Fruit Machine (gonna make you sweat!)

queen  circus  gay bell 
whole blind bull camp 
coo cruise drag dike 
fish flute fruit mother 
punk queer rim sew 
swing trade velvet wolf 
blackmail prowl bar 
house club restaurant 
tea room top men

breast  farm hammer 
blonde stiff radiator 
erect politician stroke 
cigar child newspaper 
fight asphalt

Another found poem. This one comes from an infamous chapter in Canadian history--the effort on the part of the RCMP, mandated by the federal government and the military, to build a machine to identify queer people. This top-secret high security undertaking, the "Fruit Machine" project, gets going in the 1950s and 60s, when "national security" is evidently threatened by that scurilous curious hybrid, the "commie pinko fag" and all of his or her friends.  The idea was to show gay and straight pornography to suspected gay people strapped in barber's chairs (only a couple of rhetorical steps away from the electric chair here), and to use a device to measure the dilation of their pupils as they looked at the gay pornography. The idea was that the more the pupils dilated, the greater the involuntarily revealed interest. (If this story makes you think of some infamous scenes from Clockwork Orange, you're on the right track.) A second phase of development was supposed to measure sweat responses to stimuli, but results from the first phase were so unsatisfactory (unreliable) that the entire project was ultimately abandoned. Apparently finding willing test subjects was also profoundly difficult. The RCMP resorted to shadowing gay and lesbian clubs, secretly photographing patrons, and pressuring subjects they picked up to reveal the identities of various suspected queers. Many people refused to become informants, but over the course of this period, data was collected on some 9000 Canadian citizens, and hundreds of queer people, particularly in the military and the civil service, lost their jobs.

The words in the poem come from word associations used in initial "fruit machine" tests. Words in the first stanza are clearly supposed to evoke associations with the gay life; words in the second stanza are designed to suggest "strong," "upright," "straight" ("manly?") associations and virtues. ("Wanna fight?")

The text of the poem is drawn from Gary Kinsman & Patrizia Gentile's important book The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Also worth looking at: Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse and Mercedes Steedman, eds. Whose National Security? Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000. Note, the first time I called up and perused this book on google books, the framing language (when the book was published, where one might buy it, etc.) was all in Hebrew. It took three tries and several specific searches for the book title to pull down a google book with English framing. What does this mean? Your guess is surely as good as mine.  

For a brief video introduction to the "Fruit Machine," see the following clip from the CBC digital archives: http://www.cbc.ca/archives/categories/society/crime-justice/mounties-on-duty-a-history-of-the-rcmp/rcmps-fruit-machine-to-detect-gays.html

Incoming Tide

The tide: is it coming in or going
out? With every wave, the sea shifts, breathes.
and so do we.

Green (ditch flood)

Trapped Stick Open Water

Soon Time Spring (melt haiku)

Soon Time Spring

What is the sound of melting?

Sound of Running Water (encore)

Sound of Running Water 2 (more video haiku)

Sound of Running Water iv (Ice and Bubbles)

Sound of Running Water v (Whirling)

Sound of Running Water vi (Splash!)

Sounds of things you cannot hear

Snow falling on a doe's nose;
twitch of the hairs that line her ears; how
our nervous eyebeams cross and stutter; when
spindrift flurries smash and drop.

Otter prints at the water's edge;
taste of grass beneath the pines;
flank's quiver, heart's thump, and the
sudden savour of coyote paws.

Hunger marches across the pond, by
rabbit trails and pheasant scratchings
crouches near the slouching rushes, where
come night, some creature sleeps.

Somewhere a doe is always watching--
fluttering startle, tail flicker, flattened grass and trampled snow.

This poem--really an exercise--was suggested by what seemed to me to be a found poem in Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods (2008).  In explaining "why the young (and the rest of us) need nature," and what he means by "coming to our senses," Louv recounts a game played by Janet Fout, an environmental activist, with her daughter Julia. "As they wandered through the woods, they would listen for 'the sounds they could not hear:'

sap rising
snowflakes forming and falling
sunrise
moonrise
dew on the grass
a seed germinating
an earthworm moving through the soil
cactus baking in the sun
mitosis
an apple ripening
feathers
wood petrifying
a tooth decaying
a spider weaving its web
a fly being caught in the web
a leaf changing colors
a salmon spawning"

even, "after the conductor's baton ceases to rise" (76-7).

It seemed to me that certain emotions or states, too, like love, fear,  hope, hunger, desire, sleepiness, sadness, wariness and even joy were very often first seen or experienced as if without or below the threshold of audible sound. Likewise, we tend to treat vision, taste and touch as more or less silent sensuous attributes. Still, as my experience of being eye to eye with deer through a pane of glass testifies, looking is not really noiseless, even if we cannot hear one another. It is rather, like so many other things, comprised of sounds we cannot or can hardly hear. What for example is the sound of feeling nervous? Or the impossibly slow trickling onset of spring?

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Note: Another found poem, of course--and possibly a dangerous tool. Not really what you want to find in your workplace inbox, which is where this odd device appeared sometime last year. Spam, of course. I think, although one can never be too sure.

Photos were taken at the tumbledown remains of a cannery in Butedale, northern British Columbia. For more information on that site, as well as more photos, see http://quoddysrun.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/the-sound-of-running-water-butedale-cannery/