What a beautiful and dreadful little pearl of a book is Oil + Water. Like a pearl it is a byproduct of trouble. This handcrafted “book project,” created by many skilled artists, intends to “engage you in exploring your own relationship” with petroleum and water through poems and creative prose about Gulf and Delta waters ruined by oil harvesting and inept river management. Inspired by the BP oil spill, it is meant not only to be read but, like the spill itself, to spread consciousness.
Don’t blame me, I wanted to say to this modest little hand-pressed, eco-friendly creation. Like project editor Jen Woods, or like Tony Hoagland, author of the poem “Texaco,” I have enjoyed mindlessly feeding my car and living in the Magic Kingdom where my primary concern is not natural-resource depletion but how I have ruined this little book’s collectible value by impressing its slipcase with coffee rings. As poet Matthew Lippman wrote: “What I say to the ocean when I have my feet in the sand is this:/ It is my fault. It is not my fault.” If you struggle with “your relationship” to this book project, if your feelings are aroused, then mixed, that’s because it is a work of art and does what art is meant to do.
Oil + Water at first looks like a collectible. The Kraft-paper slipcase holds a 40-page anthology of politically inclined, well-chosen poems and creative prose. In fact this anthology has already won a prize. Its spill-themed cover is subtle and beautiful. Also in the slipcase are 10 postcards with no pictures, text only, more like flashcards, baldly stating facts about oceans and about petroleum and its byproducts, such as aspirin and prosthetic limbs. “Crude oil is a combination of carbon and hydrogen” is not a fun postcard. It is not meant to be. It’s medicinal. It’s there to remind you, citizen of the Magic Kingdom with no other place to live, that you are part of a very serious problem that you personally cannot solve. After the Spillcam, what forgiveness? Readers are told that many people working in small ways will help. We all know we have to do more and better than that: Ration gasoline. Limit cars. Stop drilling. Stop building roads. Jail some people. Quit recreational shopping and travel.
As during the days of the Spillcam, I genuinely wanted a suggestion as to what action personally to take after engaging with Oil + Water. Anhedonia is a growth industry, and I think well-intentioned projects such as Oil + Water help inspire, among those educated enough to appreciate them, not collective action but anti-collective, entirely personal reactions such as survivalism, hoarding, frantic veganism, depression, nostalgia, and religious fervor. A survivalist friend who has an M.A. in social psychology buys and buries nickels, believing that one day when most of us have died but he has not, nickel will be a precious metal and he a kingpin.
On a recent visit to a Florida wildlife sanctuary swirling with marvelous waterbirds, I saw with a group of burbling eighth-graders a teacher’s aide who carried their cellphones in a bag. The main teacher spotted a bit of trash beneath the boardwalk. She shushed the group and pointed at it. “What do we call that, class?” she sang out. “Pollution,” they chorused. “And pollution—” she said, leading them, “Is a dirty word!” they cried. They got the word. They had seen pollution. And then they all got back into their bus.
Oil + Water ($20, Typecast Publishing) is available at typecastpublishing.com.
Catherine Rankovic is the author of Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis (Penultimate Press, 2010), and chief editor at BookEval.com.
