This is hi-vis culture; stickers on giant lunch boxes and hard plastic helmets, a vague idea of getting the city built. But when is the city done? At what point is the landscape no longer workable, re-workable? Think about a future where broken down debris, dust from development projects is so fine, piled on so thick that to find footing is impossible.
I’d heard this second hand: someone somewhere, looking out over a desert landscape proclaimed: “One day all of this will be drywall”. Drywall is made of Gypsum not sand, so I guess they were looking out into the vast white sand somewhere southwest. In any case, the focus here is on the misinterpretation of materials. The story then, must be an attempt at rendering the bland poetry of a contemporary suburban landscape and its effect on the human psyche — something like that.
Think of the imprints on the soft wood of a kitchen table – kids scrawling, folks writing out cheques or recipes, part of that stuff stays in the table like carbon copy pictographs. Things take something on when they are worked in. Stuff, goods, objects attain some patina. That first poem there is about all of that.
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- Patrick La Marre
