Melanie Dennis Unrau, The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.
How does it feel to be a worker in an oil-and-gas industry and a Canadian petrostate amid the climate crisis and the early stages of a transition away from fossil fuels? What do industry workers know about how oil-dependent worlds are made, perpetuated, and unmade? How do they feel about the land they live and work on, and depend on for their livelihoods? What do they say about oil work when they are off the clock, when they think no one is listening, or when they are reaching toward ways of describing and reckoning with extraction that don’t pit them against either their fellow workers or the land?
These are some of the central questions in my new book The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry, an ecocritical study of seven poetry collections published by oil workers in Canada between 1938 and 2019. With the introduction, conclusion, and each of the seven short chapters preceded by an oil-worker poem that is then interpreted in the pages that follow, the book functions as both an anthology of oil-worker poetry and a work of literary criticism. It includes a timeline of oil-worker poetry in Canada (including chapbooks, portions of books, stand-alone poems, and examples of poetry about work indirectly related to the oil and gas industry) that I hope will contribute to the further study of the poetics of oil and oil work in Canada and elsewhere. I approach the texts I study in The Rough Poets as an environmentalist reader and as a poet, using creative and imaginative modes for literary criticism that are not so much about getting to the truth about these texts as considering how they imagine and make possible more just futures. I also approach these texts as an outsider—a literary scholar with no experience as an oil worker—and therefore with humility and openness to other interpretations and ways of reading.
The book makes four main arguments. First, it gathers an already-existing but seldom-studied tradition of oil-worker poetry in Canada, interpreting it as a literature of production that is foundational to the study of oil poetry. Second, it makes a case for the study of petropoetics as not only poetry and artmaking about oil but also material, cultural, and relational processes of worldmaking with fossil fuels. The Rough Poets counters the colonial, extractive mode of petropoetics with a poetics of solidarity, care, and climate justice. Third, the book contends that oil-worker poets are themselves theorists of petropoetics who do not need someone else to explain class, settler colonialism, toxic masculinity, or the petrostate. Although I use cultural theory to interpret these texts, I do it in a way that supports and builds on the poets’ own theorizations. My umbrella term for many of these theorizations, petrocultural disidentification, draws on cultural theories of disidentification (by Michel Pêcheux, José Esteban Muñoz, and Judith Butler) to help me make my fourth point, that oil-worker poets avoid fully identifying or counteridentifying with the oil industry or the toxic cultural identities assigned to people who do the dirty work in an extractive society. Instead, they ambivalently embody, play with, and subvert stereotypes of oil workers and, by doing so, demonstrate modes for solidarity that transcend the false framing of climate change as a debate or war in which they must choose a side.
They ambivalently embody, play with, and subvert stereotypes of oil workers and, by doing so, demonstrate modes for solidarity that transcend the false framing of climate change as a debate or war in which they must choose a side.
Ross Belot’s poem “First Day” precedes the introduction, which unpacks key terms and ideas like petropoetics, who counts as an oil-worker poet, disidentification, and the fraught state of Canadian literature. “The Athabaska Trail,” a poem by “father of the tar sands” S.C. Ells, is interpreted in a chapter on the 1956 expanded edition of Ells’s book of self-illustrated poems, short stories, and essays about the Athabasca region, Northland Trails. I argue that by avoiding reckoning with the impacts that his own work would have on a northland he claimed to love, Ells “fathered” for the industry and oil-worker poetry a trope of avoiding and repressing knowledge about the ecological and social impacts of extraction. Before the second chapter comes a clearer version of former oil-rigger Peter Christensen’s concrete poem “The Driller Makes a Mistake” than what appeared in Thistledown Press’s 1981 edition of Christensen’s pathbreaking book Rig Talk. Although reviewers at the time of its publication considered Rig Talk to be too rough and complicit to be considered good poetry, I interpret it as a discourse-theory of “rig talk”—a rapacious, endangering language/logic that is not only spoken and embodied by the workers but also inflicted on them as “expendable machine[s]” (Christensen 32).
A selection of the literature examined in Rough Poets.
Drawing on the poem “Interest-Based Negotiation” as an example, the third chapter interprets surface-rights negotiator, mediator, and writer Dymphny Dronyk’s book Contrary Infatuations (Frontenac House, 2007) as an affect theory of the bad love that keeps petrocultural subjects in relationship with fossil fuels, settler colonialism, and racial capital, locked into purist rules about what we know deep down but “don’t say” (Dronyk 80). In poems such as “Washout,” former production tester Mathew Henderson’s book The Lease (Coach House, 2012) advances its own discourse theory: “the lease” positions workers who also often live on oil and gas leases simultaneously as the perpetrators and the victims of ecocide, sexual violence, and other forms of dispossession. I argue in the fourth chapter that Henderson’s speaker’s ambivalent and naïve explorations of questions like “what a lease is” (Henderson 17), “what hands do” (48), and “what work is” (52) test the limits of solidarity and of what workers are willing to continue to do in a dangerous industry and a climate emergency.
In his poem “Blue Collar Mayhem,” former drilling fluid specialist and self-published poet Naden Parkin expresses “shame” about his work and its impacts while also implicitly asking readers not to “blame him” (Parkin 53). My chapter on Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth (2014) troubles his appropriation of Black and Indigenous dispossession as a metaphor for his own disempowerment; it also highlights his poetic practice of exposing hidden and ugly feelings as an invitation to rethink relationships, responsibility, and care. The sixth chapter, on former project information manager Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons (Book*hug, 2015), is preceded by Battler’s refinery poem “The Petrochemical Ball.” The language poetry in Endangered Hydrocarbons shows how the oil-and-gas industry and its opponents manipulate language to serve their interests—for instance, the term endangered hydrocarbons can be used to argue for the liberation of fossil fuels, either as trapped underground and in need of release or as imprisoned and tortured inside a refinery. In my reading, it also exposes the racist, colonial, and inhuman(e) logics that underpin the petrostate and stand in the way of energy justice.
Lindsay Bird’s poem “Safety Reminder” comes before the chapter on her 2019 book Boom Time (Gaspereau), a poetry collection about working in a tar-sands work camp in the mid-2000s that is good to read alongside Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. Bird’s chipper, unreliable young narrator attributes the danger and violence she skirts to fantastical giants and unknown monsters outside the frames of the poems, but my chapter finds the true monstrosity of Boom Time in the cannibalistic relations of “what eats grass and what eats us” in the settler-colonial petrostate (Bird 9). The poem “Birds Migrate at Night, Mostly Unseen” by Kelly Shepherd precedes The Rough Poets’ conclusion, which draws back from outside theory to investigate an affect theory of disidentification that runs through the tradition of oil-worker poetry in Canada.
In the face of purist logics that demand workers’ full allegiance to the corporations and industries they work for, my readings of oil-worker poetry highlight their contradictory care for the land, for one another, and for a livable future in the colonized and compromised landscapes and communities where they work and make their homes.
I like that, in my readings of each of these texts, the title of the book becomes the key to interpreting it—sometimes with, sometimes against the grain. It’s as if the poets and their editors knew what they were doing—knew they were articulating astute theories about petropoetics that can be summed up and accounted for as rig talk, contrary infatuation, the lease, a relationship with truth, endangered hydrocarbons, and boom time. These are intelligent books and essential reading for our era of climate emergency and polarization. In the face of purist logics that demand workers’ full allegiance to the corporations and industries they work for, my readings of oil-worker poetry highlight their contradictory care for the land, for one another, and for a livable future in the colonized and compromised landscapes and communities where they work and make their homes. Instead of focusing on shame, on what workers might feel they owe to an extractive industry that has never loved them back, or on the idea that being implicated in harm excludes a person from critique or resistance, I highlight the disidentificatory feelings of ambivalence, uncertainty, complicity, and discomfort as potential sites to cultivate solidarity and care toward a more just future.
Feature Image: Worker inspecting a furnace at the Imperial Oil lubricating plant in Edmonton, Alberta. Credit: Canada. Dept. of Manpower and Immigration / Library and Archives Canada.
Melanie Dennis Unrau
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