ABSTRACT
This chapter features the commission response from internationally recognized nature poet Don McKay. The commissioning ideas behind Artists of the Floating World, with their transgressive aspirations in relation to Modernism, touch on a deep preoccupation with McKay, that is, the relationship between language and experience and the limits of representation. To this, McKay brings an enigmatic self-understanding: “The point of poetry is to use language to demonstrate its own inadequacy.” In other words, it is a method to engage the world that embeds an illustrative self-consciousness of its own limitations. This chapter explores McKay’s poetics for their tensions with Modernism, their efforts, that is, to pull entities out of insufficient objectivities—what he will call ‘Thingifying’ in the commissioned work Thingamajig.
