Lenguajear como acto reflexivo

Before commencing my doctoral studies, I often wrote about the nonhuman inhabitants of New Zealand, but thought little about the relationship between my poetic representations and that which they attempted to describe. In 2009 I wrote “The Picnic” (published in Brief in 2010), which, for me, indicates the beginning of my interest in how poetic representations relate to the natural world:

We climbed up the gorge once,

to Samuel Butler’s hut, which happened to be a memorial plaque set

in dense gorse.

Yellow flowers on a khaki hill.

It is a story you embellish in company—

add the sighting

of a Tarr, his quiet black face rotating in slow motion; the picnic

where we laid

goat’s cheese, apples and sweet sultanas on a home-spun jersey

that you still wear;

or the encounter with a skink, skin wrapped around his skeleton, who

when you reached out, slipped into the rock.

The poem foreshadows the concerns that are explored by both the critical and creative

components of my doctoral thesis—that nonhuman creatures are often central to our stories, but that their depiction reflects our own desires rather than the creatures themselves. In the poem the nonhuman world is intertwined with the speaker’s daily life, but has been embellished in

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order to provide a more thrilling story. Through the act of seeing and describing, objective meaning slips away like a “skink” into the rock.

As these themes appeared in my work I also became interested in the field of

ecocriticism. Ecocriticism provided a lens through which I could examine the work of Robert Hass—whose poetry I had read for many years—to understand the techniques he used to

explore the relationship between poetryand nature. In undertaking the doctorate, it was essential that the critical research not only expanded my understanding of Hass’s poems, but provided me with poetic strategies that I could adapt and experiment with in my own work. In this way, the creative component of the thesis has been shaped and informed by the investigation of the critical essay.

Like Hass, I have used a series of strategies in my creative work to investigate the way we depict the natural world. A central strategy is the use of technical language and terminology from the fields of geography, biology, and glaciology. Rather than relying primarily on

traditional lyric imagery, the poems use scientific discourses to suggest human emotions and situations. By bringing together these different types of language the poems place pressure on each discourse. For example, “Glaciers” uses language from the field of glaciology to describe human sexuality, mental health, and childbirth. The unexpected and out-of-context use of this language to describe human concerns is meant to subvert the discourse and imply that, because it can be used out of context, it is constructed rather than an objective representation of the world. Through such subversion the poems intend to suggest that other discourses about the natural world are equally constructed.

As with poets such as Retallack, who assert that poetry can “develop[ing] a body of work that reinvestigates our species’ relation to other inhabitants of the fragile and finite territory our species named, claimed, exploited, sentimentalized, and aggrandized as ‘our world’” (par. 30), I wanted my poems to suggest that humans are animals with instinctual and biological drives, and are therefore part of the natural world. These poems focus on themes of

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sexuality, mortality, procreation, and urban habitats, whether that be the pack mentality of the crowd in “The Fire,” the instinctual fear of the old woman in “Glass,” or the way a man creates a dwelling similar to other animals in “Bees.” Other poems such as “Mountains” and “Running with my Father” explore the tension between our biology and the social construction of gender.

Drawing inspiration from Hass, I have tried in my creative work to highlight the way our conceptualisations of nature often reflect human intention and imagination, rather than being a representation of the nonhuman world. For example, a poem such as “Measures” explicitly describes the use of the sea as a metaphor for emotion, and the series of poems about birds and animals—“Crow Experiments,” “Pigeons,” “Kangaroos,” “Lamb,” “Cow Skin,” and “Phobias” —explore the way we imagine and use animals as a mirror for human concerns. Other poems such as such “Rescue Story” depict our perceived separation from the natural world, whereas “When the Sister Walks,” “Paradise Ducks,” and “The Pipeline,” explore how we conceive of nature as a place of solace.

The use of these strategies in my creative work intends to call attention to the way descriptions of the natural world often reflect human culture and intention, rather than the physical world. I hope this has produced a strong and thoughtful collection about the relationship between human, nonhuman, poetry, and imagination.