The Rough Poets

Reading Oil-Worker Poetry

Melanie Dennis Unrau

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780228023395
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas.
The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.
How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline of Oil-Worker Poetry in Canada
• First Day
• Introduction
• 1: Father of the Tar Sands: Modernity and Wilderness in S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails
• 2: “They make me / rough”: Speaking Oil Patch in Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk
• 3: “my love is not dead yet”: Living/Loving Oil and the Land in Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations
• 4: Tending Rusted Steel and Leased Land in Mathew Henderson’s The Lease
• 5: Mud Man: Poetry as Truth-Telling and Land Relations in Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth
• 6: “do not / be naïve”: Language and the Stakes of Animacy in Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons
• 7: Boom Time, Giant Time, and Other Elsewhens of Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time
• Conclusion: Feeling Rough: Oil-Worker Poetry, Energy Justice, and the Cultural Politics of Emotion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index