A CONVERSATION ABOUT RAC[C]OONS

Loydell, Rupert ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2730-8489, Levy, John and Ferguson, Mike (2025) A CONVERSATION ABOUT RAC[C]OONS. Symbology Institute, none (18). pp. 62-89. ISSN 3010351416991

Text (poems + critical text) RACOONS.text+poems.Aug2024.docx - Accepted Version Download (22kB)

Abstract / Summary

Rupert Loydell and John Levy live an ocean apart but have mutual friends and have known each other and read each other's work for decades. Thanks to email, they often have brief conversations about their work, politics, culture and their different lives.

The four poems which follow were prompted by a brief discussion – along with some desert snapshots of Levy's – about wild animals. It prompted Loydell's 'Bandit Country', remembering seeing racoons search through the bins at an American summer camp in 1980 where he taught sailing and art for a season. Although the racoons and camp setting are real, the frequency of the bin raids and the narrator's attitude to his young charges and camp activities are not.

'Bandit Country' prompted Levy to recall and write about his own summer camp experience as a boy, this one a stricter regime with uniforms, punishments and no time to be alone. It directly references Loydell's first poem and also makes a humourous connection to the way poetry can be constructed by 'pawing // through the garbage and making noise'.

Meanwhile, Loydell was doing exactly that, throwing his original poem into an online cut-up machine with phrases found by searching for bandits online. The edited and shaped poem allowed for wider, sometimes surprising, connections, from the 'wild west' to 'racoon accountability' and the animals' education and relationship with humans.

In response to this third poem, which Levy suggested seemed like a missive from another planet, along with a prompt from Carrie Etter's poem 'The Unicorn', published in Loydell's Stride magazine*, Levy riffed on unlikely connections he had made:

No one con-
fuses
a raccoon

with a uni-
corn.
Or trains a

rac-
coon to ride
a

bicycle for
a living

The act of both presenting and denying these ideas holds contradictions in balance, as does the – again negated – second part of the poem which moves from the idea of a God who made the racoons but is not spoken about, to those raccoons who, 'one by one', enter raccoon Heaven.

This poetic exchange was neither premeditated or planned, but does evidence chains of thought (which some might call inspiration) and how the writer sidesteps and dodges the obvious to change the subject, make connections or try to make it new.

•

Just as this introduction and the original four poems were finalised, a fifth raccoon poem arrived, from author Mike Ferguson. It is appended here.

View Record (staff only)