Under the microscope of a poet: What can we gain from reading about the deep sea?
During their postdoctoral fellowship at the UWA-Minderoo Deep-Sea Research Centre, author Prema Arasu explored the deep sea through the perspectives of scientists who each relate to it differently – be they oceanographer, geoscientist, taxonomist, marine biologist, geneticist or the creative writer–observer.
In this interview, Prema dives deeper into the work, and puts the scientists who inspired Vampire Squid under the microscope.
You have said elsewhere that you didn’t have a big body of poetic work behind you when you began to write Vampire Squid. What was it about your role at the Deep-Sea Research Centre that made you turn to poetry to describe what you saw?
My role at the Deep-Sea Research Centre was borne out of a need to investigate and challenge the ways in which the deep sea is constructed in the cultural imagination. Across books, movies, documentaries and YouTube videos, it tends to be represented in terms of its alterity, its incompatibility to human life. Its inhabitants are construed as sublimely mysterious and resistant to anthropocentric modes of knowledge. I saw this as a problem of aesthetics, and as a dedicated researcher, I approached the problem with the creative mode most suited to the contemplation of aesthetics: poetry.
It’s true that I hadn’t written much poetry before starting to write what would become Vampire Squid. The earlier poems were parodies, e.g. ‘Ode on a Blobfish’ and ‘Sonnet to a Fair Kraken’ or found object pieces e.g. ‘reviewer two’. Once I decided to collect it all into a monograph, much of my research was doing my own close readings of Romantic poetry, reading papers about post-anthropocentric poetics, and writing plenty of bad poems that didn’t make the final cut.
What did your colleagues think about being under the poet’s microscope? How have they responded to the poems you wrote about them?
It was a privilege to work alongside a team of the smartest, most dedicated and hardest-working people I’ve ever met, and not just as a writer-in-residence, but a fully salaried postdoctoral researcher. This, I believe, was a prescient managerial decision made by Centre Director Professor Alan Jamieson, and drove home the idea that humanities research plays a huge role in the dissemination, reception and outcomes of scientific research. My presence at the Centre made sure that everyone was always questioning the assumptions they brought to their own work, such as anthropomorphising fish or describing something as ‘cute’ versus ‘weird’.
Broadly speaking, scientists are used to removing themselves from their work in the pursuit of scientific objectivity—that’s why they love using passive voice. Most of them loved hearing my recounts of silly or strange moments of the things that happened in the lab. I was often asked what made something a poem or not a poem. I still can’t answer this.
What do you hope that readers gain from reading about the deep sea?
I hope they think about it more. The deep sea covers 40 percent of the earth’s surface and is inhabited by some of the most wondrous creatures. Its stability is also increasingly threatened by deep-sea mining, climate change and plastic pollution, but it often is forgotten when it comes to ocean conservation campaigns or policy.
What is next for Prema Arasu?
Speculative fiction has always been my thing. There are hints of it in Vampire Squid, but I’d like to return to worldbuilding in long form. Witchcraft, resurrection, cults, eldritch gods, parasitic fungi, blood magic.
Vampire Squid is available now from all good bookstores and online.
