Questions by Cara Nelissen
PRISM got to chat with Lucas Crawford, author of The High Line Scavenger Hunt (University of Calgary Press, 2018), about the writing and research process, the complexities of the High Line park, and the role of New York City in the queer imagining. Enjoy!
As the title suggests, the High Line park in New York City plays a central role in this book. What drew you to writing about this place?
Everywhere I looked online, bloggers and reviewers of the High Line park emphasized the beauty of the park by juxtaposing it with the area’s history of both “slaughterhouses” and “transsexuals.” This pairing was jarring. The ease with which those words are paired reveals some truth about the way in which people can perceive trans bodies (variously, of course) as meat, as flesh, as undead material to be purchased, processed, and otherwise consumed. This was one reason I wanted to write about the High Line: it has acted as kind of lightening rod through which public feelings about transgender people run.
Another reason is that the public conversation about the High Line fascinated me. People gushed about it in a way that’s generally reserved for crushes! The conversation exemplified so many issues/problems/questions that can be found elsewhere. Among other things, the High Line is a project of erasure marketed as preservation. It straddles a number of categories used to govern and coerce queer sexuality (urban/pastoral, public/private, ruin/renewal, business/pleasure) and the park now animates city planning worldwide, with “reclaimed railway track park” having become almost its own genre. The book became a question of in what ways are design and poetry able and unable to respond to the forces of urban renewal?
As someone who is interested in architecture and design, I loved how the new park grappled with its odd placement and shape (it is very thin, 2.33 k long, hovering above the street). The design is sexy, and that is worth enjoying, but I felt that more of the context and social questions should become part of the conversation.
There is a lot of information about the High Line and New York City woven into these poems. How did you approach the research process for this book?
Haphazardly? Hahaha, no, I would say it was a multi-pronged approach. I looked to my mentor in all things Architecture—Annmarie Adams at McGill —for direction, and had fruitful conversations with her students. I read all I could online and in book form about the process of creating the High Line, the history of the neighbourhood, and so on. I had already studied the careers of the architects (DS+R) rather deeply as part of my PhD work. I also moved to Manhattan in the summer of 2009, which was when the first phase of the park opened. This allowed me to experience the park. Studying the High Line park at Columbia (before I dropped the sad studio course I was enrolled in) allowed me to see how the structure was being discussed in problematic ways—ways that insisted that history and justice have no role in the discipline of Architecture.
Of course, a lot of the information presented in the book exists in the margins. And there is so, so much information that I just do not have. The “scavenger hunt” of the title is meant to poke fun at the book’s own process—it gets at the idea of historical work being a type of scavenging, and it references my own desire to be self-reflective about the work and to refuse to “scavenge” in a systematic or fetishizing way. I didn’t want to pretend I found anything I hadn’t found. I wanted to rely on imagination and fantasy in a number of ways (for instance, one poem is an “artist’s statement” written by a character named Brandywine Smooth Witherod, which is a species of plant on the High Line), so as to confront my research with the realistic limits of what I could write with “authority.”
One of your poems, “The World Without Us”, references Alan Weisman’s book of the same title. The poem ends with the lines “You are not/in control”. In what ways did ideas about human control and lack of control in shaping our environments inform your writing of this book?
So many matters in life (or mine, at least) seem controlled—for me, what people think about fatness, gender, disability, mental health, etc. all inevitably influence my life. I have wondered if queer discourse sometimes emphasizes agency and self-ownership so much as a response to that seeming lack of agency. Because I find that emphasis stifling too! And not because I’m so overflowing with agential power. Out of this mess of coercions, mixed with the coercion to never be coerced, I find freedom in imagining ways to question the binary of control/controlled, to acknowledge that one is not in control much and to not experience that as a loss, to keep learning to live with discomfort. That is easier said than done, and we all bring different stakes and experiences to these challenges.
In the notes of your book you speak a bit about the role cities, and perhaps no city more so than New York City, play in the queer imagining. How does the idea of urban centers being viewed as the only livable place for queer and trans people—while also being the site of incredible violence—feature into the writing of these poems?
Being from “buttfuck nowhere”, as they say, New York City holds a special place in my imagination—both as a fantasy and as a symbol of the coercion many rural queers and trans people feel to move to larger centres in order to find “authentic” queer histories and scenes. I wanted to think about the New York City phenomenon of the High Line as a queer and genderqueer rural maritimer, to be open about this disjunction, and to theorize my own life and tendencies through this encounter with architecture and urbanism. In a culture where NYC has so much power to write the lives of rural queers, I wanted to, even temporarily and tenuously, act as though I could write back to this power—without mistaking the queer cultural cachet of NYC for actual power exercised by queers who live there.
Several poems in this collection are found or erasure poems. How did you pick the source texts and what was the significance of repurposing them for poetry?
I wanted to choose some texts that were adjacent to the High Line, but not too close to it. For instance, I repurposed a transphobic and racist script from a Sex and the City episode that features Samantha, having just moved into the High Line’s (future) neighbourhood, feuding with Black trans sex workers. I can’t write about those lives, and I certainly can’t speak in those voices, but by creating a piece like that one, I am inviting readers to learn about this without trying to control that narrative. What can I do from my subject position? I can respond to a piece of pop culture by erasing parts of it in a way that decenters Carrie and her crew. I can use poetry to underline (and strikethrough) the fact that even supposedly progressive media has had and continues to have a role in de-humanization and displacement.
The found poems were particularly satisfying, as they allowed me to reframe bits of High Line discourse and invite a new reading of them, couched in a different context of queer poetry. (For example, one list poem is “FOUND: High Line Plant Species that Sound Like Drag Names.”)
What are you working on right now?
This week, I recorded some of my book, which will become part of a free audio guide for the High Line later this summer!
I am working on the edits for my next poetry collection, Belated Bris of the Brainsick, which comes out with Nightwood Editions in October 2019. Though The High Line Scavenger Hunt is personal in some ways, this book is much more so.
I am also just starting research on another project about poetry, bodies, and space: a collection about Internment Camp B70, a POW camp that imprisoned 711 Austrian and German Jews in Ripples, NB from 1940-41 and various political dissidents from 1941-45.
Lucas Crawford is a poet and an associate professor of English Literature at the University of New Brunswick. Lucas is the author of Sideshow Concessions, winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for innovative poetry, and of Transgender Architectonics, which won the Arcus/Places prize by the College of Environmental Design at UC-Berkeley and helped spark ongoing interest in the High Line park, its designers and its histories.