Widening Gyre: A Poetics of Ocean Plastics

Abstract

By focusing on contemporary experimental poetry that engages with ocean plastics, this essay explores the capacity of ecopoetics to make distinctive interventions in the environmental humanities, and in particular the blue humanities. It examines work by Stephen Collis, Adam Dickinson, and Evelyn Reilly to show how poetry’s forms of juxtaposition, linkage, linguistic porosity, indeterminacy, and nonnarrative temporalities suggest fertile modes of cultural engagement with the more-than-human oceans. This poetry cultivates amplified modes of attention to more-than-human scales of space, time, agency, and modes of relation, and it performs highly material ways of understanding historical, economic, and aesthetic forces affecting the oceans.