Widening Gyre: A Poetics of Ocean Plastics

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 non-narrative temporalities suggest fertile modes of cultural engagement with the more-thanhuman oceans. This poetry cultivates amplified modes of attention to more-thanhuman 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.