The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson

Blessing for the swim selfie
All words (except title) transcribed from garbage found in the swimming hole in Cape Broyle, NL.

Layer by layer, let us onion
open into the sun. Let us swing,

pantsless as tolling bells,
into the green-gold water.

We are spilling from sugar
cones. We are mouthfuls.

We are sick & whole. Mages,
building boats of popsicle sticks

& emotions. Constellations
of Doritos, diving. We are

mathematics. Please, we are facts,
with hands & cameras as proof.

Every So Often You Love Your Body
All words (except title) transcribed from garbage found at Beachy Cove, near St. John’s, NL.

You are
a que3r village

undressing,
lifting your _________,

saying here,
here

is my _________,
embers still hot.

Your thirst lowers
its open _________

to the water
& drinks.

Artist Statement

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why swimming outdoors, especially in cold water, makes me feel so good—nervous system regulation, cold shock response, mammalian dive reflex, endorphins, hydrostatic pressure. But what matters more than the science is the crisp visceral embodiment of a cold water swim in a half frozen river, the sensory pleasure of floating in a warm pond looking up at the stars. Swimming is one of the things that has brought me joy throughout years of chronic illness, and is one of the few times I dependably feel at ease in my body. I sometimes refer to this as a “survival joy”—an experience of body-based joy that I seek out when I am struggling to feel pleasure or happiness in everyday life.

I came to the Garbage Poems project five years after a serious concussion that seriously limited my ability to write (or even enjoy) poetry. I had received a grant for an in-depth project about chronic illness and recovery that I was failing to write, daily, at the writing retreat funded by this grant. Eventually I let myself stop trying so hard and simply did what would give me a little joy—swimming. Every morning I walked to a nearby waterfall to swim in the cold water. Out of habit or annoyance, I started collecting discarded cans and bottles to bring home for recycling. As I sorted my haul for the recycling and trash, I began to rearrange the words on the packaging into small proto-poems. This became my daily ritual. I would swim early before the crowds gathered, and then bring home assorted garbage and sort it on the kitchen table to transcribe. With the chill of the river still on my skin and my nervous system regulated and enlivened by the cool water, I’d use the found language on beer bottles and chip bags to find ways of describing the experience of swimming.

The constraint of found language prevented me from saying things in habitual ways, which brought a weird honesty into my writing — not only did I have to scramble around for unfamiliar ways to say things that still felt true, I also had to sit intimately with the experience of linguistic and cognitive limitation that had been such a core part of my experience of concussion.

I’ve returned to this ritual over the past eight years, and it’s become a book-length manuscript illustrated by my artist friend April White. I cannot explain the joy I get from their watercolour portraits of the garbage that is the source material for these poems, the unexpectedly open-hearted ‘being with what is’ mood of the paintings. Strangely, or perhaps not surprisingly at all, this collection of poems has become about chronic illness and recovery, and the role that physical joy and the specific pleasures of swimming have played in that process.

See more about the Garbage Poems project, including April White’s watercolour works.

Anna Swanson is a queer white settler living in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk. Her writing is interested in themes of chronic illness, concussion, embodiment, identity, queerness, pleasure, and survival joy. Her first book of poetry, The Nights Also, won the Gerald Lampert Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies including In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry and The Best Canadian Poetry in English. She recently joined Riddle Fence as a poetry editor, loves wild swimming in all seasons, and is still making poems out of garbage.