Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Bailey, Thomas

Area of Concentration

Creative Writing, Environmental Studies

Abstract

The Anaerobic Summers is a collection of sixty-six pages of ecopoems divided among six sections— “Plastic Causation,” “Neptune Wallows,” “Rewash (Hose-Down),” “The Forest,” Mother’s Apartment: 2B (Open-Invitation),” and “Expiration”—that give intrinsic value and respect to the other than human world. In my introduction, I not only work to define ecopoetry, but show how society's views of wilderness are detrimental and how ecopoetry acts as a bridge between wilderness and society. These ecopoems challenge the belief that humans have supremacy over the wild world. As Long writes in his “Introduction to Ecopoetics,” “Ecopoetry uses language to deepen a sense of nature’s presence in our lives; and these invocations of nature’s presence— celebratory of the biological fact that we are nature— suggest an ecological understanding of nature and its processes” (Long, 2008). The Anaerobic Summers offers readers a portal into the energies that bond humans and wilderness together, helping us to see that humans are intertwined with the wild, not separate from it. These ecopoems bring the readers closer to the wilderness and the wild within (Butler xv).

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