poem: Diptych: Landscape of Consumption, Landscape of Production

poem: Diptych: Landscape of Consumption, Landscape of Production

'Landscape of consumption' and 'landscape of production' are sociological terms I learned from editing _Local Democracy under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics_ (New York University Press, 2007). A result of urban planning and zoning laws, landscapes of production (like factory districts) are developed distinct from landscapes of consumption (like strip malls). The starkness of the distinction can be easily ignored in a car, or when shopping online, but is unavoidable when bicycling across a city. The two types of landscapes reify a bifurcation of the economic self.

Published by Notable Works in 2020 in Voices of the Earth: The Future of Our Planet II

Karina Lutz

English

Diptych
I. Landscape of consumption

I’m so tired of the faux facades
of the “landscapes of consumption,”
like this mall built to look like
the village it supplanted
(lights in second story windows
with no rooms behind them
illuminate only drapery and the parking lot);

I’m so tired of being American,
of this ‘we’ that keeps implicating me
in all kinds of atrocities,
in my insufficient resistance,
in the insignificance of my concern;

so tired of the facades splayed
with brand names in elegant fonts
of automated recognizance,
of the logos and logoi and designs and reasons of consumption,
the artistry of my people spent
on storefronts and billboards, ads
and special effects. I want to be unaffected:

to resist, resist, resist the purchase.

But the best of my people’s psychology, too,
is employed to transgress my resistance,
to subvert our sufficiency.

We have had enough.


II. Landscape of production

As antidote to the trip to the mall
to watch the movie to know what
we have done with our history this time,
I bike the landscape of production,
weave the potholes of the parts of town
no one goes to except to work, if necessary,
and it’s always necessary
for some.

Then, as antidote to the engineered and treeless
‘neighborhoods’ (you might call them
if the homes were close enough to see
each other around the sewer treatment plant
and oil tanks and adult establishments.
Sure, I am adult too, and that is one of the few spaces
off this street I am free to enter,
but I can only imagine
the discomfort of being ogled with questions
by those poor shame-debilitated men
having so much trouble getting to maturity),
I leave my bike at the bridge,
and walk upstream past the old mill to the unfilled
wetlands, still unbuildable, so far.

I find trees and breezes and the small wildlife
we once took for granted, I think, though I don’t know
who ‘we’ is here, either, certainly not us-as-children,
when a pigeon’s iridescent neck would mesmerize,
a squirrel would be welcome in the attic,
and a robin a sign of something.
I’m so tired of being American,
of this ‘we’ that keeps implicating me
in all kinds of atrocities,
in my insufficient resistance,
in the insignificance of my concern.

?

The landscape of production is the old mills of west end of Providence, and the landscape of consumption image is a cutesy shopping center in South County.