Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins, by Genevieve Carver was written in response to the poet’s engagement with research and researchers at the University of Aberdeen's School of Biological Sciences. During her residency here, Genevieve was in Eynhallow, Orkney following a study into breeding fulmars, and in the Moray Firth following the passive acoustic monitoring of dolphin and porpoise populations in and around offshore wind farm sites. In the following interview Elliot Ruff speaks to Genevieve about the process.
ER: What was your day-to-day like in Eynhallow and North-East Scotland during the residency?
GC: The two parts of the project were different, I guess. For the Eynhallow project, because it’s an uninhabited island and you can only get there by charter boat, you go there for one solid chunk of time. So, I went there for a week in May, the start of the breeding season for the birds. And you’re living in a little old house, which is bare bones in terms of the water is on a pump and there’s a generator. It’s quite idyllic. I was really lucky as well because it was good weather while I was there. But it’s just you and the birds on the island, and I kind of took the attitude of getting as involved as I can in the fieldwork, and to save the actual writing for when I got back, so I could immerse myself in what they were doing. They’ve got records of every nest site, because the birds tend to go back to the same nest sites every year. So, they’ll go round and record is there a bird in that nest site, are there any new nest sites, is it the same birds as last time in that nest site, because you can tell which birds are which by the colours that they put on their legs. So, it’s an inventory of who’s back and who’s breeding, and who’s got an egg. Sometimes they would catch birds with what looks like a giant butterfly net to put trackers on them to figure out where they’re going. They only hold them for about a minute and then let them go.
There were two artists there as well as me. One was a painter and illustrator called Joan Gabie, and she did all these one-minute sketches of the birds when we caught them. Afterwards, you go back and they input everything into a computer.
What I’ve tried to do in the poems is really capture that scientific process. I didn’t want to just be like: here’s a load of poems about birds and how nice they are and look at them flying. I wanted it to be about the science.
Some of these poems won the Moth Nature Writing Prize, with judge Max Porter highlighting their ‘hybridity’. Is that hybridity something that was consciously important to your writing?
I don’t know how conscious it was. It was a really fun way to write because you have a lot of base material to play with. So, in the other section of the book about the dolphin monitoring work, that’s a different type of fieldwork. When we were on the island with the birds, it’s like you’re right there in it, you’re picking them up. But the dolphin work all happens underwater, and you’re listening, and it’s all to do with sound. So that process got me into thinking about all the equipment and all the processes. There are so many steps we’ve developed to study these animals. So, thinking about the hybridity, that’s why I used things like the ‘Risk Assessment’ and the ‘Method Statement’. They were fun primary sources to play with. The dolphin stuff took me ages to get into. I couldn’t figure out how to approach it and everything I wrote was just a cheesy poem about a dolphin. It was really the machines, equipment and kit that made me realise at a certain point that I was going to have to start writing as if I was writing about space, not as if I was writing about animals. You’re exploring the unknown.
Did the fieldwork experience give you a notion of where the place of the machine is in the environment?
Yes, because that’s what you’re working with. You’re not actually working with the animals. That’s what all the conversations revolve around, so they kind of became my subject. And also, technology is not always reliable, it’s not always fit for purpose and it goes wrong. So, I liked the idea that these bits of equipment had little quirky personalities.
Alongside the ‘Machines’ section you have the ‘Humans’ section. Was this a difficult voice to place at all?
I can’t remember when that section came. I think it might have been the last one. But I guess it’s not that human. What I mean by human is the way that humans study animals and their processes. I became really interested in that. The dolphins and the birds do not care that we’re studying them. It’s such a human thing to go to extreme lengths to observe these creatures that really don’t care. So I wanted to get across some of that, the complex processes and methods people use to understand things. I think the human section could have been called ‘scientists’.
There’s often a dichotomy between biological and mechanical, but they feel close in this structure.
I think I play with that quite a lot. In the very first poem in the book the humans become the island, become part of the environment. In the machines section there’s definitely a playing with the idea that they’re animate. In the poem ‘Hydrophone’ I describe the electronic cable like an umbilical cord. So, I’m definitely playing with the idea that biological and mechanical are not necessarily distinct.
What decisions were you making regarding the form of the poems moving between bird, human, machine and dolphin? And what about those postcard poems?
A lot of it came from me, but it was also massively enhanced by Guillemot. I’m not sure if I was aware of it at the time, but I noticed that the bird poems are full of space and air, with a lot of space on the page and very little punctuation, and the machine poems are more dense. This is probably the work that I’ve written that plays with form the most. I don’t know if I thought about it consciously, but it seemed to make sense.
The postcard idea is from a particular piece of research about one of these birds that had a tracker on it. They tend to fly to the same feeding grounds, and this one got really lost and ended up about five hundred miles from where it was meant to be, but still found its way back to the island. They’re homing birds, so they go back to the same nest every year but go on these huge voyages. So, they’ve got this incredible homing instinct, and I liked the idea of it going off on its travels and writing postcards.
In the final ‘Dolphins’ section, how were you translating the dolphins - subjects without human language - into poetry?
These poems all focus on sound, and I took each one of the different, categorised sounds that dolphins make. But everything came from the research and what I learnt. I thought the echolocation click was really interesting. We know echolocation is how these animals navigate, but I loved the idea that what they’re doing when they click is listening. To listen they’re making a sound, so they actively listen using their voice, which is completely different to how we think of listening. The whistle was also really fun to write. The different sounds have different purposes, and the whistle is how they communicate. If we did talk about dolphins having language, that would be the whistle, how they’re sending messages to each other. Some of the lines in the poem are things that have been suggested that they might have been ‘saying’, like for navigation with a dolphin saying, ‘go this way’. But most of the lines are just me thinking, I wonder what else a dolphin might say to another dolphin. They all have what’s called a signature whistle, so every dolphin has its unique whistle that it and others will call, almost like a name.
The sequence is also accompanied by the EP that you made. Music is a key part of a lot of your past writing, but was there anything that made you want that musical accompaniment this time specifically?
I think because they’re so focused on the sounds, and the way that the scientists study these animals is using sound. For example, they put a hydrophone underwater and get these recordings, so it made sense to use that. The music that Lucy Treacher has created uses the actual hydrophone recordings of dolphin sounds alongside instruments, with human whistling and human breath as well as dolphin whistling.
Is music almost a way out of the high risk of anthropomorphising that comes with language?
I learnt to accept that I’m an absolutely guilty anthropomorphiser. I would be lying if I said that isn’t what I’m doing in a lot of these poems. I think it can be bandied around as something you shouldn’t do, but I think you can’t avoid it, so we might as well have fun with it and try and be true to what we do know.
Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins by Genevieve Carver has been illustrated by Antonia Glucksman and is available here.