Poetry as Plant Script: Interspecies Dialogue and Poetic Collaboration in the Northern Tablelands Region of New South Wales
Abstract
Advances in the science of plants increasingly reveal the sensitivities of vegetal life. Although characterised as contemporary neuro-botany, research into botanical percipience can be traced back at least to Charles Darwin and Jagadish Chandra Bose. Bose developed novel instruments to make visible the endemic semiosis of vegetal life, or what he termed plant script. Despite the thinking of Bose and Darwin, however, a prevailing zoocentric ontology continues to marginalise the capacities of vegetal nature and, what is more, contributes to aspects of climate change, species loss and biocultural disintegration. Set within the New England Tablelands of Australia and invoking principles of interspecies dialogue and poetic collaboration, this article investigates the potential of the creative arts to engage, evoke and elicit plant sensitivities. Rather than constructing them as objects of representation, I consider the possibility of creative exchange with plants in which plant script intergrades with the production of a text. Extending the notion of collaboration in the environmental arts to include vegetal being, the article draws in particular from ideas of agential realism to explore the potential of writing practices to initiate new social, biological, political and imaginative perspectives on flora.
Keywords
Botanical poetry, Jagadish Chandra Bose, plant script, Les Murray, Judith Wright, Peter Skrzynecki, New England Tablelands
Author Biography
John Ryan
John Charles Ryan is a poet and scholar who holds appointments as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Arts at the University of New England in Australia and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. From 2012 to 2015, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University. His teaching and research cross between the environmental and digital humanities. He has contributed in particular to Australian and Southeast Asian ecocriticism and the emerging field of critical plant studies. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 10 books, including the Bloomsbury title Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media (2014, as co-author), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2017, as coeditor and contributor), and Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination (Routledge, 2017, as sole author).