The Ocean Is Vomiting Garfield Phones
i’m haunted by this news story:
for 35 years the locals have been finding
Garfield phones washing up
on this beach in Brittany
at first i thought
this is a moment of true magic in the world
this Garfield phone beach
the ocean & its wonders sparkling
with that anime effect
hey… the sea has a sense of humour too
but then a realisation—
an underwater container
filled with Garfield phones,
a Garfield landfill, cute
…but really nasty…
the phones washing up on the shore
the ocean puking Garfield phones
bluuuuuuuurgh
┐(￣ヘ￣)┌
a feeling comes and sits on my lap
in a public toilet cubicle
meows as I listen to the plops
of strangers doing
carefree shits
sometimes everything is fine
a feeling violates
my personal space
obnoxious city behaviour in a rural setting
it demands margheritas at the country bakery
the contents of its tiny luxury bag
spill out onto the counter
rude
materialistic
waterfall
a feeling does the inappropriate thing
— attends my dad’s wake!
and tries to spruik
its suburban artisanal ice-cream business
to a lactose intolerant crowd
sometimes everything is fine
but then turns to shit…
a feeling saunters
into my body like it’s a goddamn bar
yeehaw-style!
wearing a bright pink cowboy hat
with diamantes on it, spelling out
‘GRIEF… xoxo’
a bit of a dick really—
orders a drink, spills it on me
doesn’t apologise
says something
casual about how
my body
isn’t mine
murmurs something about it being
a tainted landscape
a surface for loss to wash up onto—
ugly and surprising all at once
(｡╯︵╰｡)
will the little Garfield phones
keep being found?
on the shores in Brittany
so cute and so nasty
the little Garfield phones
Vidya: Tell us about your current artistic practice.
Panda: I only started writing poetry about a year and a half ago, but I have always been obsessed with recording these kinds of strange moments or observations on my phone, in a notebook, through photos and screenshots. I had this big, life-changing encounter with grief which led to me writing poetry as a coping mechanism. I write poetry to come to grips with how bizarre this whole simulation called life is, to complain (a lot), to unpack this very intimate and horrible experience called grief.
My poetry practice is not really concerned with timelessness or being super relevant. I like leaving little markers of time in my work, like pop culture events or weird world news, because it pins down that moment of time to whatever poem it’s in. I think also experiencing loss makes you hyperaware of how transient life is, so maybe I’m just trying to preserve what I can. Ultimately, poetry is also a space where I can have a bit of a laugh. Laughing at things and writing poetry are both coping mechanisms to me, so it makes sense that they overlap.
What prompted you to write this poem?
I started thinking about ‘the moment’ of how you can be living your kind of oblivious, occupied life and how moments of grief can interrupt this. Not even just moments of personal grief, grief for all of the shit that goes on in the world. Grief for species going extinct, for the effects of white supremacy, for another shitty government, disappointment in the broken systems around us. I was mulling over how this hardening to the world can be a reflex of self-protection, but I think grief as a feeling is so out-of-control that you can’t really escape it.
I’m also constantly drawing inspiration and fascinated by these weird little news headlines; they’re truly distracting from how scary and intense our world is. We live in a dystopia but then there are these weird news headlines about Garfield phones washing up on the shore? It’s funny but it’s fundamentally fucked up and says a lot about how the truth of the world is too much for us to grapple with most of the time.
I’m really interested in the voice of this poem – a sort of wry, solipsistic late-capitalist internet person. How would you describe it?
I feel like you just described my personality a little, eek I feel exposed lol. I can’t hide that I’m inextricably sucked into these black holes in our society (capitalism and the internet). I feel like this voice is almost dissociative, like using kaomoji, pop culture references the kitsch to engage with these big feelings of grief, it’s a coping mechanism to be detached in this way. I’m reading this Otessa Moshfegh interview and she talks about how people being like ‘not-vulnerable’ are actually the most vulnerable of all. I really relate to that; in this poem I’m working out new ways of expressing vulnerability.
How does editing factor into your work?
Editing is so valuable to me; I think being able to see the editor’s perspective and have a different set of eyes on my work helps me to work out what elements of the poem are truly valuable to me. Also, I really enjoyed reading what you have gleaned from this poem. Through discussing the poem with you, I really worked out how to create a rhythm and flow that mirrored the kind of dystopian turmoil and erratic nature of grief that I was writing about. I think editing keeps teaching me new ways to see my poem and how I can create these shifts of meaning. I feel really blessed to be honest, I’m always so touched by other people giving their time to read and edit, it’s effort and it’s validating.
Who are some poets you commonly turn to? Who are you reading nowadays?
I love this question because I always want to gush about whoever I’m obsessed with at the moment. Chen Chen, Wendy Xu, Chelsey Minnis, Kaveh Akbar and Sophie Robinson are poets who I absolutely adore and always turn to. At the moment I am reading Otessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World. The way she addresses life in this almost otherworldly way is really transfixing… I’m obsessed.
About the author
vidya rajan is a writer, editor and performance-maker. she currently lives in melbourne and is a writer in residence at the malthouse theatre. you can get in touch on twitter.