Styrofoam

by Evelyn Reilly

Evelyn Reilly's previous books include HIATUS, which was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, and the chapbook Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces.

In this tour de force of applied poetics, Reilly casts a "clear dome over the fake snowstorm" of human spirit, and sings the body plastic. If polymers have a destiny, as the ultimate Ideal Material, Reilly be their phenomenologist, synthesizing domains out of "the multiplicity of foam and foam¹s conditions," spirit¹s antithesis to the human comedy, and animal tragedy, of extinction. Can we avoid such an Inferno, say "goodnight styrene," without examining the broken dust of our lingo, the abhorrent force of plasticity? Can poetry be more than Paradise with a plastic garden at the end of it? Let Reilly be our guide through this Purgatory of partial objects, let lux arise from a sea of foam. A solvent book for unabsolvable times.
- Jonathan Skinner

"A vast Sargasso sea of plastic fragments the size of a continent has been discovered in the Pacific Ocean. How do we go about living in what Evelyn Reilly defines as 'our infinite plasticity prosperity plentitude' and still have room for poetry? STYROFOAM might just show us how to do this. It's a wonderful, mad, challenging itinerary"
- John Ashbery.

Genres: Poetry

68 pages

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an incredibly challenging read for me, but it was a rewarding journey. Glad to have taken my first step into exploring ecopoetry!

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rooms outlast us? So does cup o soup. Oh here's my real, stupid, hastily typed review: Quintinye was a compost poet “but what may serve to amend that Earth or Soil returning to it by way of Corruption, under whatever Figure it returns to it; because that whatever reenters into that Earth, gives it back in some manner what it had lost, either in the same Specie, or in Value, and in effect it becomes Earth again, as it was before; thus all manner of Stuffs, Linnen, the Flesh, Skin, Bones and Nails of Animals, Dirt, Urines, Excrements, the Wood of Trees, their Fruit, their Leaves, Ashes, Straw, all manner of Corn or Grains, &c.” In the 17th C the belief was all waste will cycle back into soil, the fungible stuff that composes what Marx called “the land, which functions as [humans’] natural laboratory”. In the 21st C we are

here in [un]eternal [de]frosted desolateness

where the solvent properties
of our insolvent imprints

admit not (even) the cheerful greenness of complete decay (64)

Significant that Reilly ends with the ocean and the American and poetic genealogy of oceanic literature in “The Whiteness of the Foam.” The ocean is traditionally the space in which a radical alterity or immanent power resides whether it is the subconscious, the eschatological or political leviathan or Melville’s terrible god. Evelyn’s styrofoam represents the plasticity and the protean changes of one substance replacing digestion and decay of substances in the ocean. Just as Evelyn turns these lines from the classics against themselves with parentheticals, the evanescent sea foam is now injected with the eternal plastic which are now becoming significant, enduring actors in ocean systems. THIS IS ONE OF THE SHAPES SHE SAID PROTEUS WOULD TAKE. Reading this was to be startled by ontological insights via their emphasis on representing the longchain molecular form of plastic molecules. Just as binary code undergirds the virtual, more and more matter is being eternalized into a form “without change in its intrinsic properties” (61). “Thus the common.experience”: Reilly’s uses of the period suggests words as polymer chains and as part of the syntax of web-address, all saturating daily experience. These are different relations: “All this.formation / anddeformation” (11). The period as a link in the polymer chain brings the elements it links together into a relationship of difference. Each word becomes its own hermetic utterance, a tough, inert thingyness within a larger string of languge. The period as part of url nests each term within the previous one, determining place or route, while also serving as directions to (or envelope for) content. It’s a signifier that doesn’t deliver the signified in all its fullness. // // // Here is Gabrys on the plastic that undergirds modern consumer goods: “Ephemerality can only hold at one level; it instead reveals new spaces of permanence. Throw away plastic to discover it lasts for an ice age. The balance of time shifts. The instant plastic package creates new geologies” (88). Reilly revels in suggesting that these banal plastics are what put us in touch with sublime durations. We do not kiss the stone sculpted into an expression of religious ecstasy or pieta, we kiss the plastic lip of a styrofoam cup. The affective registers of these plastic geologies is that of melancholy—zombie and purgatorial masses outlasting life—or constituting our afterlives. Here we’re far away from the geological sublime of Neidecker and other authors as these plastic objects don’t register signs of their passage through time (of waves on rock become waves in rock); indeed “A Key to the Families of Thermoplastics” becomes not a jaunt through history but a piling list soon to be detritus devoid of human actors or users. Indeed in lines such as “powder coatings used in offshore drillings” plastic indeed seems to become tech for its own extraction, automated technological process acting out the string, the long chain, the foreseeable duration.

[Geoffrey Olsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

this apoplexy apocalypse incantation
this devastation deflection invocation
this reflex context perplex
-from "The Whiteness of the Foam"

The poetry polymerizes on the page—sparse, stark structures form bonds & affinities among word units. Reilly's Styrofoam seems to move in ways similar to Pound's Cantos (Reilly calls Pound a "great (if rather medieval-minded) nature poet and lousy political poet")—it's epic (it opens with a statement of the theme "Styrofoam deathlessness" and then an invocation of the muse: "little dead Greek lady/ in your eternity.saddle") but lacks the hubris and imperialist intentions of the epic poems of the past. A pastiche of sources, fragments, varying rhetorical modes (high, low, St. Theresa of Avila's renaissance mode, modern chemist's diction etc.), it is an epic of ecopoetics exploring the consequences/reverberations of plastics. An epic of the global ecology (ecologue?), so an epic not just of humans. Not fixated on human experience, seeing the bonds linking ecosystems, resource consumption, art making, society, politics, texts etc.

Plasticity parallels art-making communities "this intimate.mixed with authentic.faux.art.products." Sentences contracted and condensed to let their ambiguities and bifurcations extend. Sentences like chemical diagrams. Poetry as engagement with the plasticity of form: "which can be molded into almost anything//& cousin to.thingsartistic"

"to ride on the heat of y/our own melting"

[Reilly Blum · Rating 2 out of 5]

don't like poetry

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Polystyrene versus the Ideal Material."

Page 37 says it all.