“‘A Moon Without Metaphors’: Memory, Wilderness, and the Nocturnal in the Poetry of Don McKay”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to interrogate Don McKay’s body of poetry through the lens of his own critical writings, with a particular focus on poems linking representations of the nocturnal with his concept of “wilderness,” which he defines as the ability of all things to “elude the mind’s appropriations” (“Baler Twine” 21). In McKay’s poetry, night is variously the time of shape-shifting, de-materialization, memory, and non-empirical knowledge, all of which require a re-investigation of the division between inner and outer, memory and experience, and between naming and knowing. At the same time, the article highlights poetic strategies used by an artist who loves the natural world as much as, if not more than, the language in which he renders it. As such, the nuances that assert and describe “otherness” are sharpened; by the same token, the non-human wilderness and the one inherent in human systems of language are shown to imply one another. The uncomfortable space beyond empirical knowledge―and beyond the epistemological convenience of a dichotomy between self and other that such a mode of knowledge introduces—is one that the night forces upon the mind as the latter is reminded of “another gravity” that, even if unseen, remains at work. It is this explanation of the other as “another gravity” that informs much of McKay’s poetry, and that forms the basis for his critical writings about human relationships with the environment beyond mere relationships of utility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".