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Selby, Nick 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5255-0421
(2021)
Creeley — poem — world: an eco-poetic limit case.
In: 2021 Romanian Association for American Studies-Fulbright Conference, 2019-10-08 - 2020-10-10, Bucharest and online.
Abstract
Robert Creeley’s poetry has not — so far — been discussed in relation to ecological thinking. Nor was he an ecopoet. His work, however, continually touches on the entanglement of poem and world, of the internal and external environments it encounters. This paper argues that in Creeley’s major collections Words (1967) and Pieces (1969) such a sense of entanglement is sustained by a ‘vibrant poetics’ within which an ecological thinking takes place. It sees, that is, Creeley as a ‘limit-case’ for such thinking, and asks what the consequences are of reading Creeley’s poetry as fundamentally environmental in its concerns. In Words and Pieces Creeley dwells on home, his family and the familiar objects that surround him. These collections seem, therefore, to enact Gaston Bachelard’s claim that home is ‘our first universe, a real cosmos’. But what, this paper asks, are the implications, in reading Creeley, of seeing domestic space as ‘a real cosmos’? How is ‘home’ the locus for an exploration of cosmicity in his work? The paper also suggests that such exploration helps explain the dramatic change of poetic strategy between these collections. Ultimately, it argues that Creeley’s sense of ‘poem’ and / as ‘world’ is sustained by the question of ‘nature’, or — as Timothy Morton has it — the ‘ecological thought’.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > American Studies Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Area Studies Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Legible / Visible |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Mar 2022 13:30 |
| Last Modified: | 21 Jul 2023 10:02 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/84186 |
| DOI: |
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