Fruits of research leave!
My new article, ‘Lysergic Excess in the Poetry of Dana Ward’, is now live over at Green Letters, as part of a special issue theme of ‘Psychedelic Ecologies’.
Abstract:
This article examines how the work of contemporary American poet
Dana Ward generates ecological thinking through ‘infinity lyric’:
a mode shaped by psychedelic aesthetics, drifting attention and
shifting scales of perception. By close reading Ward’s two collec-
tions, This Can’t Be Life (2012) and The Crisis of Infinite Worlds (2013),
in conversation with poststructuralist, new materialist and contem-
porary poetic theory, the article explores how Ward performs an
active reorganisation of everyday experience, forging a psychedelic
ecosophy in which mind, society and environment connect through
lyrical voice and movement. Situating Ward’s work within the cul-
tural ecologies of Web 2.0 and anti-capitalist critique, the article
argues that Ward’s aesthetic of lysergic excess offers an ethical
practice grounded not in transcendence but in immanent, rela-
tional forms of being. It concludes that infinity lyric provides
a distinctive contribution to ecological thought by modelling parti-
cipatory, heterogeneous and open-ended ways of attending to the
world’s material agencies.
mariaology 