Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE DISARMED HEART Susan McCaslin Toronto: The Saint Thomas Poetry Series, 2014 Susan McCaslin's The Disarmed Heart is a poetry collection in three parts, each distinct, yet importantly connected through resurfacing concerns expounded by her speakers. Each section offers intimate glimpses into the past and present lives of the speakers as well as their troubling dreams of eventualities. The I voice of the collection and its intimacy of experience remain consistently effective across all three sections, delivering a biting, often playfully insolent, and always eco-critical discussion of consumerism, capitalism, and the treatment of feminism in the contemporary West. Despite minor shortcomings and contrivances, McCaslin's poetry seamlessly weaves together numerous concerns to make a convincing argument for peace and environmental justice without resonating as didactic. The first section, Open Odes, is a series of appreciations addressed to a curious variety of natural subjects. With the sparse inclusion of human subjects, the eloquent language and tone with which McCaslin addresses her animal subjects is defined as celebratory because her subjects exist, for the most part, outside humanity. Deeper levels of compassion, and in some ways humaneness, mark McCaslin's animals. This differentiates them from the poet-speaker and the reader, which proves effective in that it allows the reader to consider her own position in relation to these celebrated subjects that range from the lithe black panther to the oozing banana slug. At first, it is easy consider an ode to a banana slug (to use one of many offbeat examples) as quirky or somewhat of a disincentive, yet McCaslin subtly demands why this is the case and, further, why the banana slug indeed deserves praise. Within these unorthodox subjects, McCaslin's speakers find a way to transcend the boundaries and limitations that have been self-imposed by humanity: routine, the black panther existing outside his ecosystem; gender, in the case of the hermaphroditic banana slug; and religion, as in the scape-goat-ed Sam the Goat (McCaslin's wordplay is consistently enjoyable). Also worth noting is McCaslin's mixing of the ode form with hints of contemporaneity, both based in personal experience and pop culture iconography. Though clever, these references seem contrived and rather unnecessary at times. The eponymous second section is rather shorter than the others yet incredibly compelling. A number of pieces, including Dank Tureen, a dream of the effects of global warming, and Xanadu Two, a reworking of Coleridge's opium induced Kubla Khan, lend this section a distinct level of irreality and an attitude of disenchantment in imagining the impending consequences of climate change and international conflicts. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".