Today, I completed my first poem Spurn for the project. It marks the beginning of a longer cycle of poems that will celebrate the unique landscape of South Holderness. In these poetic works, I will deliberately and purposefully anthropomorphise the South Holderness landscape—or rather, ‘de-phusimorphise’ it, borrowing terminology from the French ecological ethicist and philosopher Bruno Latour. This approach will aim to ensure that my poems shift fluidly between non-human and human elements, foregrounding the dynamic interactions between natural and human actors along the South Holderness coastline, and eroding the unhelpful separation of our world into a false human/non-human binary.
It is my intention that each poem in the cycle hinges on a structural crux, a moment where a natural action or process subtly transforms into something distinctly human, and vice versa. This figurative ‘turn’ will serve to disorient and reorient the reader or listener, provoking reflection on how deeply intertwined human and non-human forces truly are. In this way, the poems will not merely describe the South Holderness coast, its flora, and fauna, but also evoke in equi-valent ways (i.e. with the same force and power) the lives and experiences of those who live or have lived there, past and present.
This cycle will also become the dramaturgical foundation for a new site-specific performance, where my individual poeisis—acts of creative writing—will merge into shared dramatic praxis through an ensemble-based development process. Collaborators in the project will respond to these poems by developing a spoken-word performance text, and the verse cycle will also be the underlying dramaturgical substrate from which a choreographed movement piece that complements this textual layer will be added.
In my poem cycle, the human and non-human will be continuously blurred, questioned, and reimagined. What might initially seem like inanimate aspects of the natural world will be mobilised as active participants in the poetry and in the performance, serving as key theatrical and visual devices that disrupt the false binary between humans and nature.
This deliberate destabilisation of human dominance over nature is, I believe, a critical step towards fostering the radical ecological awareness and action that our world so urgently needs.
