Tanker No. 1026
by Ben Cartwright
The initial ideas for both “Tanker No. 1026” and “Woman Trapped in Landscape” came directly from the materials. With both the transcript of the court proceedings and the found slides, I found I couldn’t help but imagine ghost narratives surrounding the textual and visual objects. That impulse toward narrative was the initial spark, but the final form of both pieces was inspired by a resistance to that narrative impulse. Rather than constructing stable narratives to explain away the strangeness of the found materials, the form of the pieces came from repeated attempts to leave that strangeness intact, though shaped. Is it weird to refer to topiary bushes here? That’s what I wanted; a kind of topiary where a reader is aware of the shaped object but doesn’t lose sight of the materials used in that object’s construction. To try and achieve this in “Tanker No. 1026,” I used the syntax of the original court document as a guiding constraint. In “Woman Trapped in Landscape," I limited myself to two sentences, reminiscent of captions on photographs, and also a structure in which a lyric “I” (ostensibly the women depicted in the images) addresses a “you,” (ostensibly the one taking the photograph).
Ben Cartwright lives in Topeka, Kansas and teaches poetry and fiction writing at the University of Kansas. His past haunts include Washington and Idaho, where he first started collecting found slide images to incorporate into his poetic practice, as well as Tianjin, China, where he started work on a hybrid forms manuscript titled Tea & Gin. His work has appeared in Sentence, Parcel, The Stinging Fly, and Prick of the Spindle.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1