Interview with Keith Gaboury
Q: Poetry and the sciences are often placed at odds with one another, whether they are truly all that fundamentally opposite or not. What drew you to this issue of Popular Mechanics as a source for your erasure?
A: I’ve always been interested in science. I remember reading Scientific American as a teenager. To this end, I have a full-length poetry collection titled The Cosmos is Alive that I believe poetically scratches my scientific itch. With “Dear Yesterday’s Imagined Future,” I wrote the erasure poem this past April 2023 when I wrote a poem everyday for Hollie Hardy’s 30 For 30 Challenge as part of National Poetry Month. Over 30 days, I was given 30 poetry prompts. The prompt on one particular day was erasure. Through some online research, I went down a little rabbit hole where I read a smattering of writing that attempted to predict the future. There’s a universe of writing and artwork out there that works within this predictive space. When I found an article predicting the future in the archives of Popular Mechanics, I was immediately interested. From there, my erasure play took over.
Q: Where is the hingepoint for you between the clean utopia and the ugliness of what it takes to build it? Is the destruction of the natural, the human, a feature or a bug?
A: On a cosmic scale, one argument in favor of humanity being alone in the universe is that there’s a cosmic filter at a certain point that humans on Earth have not yet reached. Are all conscious organisms doomed for a fate of self-destruction? Perhaps the universe hosted a species in the distant past who annihilated themselves in an event akin to a nuclear fallout. In order to build our version of civilization’s clean utopia, must humanity destroy the natural environment? If so, this clean utopia has a relatively short shelf life since utopia requires a stable environment for people to inhabit. Moreover, if one argues that destruction of the natural environment is a feature, then the logical extension of that argument is that humanity’s destructive environmental actions deserve a pass without any consequences. I refuse to make that argument. While we don’t know with any factual accuracy if there’s a cosmic filter, humanity can and must control how we treat the natural environment on Earth. Therefore, I believe that if (and when) humanity is destructive in order to build civilization in our twenty-first century image, this behavior is a bug that we must fight against.
Q: Is a city a kind of body? What is corrupted when the heart itself is a means for harm?
A: A city is a great metaphor for a body. I enjoy writing poetry that follows a metaphorical chain. If a city is a body, where in the city is the liver, the lungs, and the heart? The answers to these questions are very subjective. A city’s heart can be a human-made building, a natural geographical feature, a group of people, and other possibilities too. For instance, one person could argue that a city’s heart is a specific building while another person could say that the same city’s heart lies instead with a group of people. Between structures, people, and nature, a person’s choice in turn reflects their values. There is no wrong answer. One person’s answer is right from their perspective. If a city’s heart is used for a means of harm (wherever the heart resides), then the city itself is corrupted. Since the heart pumps blood throughout the body, the heart’s corruption spreads throughout the city. If a city can survive, its corrupted heart must be removed. The corruption must be physically, psychologically, and/or emotionally removed. Ultimately, the city will be remade anew.