Procedural Ecologies
Joan Retallack’s “Archimedes’ New Light”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12920217 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A J Carruthers, Andrew Carruthers (0000-0002-5823-290X, The University of Sydney, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 24-38 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary Women s Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-1476 • E-ISSN: 1754-1484 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/cww/vpv034 |
| OpenAlex | W2318975902 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
The US experimental poet and critic Joan Retallack has used ecologically modeled operations to expand the parameters of the poetry of the natural world. Inviting complexity and the “shock of alterity,” Retallack’s ecological procedures seek to expand the discursive reach of poetry to the nonlinear sciences, studies in fractal geometry, and chaos theory. This essay explores the “poethical” imperative of ecology in her 2008 poem “Archimedes’ New Light: Geometries of Excitable Species,” a poem that unsettles/distances itself from egoic, descriptive, metaphorical, or representational means of writing nature. By avoiding single-point perspectives, the poem is developed around an “Archimedean” fulcrum from which readers can derive new logics of sense. The procedural-ecological poem is found to be experimental and realist, testing/questing and pragmatist, and erotic and parasitic, a poetry of environment attuned to the astonishing complexity of environments
Aesthetics · Alterity · Art · Biology · Epistemology · Geometry · Literature · Poetry · Point (geometry · Pragmatism · Sociology · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Mathematics · Origins and Evolution of Life · Ecology · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |