Feral Poetics

Reflecting on the ecopoetics conference. Lots to sift through and think about. Thought I would share my abstract here. I'm already thinking of ways to amend and refine the ways I would describe a feral poetics, so consider this a work in progress.

Troubling the Field: Feral Poetics, Feminism, and the Politics of the Anti-Pastoral

Representations of nature and creaturely life, both in poetry and in the language of
environmentalism, remain haunted by the pastoral tradition. As a feminist, I am often concerned by the tacit acceptance of a pastoral frame in writing about nature. In my work as a writer and reader, I have experimented with a feral poetics as way to trouble pastoralism’s duplicitous and highly gendered fantasies of nature as "wild," “pure,” “unpopulated,” and outside of historical and political time. A feral poetics destabilizes these fantasies, and feral texts articulate and recover the subjects otherwise contained or made invisible by pastoralism’s narratives of nature, nation, state, and species.

In this presentation––part of a continuing project that meditates upon the politics of interspecies affiliations, affinities, and alliances––I outline the contours of a feral poetics, situating it as both an aesthetic and scholarly project of refusing/resisting pastoralism, recalling that pastorlism has often served as the warrant for settler colonialism, racism, and imperialism. In light of a feral poetics, writers, thinkers, and creatures as diverse as Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine, Bernadette Mayer, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Audre Lorde, Lorine Niedecker, Emily Dickinson, the feral ponies of Assateague Island and New Zealand’s celebrity ovine “Shrek” the sheep can be seen as co-conspirators in a common endeavor.

The Next Big Thing

I was tagged by Elizabeth Treadwell. She is awesome. She sent me a copy of Virginia or the mud flap girl and it is awesome. I am supposed to send her a copy of my book in return. Even though I don't have a published full-length collection. I will probably send her some chapbooks and a valentine if I can get to the post office soon.

THE NEXT BIG THING

1. What is the working title of the book? 

I've been working on something called Fur Birds for about 3 years. It has multiple manifestations, including two chapbooks (one by Dusie and one in the Parrot series for Insert Press) and 3-d book arts assemblage stuff.

Right now, I have a 105 page manuscript with three sections: Fur Birds, Havens, and Notes from the Land of Hurt Feelings


2. Where did the idea come from for the book? 

It came from the mess of glass and glitter that is the sort of the flotsam and jetsam of the broken and brakish swampland of  nostalgia and other fantastical longings. A longing for an unlearning that might take me back to creatures. A longing for dirt.  A weaving through an affective geography that effectively maps states of emotional intensity without losing too much to narrative or conventional rules of grammar, syntax, and other linguistic forms.

 3. What genre does your book fall under? 

Poetry. Mysticism. Cozy Catastrophe.

 4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 

It would be a way of looking at people and things and not so much about the actors.

 5. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Time is with the animal. It has a politics.

 6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? 

This is difficult for me to answer because my writing process is closest to that of a compost heap.

 7. Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

Living in this world. Animals. Capitalism. Spending a lot of time in the South Carolina woods when I was a teenager.

 8. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

The narrator(s) may or may not be human.


 9. Who is publishing your book?

I don't know.


tagging Julia Drescher, CJ Martin,  gillian devereux, katy henrickson, harold abromowwitz, amanda ackerman, matt timmons.