Susie Campbell

NationalPoetryMonth.ca April 5, 2023

“Compulsions” by Susie Campbell is published on NationalPoetryMonth.ca on April 5, 2023.

from Susie Campbell: “On ‘Compulsions’ and its creative context

‘Compulsions’ combines text and textile in a visual poem as part of my series of poetic interventions directed at the internationally used, diagnostic manual known as DSM-5 (full name American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition). This poem engages with the section on Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders and my own experience of OCD.  ‘Compulsions’, states DSM-5 ‘are repetitive behaviours or mental acts that an individual feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly’. What the manual doesn’t – or perhaps can’t - describe is a continuum that exists between my behaviours when suffering from a compulsive disorder and those which characterise me as an artist, as an athlete and as an activist. Yes, they are different, but not opposite poles, and frequently they overlap and blur, sometimes negatively but sometimes in ways that support and regulate each other. Inevitably, the medical discourse of the DSM falls short of lived experience. It continues ‘while the specific content of obsessions and compulsions varies among individuals, certain symptom dimensions are common in OCD including those of cleaning…etc’. No additional context is provided that might complicate this medical profile: the fact that certain activities are valued or necessitated socially, economically, and culturally which might illuminate why compulsions manifest in certain common ways. Of course, this would introduce all sorts of other variables into a manual whose aim is to provide a shared diagnostic language. It is not so much that this language is necessarily problematic in itself although the manual has been challenged on the grounds of a number of possible biases. My main issue with it is that it enjoys an authority beyond that of other discourses, a claim to scientific objectivity and universality which seems to transcend the material circumstances of the book itself. This may in turn feed such false and harmful binaries as ‘mad versus sane’, abnormal versus normal and a fantasy ideal of perfect mental and physical health against which such ‘disorders’ are opposed.

My ‘Compulsions’ piece therefore engages with the material fabric of the manual and is part of a series of visual poems which play with combining its language with cloth, in order to unravel the text and explore alternative ways of articulating the experiences it diagnoses. ‘Compulsions’ starts with a cleaning cloth – a cheap, woven dishcloth – and applies the opening phrase of the diagnostic language to the surface of the cloth. Fray caused by wear and tear is then teased into the word ‘repetition’. Textile artist and philosopher Catherine Dormor suggests that fraying exposes the structure of the cloth, the hidden weave that constitutes its material being: ‘when worn and thinned (warp and weft) they separate and the interplay between them becomes revealed’ (A Philosophy of Textile, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, p. 93). By extension, in ‘Compulsions’ the involvement of the printed word in the damage it describes is also exposed. My poem engages with what is revealed at this site of wear and tear: what becomes apparent about the physical and emotional complexities of the experience, how it is contextualised by the fabric of the quotidien, and what surfaces from the hidden structures and behaviours of a language which seeks to describe it.

I don’t want to say too much more about what else might be revealed in this poem as I hope it is open-ended in its possible meanings. But I have hoped to avoid either romanticising, fetishizing, or demonising the experience of OCD by attempting to give it a more embodied expression and to gesture both towards the ‘wear and tear’ of managing it and to its continuing mysteries and complexities. Another recent work of poetry engaging powerfully with the experience of OCD is Oems by Matthew Tomkinson (Guernica Press, 2022) which uses lipogrammatic constraint to ‘lean into’ the experience of OCD and monomania.

The ‘Compulsions’ piece, although created specifically for nationalpoetrymonth.ca, is part of my bigger DEFASURES visual poetry project which developed out of my ongoing interest in the ways both text and textile respond to damage and repair. I coined the word ‘defasure’ (a compound of ‘deface’, ‘erasure’, ‘suture’ and ‘aperture’) to refer to text-based interventions which use thread, stitching, felt and found fabric to engage with the material surface of the text. Earlier works in this project sought to highlight the fabric of DSM-5 by stitching directly into its pages, ‘defasing’ them by using stitches, patches, and holes to open apertures into the notion of healing as ‘repair’. Interestingly a number of people responded to these works by mis-reading them as ‘defrasures’ or ‘de-fray-sures’! And so, in a new series of works, of which ‘Compulsions is one, I have turned things around by printing text from DSM-5 onto cloth which can then be frayed, worn or unravelled in various ways.

This project of course involves using sensitive material and gives rise to a number of ethical considerations (discussed in more detail here https://queenmobs.com/2022/03/34920/). One of the ways in which I have tried to address these ethical issues is to work only with those sections of DSM-5 which deal with mental health issues of which I have personal experience. My poetic response is a personal reading of the way this manual describes what have been my own states of mind and being, and my own more complex experience of health and recovery. However, pieces such as ‘Compulsions’ which feature damage and gaps in text and textile, also gesture to the damaging experience of exclusion from mainstream discourse. In some of my current text-based projects, I take this further by drawing on the structures and behaviours of repurposed garments as a template for constructing a new, alternative language for extreme emotional and mental experiences. And in projects such as The Sleeping Place (forthcoming Guillemot Press, 2023), a recovered materiality of language is used as the organising principle for its provisional assemblages of experience.

Working on ‘Compulsions’ and associated pieces, therefore, has yielded a direct understanding of how the loops, seams and weave of cloth might generate a significant new poetic and an alternative approach to textual construction. But as textile-based, visual poetry it also explores and expresses things perhaps beyond the reach of my text-only poetry. I am delighted and grateful to share ‘Compulsions’ as part of the celebration of nationalpoetrymonth.ca.

Click on April 5 on the calendar for Susie’s piece “Compulsions” and other poetry and visual poetry are also on NationalPoetryMonth.ca.