“Scientific Marvel” by Chimwemwe Undi

There was a moment, 20 years ago, when the notion of a post-prairie landscape emerged, due mainly to curator Steven Matijcio’s expansive exhibition “Scratching the Surface” at Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA. The notion was built on a work by long-admired poet/essayist Robert Kroetsch. It was Robert Kroetsch who put forth the theory from a literary perspective in Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 2005). In a nutshell, what Kroetsch identified and what Matijcio illustrated was the reality that in the 21st century, we needed new vocabulary for something artists (literary or visual) were contending with: the beautiful burden of place, the struggle to articulate the elegant nature of city life on the harsh plains when more appealing locales had long ago presented themselves. What it boiled down to, and what Kroetsch so perfectly asked, was, “Where in the hell did the prairies get to?” Now, 20 years later, we have an answer to this philosophical quandary of place and placelessness in the debut collection Scientific Marvel by Chimwemwe Undi. Former Poet Laureate for the City of Winnipeg, newly honoured Governor General’s Award winner and just-appointed Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate, Undi was still a preteen when the exhibition took shape and the Kroetsch anthology was published, but she benefits from these inheritances and brings her own unique experience of Winnipeg to add further complexity to the question.

Undi’s is undeniably a poetry of place and is augmented through a deep understanding of context. In reading these poems, we are reminded that the two should not be taken as mutually exclusive. It is in this recognition that I surmise only those of us who grew up in and around downtown Winnipeg, or at least spent our formative years there, would read the title of this book with a sly nod, hearing in our heads the long, softened, concluding syllable of “Marvel” not as that akin to wonderment but more closely tied to the drudging reality of an inner-city beauty school that was frequented out of necessity over choice by those whose cosmopolitan daydreams would forever remain so.

It was just down the street from the Scientific Marvel campus, at the corner of Portage Avenue and Broadway, waiting for the traffic light to turn green, that I last spotted a sundog, the meteorological phenomenon that occurs in places like Winnipeg mid-winter, where it is so cold that the sun at midday appears mirrored, twinned and sometimes multiplied. And then it happened again, in some related way years later, when I was reading Undi for the first time. Her doubling of words is so precise and considered that when she employs this technique, its familiarity feels comforting but strange, like seeing the sun refracted through the crisp, frozen prairie air. Poems like the duplex “Grunthal, Manitoba,” 2019, that considers the violence implicit in just being alive in a country laden with its colonial past, where she offers, “You can’t give back what has been taken / Unname the place named what it already is” but concludes, “Fifteen miles southwest of nothing / A beautiful country because you still breathe.” The “duplex,” a new literary form, was introduced by queer Black American poet Jericho Brown, one of several influences on this emerging poet, employed with exactitude and grace.

There are a few poems in this collection that name Winnipeg as a source of inspiration (and frustration)—the first of which is a telling of how Undi relates to her artistic predecessors from her hometown. Names of ‘famous’ writers and artists (cult favourites more than dinner-table conversation topics) punctuate “Winnipeg Poem” amidst seasonal signposts and socioeconomic inside jokes in this list of 14 potential pitfalls when a person is attempting to work from, and through, a place like Winnipeg. Later in the collection, we are presented with “In Defence of the Winnipeg Poem,” five double-spaced lines that slyly and accurately weigh intention against outcome or more bluntly … call a spade a spade. Her “Ode to 200 from Each of my Tits” rings true for any young person spending a night out with friends at a stalwart of queer bars such as Club 200 with its plastic shot glasses, sticky floors and VLT machines that compete with the sing-screaming of drunk friends on the dance floor; but it becomes an echo of the city she loves with the lines “And all of us as all of us / going out, coming out, bright / under dollar-store disco ball, / over cardboard-cured potholes, / cardboard-lengthened / cocktail table legs / circled to shoulder / with every still / and unkissed girl.” In 2017, after 100 years of beauty tutorials and discounted haircuts by students, Scientific Marvel closed its doors across the country, but luckily for Winnipeg, Club 200 remains the last-standing and longest-running of its kind in the city.

The rare combination of poet and lawyer, Undi flexes her linguistic prowess in the handful of erasure poems scattered throughout this collection (as well as cento and sonnet). Redacting documents from the Supreme Court of Canada in poems such as “Black at the Time (from R v Grant, 2009 scc 32)” highlights the systemic and structural racism reinforcing the power imbalance that, in these examples, adversely affects Black people. It ends perfectly with the found text “… the / encounter is not made known by words …” implying the poet and the lawyer, each, have half of the job to do. A further example is the minimal poem “No, Suffer Here,” which makes way for the longer sister poem “Ground Upon,” both from Baker v Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, 1999), 2 SCR 817. This is referring to the case of Jamaican-born refugee Mavis Baker, who lived in Canada for more than a decade and had given birth to four children over that time, who was being deported without consideration for her children’s well-being or her own safety. “No, Suffer Here” is one page composed entirely of those three words in various order amidst a slender broken column of blacked-out legalese, driving home a complex understanding of the want for a better life being met with the reality of antagonistic and unyielding policies. “Ground Upon” is a five-page fortress of nuance, articulating the argument “… in determining / … the import-ance … / individual … / … lives [sic] // modern … / … lives … / … been alive … / … above what … would … / … be / given … what makes … / … the issue … / … the … body.” This emphasized erased presence concludes with the poem “An Informed Person,” cited from the same case, “… Our history … shows … / our … / multitude … / necessarily … / backgrounds, … / difference.”

Another experiment with form comes with “Comprehensive Ranking System,” a poem laid out in two columns that can be read top to bottom just as seamlessly as left to right. The subject matter pulls from the eponymous “points-based system” measuring the estimated value of a potential newcomer calculated on education, language proficiency, work experience and other forms of status quantified through governmental immigration policy.

If Chimwemwe Undi represents the legacy of a post-prairie poetic, what is she building her poems with if not the urban landscape and its violent past that continues to seep into her present? There is a successful juxtapositioning of existentialism and everyday nonsense that typifies online life in the present era where references to YouTube and social media celebrities sit comfortably alongside club nights, climate change and an astutely informed decolonial positionality. ❚

Scientific Marvel: Poems, by Chimwemwe Undi, House of Anansi Press, Toronto, 2024, 96 pages, paperback, $21.99.

Originally from Winnipeg, Kegan McFadden is an artist, curator and writer living on an island in the Pacific Northwest.