A DIFFERENT CAGE WITH WORDS: A POETIC REIMAGINING OF FLIGHTLESS BIRDS ...

• Main Author: Corlett, Rosemarie
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Plymouth 2021
• Subjects: Poetry; Flightless Birds; Ecofeminism; PhD; Great auk
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.24382/872; https://pearl-prod.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/18474

This practice-based project considers cultural constructions of flightless birds and initiates this topic as significant through original poetry. Through an ecocritical lens, it selects for exploration and analysis aspects of existing poetry, mythology, literature and art showcasing or including the emu, ostrich and great auk. As patterns emerge in the data, the original poetry arises as a dynamic response to recurring cultural concepts. My poetry borrows, resists, challenges and jumps off from these concepts through a creative process. The question of incomplete dualities drives and shapes the project’s thinking, inviting me to consider and express myself in these terms. I use my poetry as a way of speaking forth elements of gendered experience which resist the rigidities of disciplinary discourse; the figure of the flightless bird acts as a muted other looking for a place of articulation, and in its chronicles, especially its disasters of extinction, mockery, mutilation and death, I make poetry which not ...