Thinking technologies: poetry and collage as vehicles for speculative thought

The author's book of poems, Nitrate, is evaluated as a model for a poetry that is a medium of research. The collection is positioned within Rachel Blau DuPlessis's understanding of the essay form as involving 'the play of speculation' borne from curiosity and need - the need to examine opinions and to interrogate cultural materials.' Nitrate explores the birth of cinema as a by-product of scientific exploration into the problem of understanding motion, and the specific significance of the French physiologist E.J. Marey and his chronophotography. The title reflects the importance of cellulose nitrate, introduced in 1889 and used until the 1950s as the - frighteningly flammable - basis of film stock. There is also a discussion, accompanied by illustrations of the visual collages produced in dialogue with the poems as part of the understanding of practice-based research.