Oil-patch poets extract a rich literary history

Winnipeg Free Press

13 hours ago

In her first academic monograph The Rough Poets: Reading Oil Worker Poetry, Winnipeg scholar, activist and poet Melanie Dennis Unrau makes the case that poetry written by oil workers about the energy economy deserves a central place in the canon of Canadian poetry.
The texts she analyses and those like them are 'foundational to Canadian petropoetry,' a genre Unrau defines as 'being about class, care and harm, about feelings, about extractivism and how it operates, about Canadian culture and the vital role that extraction workers play in it, and about dynamic processes of moving toward and away from fossil fuels and climate change.'
The writers she highlights employ a range of aesthetic and technical choices. From the graphical ways Peter Christensen and Lesley Battler score the page to the rap-influenced verbal dexterity of Nate Parkin to the relatively traditional lyric poems of Dymphny Dronyk and Matthew Henderson and beyond, it's the poet's identity and the way the poems are 'tuned to extraction' that define the tradition of petropoetry.
The Rough Poets
In her analyses, Unrau considers themes of settler-colonialism, class consciousness, gender politics and climate change, as well as the ways in which the poets approach these.
In her consideration of Lesley Battler's collection Endangered Hydrocarbons, for example, Unrau demonstrates that the text is 'animacy theory that uses serious linguistic play with supposedly inanimate objects to reveal and exacerbate the deep linkages between coloniality, racism, and the petroeconomy.'
Unrau locates the start of petropoetics with Sidney Clarke Ells' collection Northern Trails, originally published in 1938. From there, she traces a literary lineage of white oil workers through the 20th and into the 21st century. The structural choices in this book are integral to the argument Unrau makes, among which are her presentation of the material chronologically, which emphasizes the way the lineage develops, and her choice to provide a poem in its entirety from the work she's analysed in each chapter, which gives the reader a small grounding in the specifics of material they might not be familiar with.
In her analysis of Ross Bellot's First Day, from his 2020 collection Moving to Climate Change Hours, she attends to the particular ways in which Bellot frames manhood: 'the refinery worker must learn to perform as a 'good boy' — a heteropatriarchal worker, father, husband, and citizen who goes through the paces ('wear workboots, learn work rules/ get the paycheque, go home to Shelley' and so on) to support his family.' The emphasis on the performance of gender norms is in tension with the dehumanizing setting which reduces 'Two men blinded by hydrofluric acid/ yesterday' to 'lost time.'
Among The Rough Poets's many strengths is Unrau's ability to make high-level theoretical analysis clear, if somewhat demanding, for a non-specialist audience. Common in the poems and books Unrau analyzes is a sense of the speaker's ambivalence vis-à-vis the oil industry and their position within it.
Unrau uses various theoretical models to illuminate this: among these are Marxist theory, which brings the idea of disidentification (briefly, that subjects can be both complicit with the dominant ideology and resist it); affect theory, which brings psychology to bear on the subject; and animacy theory, which treats language itself as a 'subject of inquiry rather than a mere vehicle for representation.'
Unrau concludes this timely study with a personal political vision for what truly understanding petropoetics can yield, beyond the obvious scholarly value. Closely read, these texts, and this tradition, can show us how to navigate ''ugly,' ambivalent, confused, and mixed feelings as potential ground for solidarity toward energy justice.'
Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.