-in-Residence.” But in a building lit, powered, and heated by the sun, that’s not an option.
Those glass walls mean that, during her time at North House, Houle has been oggled by her fair share of nosy passersbys; a little bit, she joked, like an animal in a zoo. She is also something of a guinea pig, one of the first people to live in the house for a significant period of time. Named after a type of butterfly found on the reserve, the Eastern Comma residency is the fruit of an almost utopian collaboration between socially-minded arts organ Musagetes and rare.
Houle, a University of Guelph philosophy professor with a background in the sciences and two volumes of poetry under her belt (Ballast with House of Anansi and During with Gaspereau), seemed uniquely qualified to occupy what she referred to before her reading as “a hybrid position,” bridging the arts and the sciences. To better embody that hybridity, Houle incorporated excerpts of scientific studies conducted on the reserve into her poems, “borrowing the eyes and ears” of researchers to express “the voices of things that are happening.” Those things, she added, with a slight hesitation, are a bit like the conspicuously poor weather. Bleak. Disheartening. Climate change. Extinction.
“I’m going to now launch, I think,” she said, crossing her legs beneath her. She began to read her first poem, an exploration of the esoteric questions of plant genetics in relation to histories of agriculture, intercultural exchange, and racism. I listened. We listened. The air circulated. The rain pattered on the roof.
And then she finished the poem. People asked questions. Finally, it was time for the second half of the advertised “reading and walk,” weather permitting. “Well,” said Katherine McLeod, rare’s Director of Research and Education, and de facto leader for the afternoon. “It’s raining.” Nevertheless, we squirmed into our coats and boots, and stepped out into the rain, cold hands clasping umbrellas. A short trek along a winding uphill trail took us to a wooden pavilion like a rib cage tipped on its side, where we squatted on converted milk crates and gazed out over a plaintive vista of muck and brush. Hands stuffed in pockets, we listened to Houle read two more poems, one a prickly sendoff to a recently-deceased colleague mixed with a meditation on plant pollination, the other a study of flea markets and archaeological sites. During the reading, a young boy kicked his rubber boots against his milk crate and a flock of songbirds gathered in a nearby tree to offer their commentary.
I admit, then, that my attention wandered, as it so often does during readings. I like to suppose that this wandering was, in this particular instance, the point, that Houle’s own effort to “pay attention” to the world and the words that describe it inspired in me, and perhaps in others, a restless need to perceive, a voracious appetite for sensation.
Walking back to North House and feeling the unpleasant ache of an oncoming cold, I saw the building from above, as if for the first time. It looked heartbreakingly temporary and profoundly out-of-place, like a Lego house, an eco-chic rent-a-box, or a mobile home for fans of Her. I couldn’t imagine, in that moment, anyone wanting to live in such a place for more than a matter of months. If North House is the home of the future, and those “things that are happening” suggest that it will need to be, the future will be strange. It will be an uncomfortable future of transience and hybridity. We will need, more than ever, our poets.