Abstract
The critical thesis and creative component of this PhD advance reparative ecopoetics as a significant orientation for the fields of literary studies and environmental humanities.
Reparative ecopoetics centres on a methodological approach that reads ecopoetry for glimpses of repair, remediation, restoration, and healing of degraded environments. In contrast to readings of ecopoetry for degradation, abjectness, toxic chemical contamination, and vertiginous scalar derangements, this study demonstrates the efficacy of three affects—eros, queer melancholia, and reverence—in making repair and reparation apprehensible. My reading of the generative capacity of these affects in the work of three North America-based poets, Juliana Spahr, CAConrad, and Cecilia Vicuña demonstrates tangible instances of repair in the contexts of socio-ecological crisis and extinction. Rejecting resignation and apocalypse fatigue, I show how the eros, queer melancholia, and reverence in the three poets’ work move beyond the repair of an inchoate self and towards the conferral of plenitude on the earth and nonhuman kin. Rather than continuing the abjectness of how to live in a damaged world, this study advocates ways of living reparatively in a world undergoing repair and regeneration.
I employ the terms “ki” and “kin” as ethically grammatical acts of remediation throughout this PhD. Indebted to Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, ki and kin are the singular and plural pronouns for animate, sentient nonhuman beings, such as the earth, ocean, trees, animals, and insects. I use ki and kin instead of “it” and “they/them.” Donna Haraway’s use of “kin” has also been influential. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first western critical (and creative) deployment of these pronouns — pronouns that seek to acknowledge and honour the subjectivity of nonhuman beings.
The creative component of this PhD, cowri en: poems and essays incorporates poems, essays, and additionally, one short story, and several text-based artworks. cowri en constellates texts that manifest eros, love, grief, queer melancholia, reverence, and ecological love across many genres to instantiate a reparative ecopoetics. Ecological love describes the love of human beings for more-than-human-beings and centres the key orientation of reparative ecopoetics; to offer sustenance to kin rather than extract it. As with my analysis of the three poets in the critical thesis, my creative work embodies this register of affects alongside ecological love to make the potential for repair and regeneration of the earth and nonhuman kin apprehensible. Recurrent themes throughout the collection amelioratively address overfishing, kauri dieback disease, extinction, plant-human relationality, colonisation, and socio-ecological crisis. Together, the critical and creative components advance and instantiate a reparative ecopoetics.