Decomp by Stephen Collis

by Stephen Collis

Poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott left copies of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species to decay in five distinct ecosystems in British Columbia. A year later, they photographed what remained, reading poetry into nature's "rewriting" process and documenting the gorgeous detritus in Decomp , a long poem in prose and color photographs. Darwin is an eye amidst graphed genera seeing the web it is woven thereof. A matted scrap of printed material, shit, soil and leaf rot—all dried, bleached and curled up at small edges. Stephen Collis is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of essays, Dispatches from the Occupation . Jordan Scott is the author of Silt and Blert , which explores the poetics of stuttering.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published November 12, 2013

Reviews

[Sam Sawazki]

Dnf. Wasn't for me.

[Mills College Library]

currently-reading

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The time of the poems is not human time."

- Maurice Blanchot, The Book To Come

"In the balance of nature, or food chain, or great chain of being, or ecosystem, or economy, some bodies feed on other bodies, some bodies work together, some bodies work for other bodies and some bodies produce, some bodies die and some bodies go on living. And somebody writes, and somebody thinks.
How did we get from some bodies to somebody? Decomp takes the text best known for exploring this question, Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and subjects it to an experiment to find how we get from somebody back to some bodies: 'I'm going to put the natural into the text, I'm going to put the text out into the natural world and see what happens to it'.
If a book decomposes in a forest, will anyone read it? Who will next in it? Decomp redefines our understanding of the act of reading and of what a book is, if not a forest, asking us to rethink who, or what, a 'sombody' is.

- Foreword by Jonathan Skinner

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50°09'897"N / 120°35'952"W


In sagebrush and cow paddy, we lay our bodies down. Here a scrap of book, scat, a spine of gluey bone. Here the word species, laying amid long ponderosa pine needles. A species laying its body down on this bed to observe the decomposing limits of its semantic and genetic expression. Darwin is an eye amid graphed genera, seeing the web it is woven thereof. A matted scrap of printed material, shit, soil and leaf rot - all dried, bleached and curled up at small edges.

If aimless passion
beside the land
sometimes a pebble
sometimes a tree
beside what is dying
the henceforth of all
feral lit azure
all deep-lying chum
what shadows are to earth
are lakescape tincture
sound in sect
sparrow cubes
glazing repose
in sweet nothings

like animals
interior suspense
the place where I am
I am alone
consumed like nature's
cultured blue
as if the right to grasp
this physical weight
of stupefied word
things in bellies
flutter of closing wings
could pronounce chromosome
like Woods' rose

Who knew if this should happen?
words for two things
because of what
we find twice
into gaze
plunge
ears into shadow

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METHODS: DECOMPOSITION


Leaching - ghost of
figures letterforms
just pronounced by
evapotranspiration

Catabolism - ipseity
in lacunae this fra
is in a text hole torn

Comminution - this he
this sect this me this our this
ch this will this most
this spe all seeding and
feeding activity

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Rain shadow:

When you're give everything, and have nothing left, so there's an arid time while you move on, an artery revising the weather.

Rain shadow:

Bluebunch wheatgrass sandberg bluegrass junegrass

And so none of these are music; and so your mouth to them are rhythms inside a home; and so water is a memory of form whistling to itself deep beneath the soil.

Rain shadow:

Separation of immersion, the idea of dryness falls in language in body in sight in sound - around which consciousness may be said to flicker in its thirst, or mothlike, compose its zonal gradient where moisture is a limit on excess.

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Stephen : But what ofdecomposition?

Jordan : Where one book was left, amidst some rocks, under ponderosa pine, just up the dry slope from the sagebrush and grasslands, we found at first only the words species, isolated and torn from the book.3

3 'There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made' (Deleuze & Guattari).

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[Shannon Finck · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We see the flexible feast before us; we believe at a small cost; we tacitly at the en cross of crytoplasm recover; and bit by bit this age is prey."

[Joe]

“Our chew slippages shorn to their descriptors”

“The very spillform I’ve become”

“Trees […] rain material down on our books in thick organic streams”

“We are porous too. Leaking. Rained on constantly.”

“The book open the ground read”

“cadence as rot”