The animal as poetic makar: the poem as multi-species event.

Ecopoetry is an emergent, dynamic creative-critical practice, rooted in relations between human and more-than-human life amid irrefutable climate and species change. A central tenet is it is "ecocentric, not anthropocentric"(Shoptaw, 2016). This research expands that tenet, with sustained focus on the cross-species potential of poetry, focused on the animal as creative co-partner.

Animals are subject to our artistic and physical framing of them, but what if they become creative collaborators? Poets are increasingly focused on multi-species collaboration(Gladding, 2014; Conrad, 2021) but no contemporary British poetry collections re-position the animal as central to the creative process. Original modes of relating to animals are now critical and poetry, as an exploratory and voiced form, can negotiate and articulate new perspectives.

This practice-based research aims to locate and work from the theoretical and practical "abyssal limit" between species, (Derrida, 2008), (re)positioning the animal as creative co-partner. It asks how the animal can co-determine the poem through the "perceptual membrane" of language (Abram, 1996) and what the poetic and ethical implications of that creative alliance might be.

In re-conceptualising the poem as multi-species event, new vocabularies and "forms of openness" toward non-human are sought. Can the animal, as "mode to think through"(Baker, 2000) co-determine the poem and, ultimately, the research direction?

Close reading of foundational texts on philosophy of animal minds, postmodernism and limitrophy will focus on cross-disciplinary thinkers including Haraway, Derrida, Malay. Analysis of animal-inspired work by leading poets and qualitative interviews exploring their process will generate insights to carry into my creative practice. I'll write with enculturated and wild animals in real-time encounters, drawing on CAConrad's "Embodied Ethnopoetics" where animals are entities with "subjectivity and creative powers" (Uzendoski, 2017).

The presence of the animal in composing the text will be explored through mimesis, visual and aural innovation and formal inventions. I'll explore how the length/span/rhythm of birdsong (in)forms the length or beat of the poetic line. Embedded recordings of birdsong in poems using QR codes will inspire creative duetting through couplets of call and (human) response to create combinatory work.

Perception will be reciprocal and participatory with experiencing bodies of human and animal operating as "open, incomplete" (Abram, 1996).

Original creative output (a full collection, readings and workshops) will orient itself within zoo poetics whereby the making of a text "includes the presence of animals" (Moe, 2014). Limitations and 'failure' will be a necessary and illuminating strand of discovery. Evaluation of how the creative work intervenes in ecopoetics, and why, is key.

This project is a serious attempt to think beyond familiar ways of writing about animals and is allied with developing fields of inter-species justice in which creatures and places are granted creative and legal rights (Watts, 2024). It offers a re-appraisal of human-animal creative relations and creates an original conceptual space in which to evaluate such relations.

Responsive, ethical and experimental relation to animals is essential when species are imperilled. It will be relevant to academics, poets, publishers, readers and those working with animals.