Someone sent me some trash in the mail. This gift was a surprise, but I order garbage all the time. Wrapped in a sheet of baby blue printer paper covered on both sides with lists—“2 tampon wrappers + one tampon | 2 apple cores + stickers | 3 dinner napkins | scrapings of plates || contacts | blueberry clamshell | ginger peels”—was a hunk of rubber-band-bound dyed rose and marigold notecards (unlined but otherwise regular, probably recyclable), each containing a note written by playwright Kate Kremer, the stack accruing to book (though in this case, also loose), meant to be either read or said, mixed up, possibly, or tossed out. Kremer’s uncollected trash collection vol. 1 and vol. 2 was published in 2022 with 53rd state press (where Kremer’s an editor), admirable to me for its ambitious and playful mission of expanding “notions of the theatrical in performance and in print.” As I start reading—dealing out the cards like a deck—the card heap plus performance piece discloses assorted fragmentary accounts of the most basic of human gestures: discarding what’s not of use. Not only does Kremer account for everything she throws away for five months straight (the named accumulation of which becomes the “cover”), she writes into and through this practice of gathering, turning repeatedly to the body’s relationship with waste in its geographies, habits, artmaking, and death. “In light of duration,” Kremer writes in notecard 27/52 from vol. 1, “we deal with what’s left.”
Upon this gift’s receipt I recall a task I’ve been meaning to complete for weeks, which is to purchase via a time-consuming and obnoxious university software system some packing paper for a small press I work at, something labeled green, sure, but still a big glob of garbage with which to pad stacks of what we peddle, also paper. It’s a less tragic capitalist act than some and yet instead of clicking send I’ve been hauling totes of home-collected scraps to campus in an idiotic effort to avoid paying for shipping material whose sole purpose is to pillow our shipping and then get disposed of. All this crap we amass!—though in fact one might call worry over such a minor chore an additional waste of time, energy, and effort. In Kremer’s uncollected trash collection, the text is made of mundane encounters with waste (food, physical, environmental, consumer-based), encounters questioning what materials are relevant to the wellbeing of the earth and its inhabitants. Kremer sees evidence of human-activated injury all over. In an early note, she makes metaphor of the land’s wounds in (this reader assumes) the area where she lives in western Virginia, a place where mountaintop removal, coal mining, and climate change have triggered visible transformation: “The scars of surface mining in this region are environmental and economic, dramatic and beautiful . . . All these blemished vistas hold the eye more easily than the virgin hills, which are at once too big and too close to be seen,” followed by an inquiry into the language employed in such circumstances, writing that while Native peoples of the area once set fires in the forests to provoke regrowth, white settlers called “these lands waste, meaning rich with natural resources to be claimed and consumed.”
Kremer thinks about what she discards as she discards it even as the unbound and performative form of the project implies that the thinking itself, the text itself, is meant to be “thrown out” (meaning the act of making something public—via gesture or speech—and the act of disposing, literally getting rid of words). “All these fragments are things I threw away,” she says at one point of her sentences, “though I did not really throw them away as in delete them. Of course trash is not deleted either. It (slowly) deteriorates, becomes something else in the hot dark at the edge of the stanza.” For Kremer, as for so many artists, trash is also material—what we require to survive, to write—this ugly, difficult, unusable crap not confusing to us; not worthless. Waste is what an artist is and wants: too much. An abundance. It’s what we work to shape, what we can’t handle, what we haven’t yet made plans for. And so we dive in, keeping our scrap pamphlets, slop logs, excess files, and tarot crumbles: “the dump is full / of images,” writes Wallace Stevens, and later A.R. Ammons: “Garbage has to be the poem of our time because / garbage is spiritual, believable enough to get our attention, getting in the way, piling up, stinking . . . what else deflects us from the / errors of our illusionary ways.”
Though Kremer’s cards are numbered—perhaps for theatrical reference, or to indicate the whole—it doesn’t really matter if they’re strewn; there’s a delightful potential in the thought of a reader entering these ecological and essayistic meditations somewhere in the middle, thereby engaging with the bright particulars of various lives bursting forth in a linear-though-nonnarrative fashion, glints of sun sparkling off the shards of a junkyard heap. The project’s mis pile. There are snippets of days, arguments, research, memories. The there there is both central and off-site—like trash, it’s everywhere and nowhere, burdensome and ignored. Woven through thinking on climate despair are observations of the body in decline and what it leaves behind in addition to corpse. It becomes clear that someone dear to the narrator is dying: “We sit trying to think what she might need to say. We are trying not to throw away this time with her.” What we cherish in the long run is often what we most fear losing—what we can’t take with us—and Kremer’s narrator finds significance in the act of accounting for common “little gorgeous” instants despite and because of their fleetingness. There’s a pleasurable tension in the realization that this stack is both documentary and ephemeral (it could be scattered by the merest wind and is also meant to be “distributed singly and at random,” so says the publisher’s site), the crux of course of so much artistic pressure. “Those of us who are not dead . . . have a certain responsibility,” writes Kremer, quoting a friend and referencing the ethical-artistic mandate to mark the moments one hopes will enter history, to record and keep, interpret and critique, all gestures that can feel in direct contrast to one’s ecological instincts which might be to let alone, reduce, reuse, or minimize: “In the town where I live now, people sense that they have been thrown away. They often don’t throw things away, but keep them for future use.”
Kremer’s one-to-five sentence-long notes shift among various tones and approaches: there’s the erotic, studious, morose, and playful; some entries document the narrator’s thinking (“the present is actually a patchwork of variegated pastness”), what is consumed or exploited (“[w]e turned the heat on today, and I ate an apple grown in California”), or what systematic behaviors demonstrate “we are isolated, but the harm we do is not.” Kremer’s connections between the use or purpose of art and the use or purpose of trash are at once familiar and provocative, as is so much writing about climate change: “We collect and preserve art to know how we live and why. We also collect trash. As luck would have it, trash is more durable than art, and more legible. It means, little by little, a less livable world.” When you think of climate change, if you think of it, you might feel both inflamed and stupid, motivated and hopeless. One recognizes the spiral: you must do something but what, what, what!?—and always, this conundrum of the individual—therefore, perhaps, as Kremer’s embodied project suggests, one obligation of art in the face of environmental emergency is to serve as a site of collaborative and creative process-making, as a regular and reliable temporal form through which we can practice for whatever fresh new level of hell awaits us. “History is whoever made the most durable objects,” writes Kremer, and in one sense this is true: our things will outlast us. Write a book that’ll outlive a hunk of plastic? I don’t think so. Stage an encounter that swells agathering’scapacity for relation? Maybe! The art that endures won’t be objects, probably, but processes; the art that persists will be enactments of its most useful and reusable aspects: flexibility, grace, originality, surprise. One purpose of art in the Anthropocenic world is to demonstrate ongoing and imperfect connection as habit, an idea engaged in Kremer’s work through her insistence—in written and theatrical forms—on the chaotic loveliness of duration. You’ve got to stay in it, uncollected trash collection’s notes show (the “it” in the case of the cards being friendship, dying, imagining, love), requiring a formidable responsiveness even when what is necessary in some instances is an agreed-upon giving up. Later, toward the end of vol. 2, there’s a sort of resolve to the actualities of entropy: “Broken down by the waves, [plastic] survives as microplastics,” Kremer’s note reads, “which will last longer than the ocean will.”
Here I’ll say I haven’t seen a performance of uncollected trash collection vol 1. and vol. 2, I’ve only read the notecards and looked at pictures on the internet. My impression of Kremer’s work is that it (crucially) has a sense of humor about itself and that its casual dailiness contributes to its gravity, the multimodality of the piece shooting for a big bold affectionate inclusiveness. I flip through the cards again, thinking of recent ecologically-minded experiential durational projects both on and off the page—Julie Patton’s Let It Bee Ark Hive, Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography, The School for Living Futures, Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis, Ron Shelton’s Ice Installations, or Maria Gaspar’s “Unblinking Eyes, Watching,” for example. I look at uncollected trash collection’s cover: “seltzer can | justin’s wrapper | carrot peels . . . package that the woman from the sculpture park overnighted j’s wallet back to him in . . . burger paper | chickpea can | cuke nubs,” etc. I record my own list. Today so far: two Kleenexes, yogurt lid, yogurt cup, shoe dirt, a tuft of Satchel’s hair, crumbled magenta grocery list, bag from spinach. I reflect upon the prank of plastic. I reflect upon the 80s-baby propaganda that implied we could integrate and innovate our junk away just by using old shorts as dust rags or coffee creamer bottles as birdfeeders as we simultaneously guzzle PFA-riddled water and accrue toxic refuse willy-nilly, forming crude new landscapes with reckless abandon. My blood boils at the stupid millennial kid misunderstanding (myself still complicit) that if we are just very very very good—very vigilant!—we can send all this rubbish back, our daily behaviors alone having the ability to amend impending doom. Near the end of Kremer’s second volume she writes (perhaps of something specific but I read it generally, as if a recognition of the sweetly stupid spacey failures of the human condition): “Do I remember so badly . . . because I was in love almost the whole time? Or because I was so much somewhere else while I was there that it was as if I were somewhere else?”
As I’m writing this piece, I run into a friend who’s recently worked with screenwriters and he reminds me that notecards, or flashcards, are often the sign of an outline. They’re organizational and mobile; scaffolding with which one might build a project from small hunks of prose, rearranging snapshots of description or plot as they go. The reader of Kremer’s uncollected trash collection is asked to engage with her unfinished and energetically disconnected thinking (punctuated with occasional repetitions and obsessions) as the reorderable elements of a potential essay, direction purposefully overlooked in service of cooperative performative material inquiry. Spreading the pieces on a table, I picture a screenwriter’s board where instead of notecards there are rows of pinned garbage indicating story stages in progress—trash accounting for who the person, plot, or population was by what was wasted or given away, what was coolly abandoned.
Caryl Pagel
Caryl Pagel is the author of four books, most recently Free Clean Fill Dirt (University of Akron Press, poetry) and Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2, essays).