Trent University alumna Dr. Kate Eichhorn was recently short-listed for the Governor General’s award for English-language poetry for her book Fieldnotes, a forensic. In Fieldnotes, Professor Eichhorn takes a poetic look at the forensic language that has insinuated itself into our day-to-day discourse over the past two decades, presenting the resulting poems in the form of an anthropologist’s fieldnotes. Prof. Eichhorn’s first book of poetry, Fond (BookThug, 2008) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award in 2009. Fieldnotes, like Fond, plays content against form, exploring the tension between fictional and factual discourses by cloaking the one in the other and blurring the boundaries between the two.
Prof. Eichhorn, who followed her B.A. in Women’s Studies and English from Trent, with an M.A. in the History and Philosophy of Education at Simon Fraser’s Faculty of Education, and a Ph.D. in Language, Culture, and Teaching at York University’s Faculty of Education, says that at times she was surprised by where her education took her, but that ultimately it ended up impacting her work to this day by exposing her to the rigors of social scientific research at a key juncture in the discipline. “I’m influenced by a particular moment in critical ethnography that happened in the early to mid-nineties when there was a lot of discussion about the fictional elements in ‘objective’ or scientific writing. Forensic investigators, for example, are always piecing together a story,” maintains Prof. Eichhorn. “I think we can say there’s some truth in those stories, but there’s also lots of fiction: They’re telling stories in the name of objective science.”
The lines between fact and fiction are further blurred in Prof. Eichhorn’s book by the integration of “found poetry” in the form of quotes and excerpts from newspaper reports, forensic science textbooks, anthropology textbooks and other non-literary sources. “A lot of the book is comprised of textual fragments taken from actual forensic investigations,” explains Prof. Eichhorn, “There are certain poems in the book where entire lines are taken out of ethnographic texts, out of forensic reports, but then in some cases, the next line is appropriated from a CSI script.”
While the resulting collection explores meta-fictional questions of language and identity, it anchors itself in a form of character study based on the anthropologist-narrator. “As a result of television programs like Bones and CSI, there’s this very popular portrayal of the female forensic investigator circulating in popular culture, but I’ve always thought they look too clean, too together. But if you actually spent all your time digging up mass graves, what would that do to you psychologically? So I was also interested in this character - who that would be, what her relationship to knowledge and identity would be. ”
Published by BookThug, a small Toronto publishing house headed by Jay MillAr, Prof. Eichhorn’s is one of three books on the Governor General awards’ five-book short list. According to Prof. Eichhorn, the relationship with a small publisher like BookThug allows her both the freedom to be innovative as well as greater control over questions of production and promotion. “It’s a very, very small press so your relationship with the publisher is quite personal,” asserts Prof. Eichhorn. “Even before I was published with BookThug, I was a big supporter of Jay MillAr’s press and an admirer of his work.”
Kate Eichhorn is a writer, cultural critic, and assistant professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School University in New York. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Fond (BookThug, 2008) and Fieldnotes, a forensic (BookThug, 2010), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. She is also co-editor of Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (Coach House, 2009) and is working on her first novel, Felt Lack, which she describes as a work of experimental prose exploring the political and aesthetic possibilities of failed social transformations.
Posted on Tuesday, November 29, 2011.