Ramoutsaki, Helen Jane (2016) The arachnophobe poet as natural historian: connecting poetic practice with the more-than-human world. PhD thesis, James Cook University.

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Abstract

As a poetic natural history, this thesis captures poetry, photographs, natural histories, autoethnographic and eco-philosophical reflections in the web between a Giant Golden Orb-weaving Spider, Nephila pilipes, and an arachnophobic performing poet in the Wet Tropics bioregion of Far North Queensland.

My creative practice-led research was initiated by the inquiry:

How can the experience of living in the Wet Tropics, focusing on human interactions and relationships with and within the natural environment, be interpreted through poetry in live performances which are designed to engage audiences and evoke awareness of place while exploring meaningful connections to the Wet Tropics environment?

As a result of this inquiry I have written a collection of poems featuring my lived experience of the Wet Tropics, some of which are incorporated into scripted performances, alternating these feature poems with either a prose narrative monologue or a further series of narrative 'coupling' sonnets. Written in a modular, tessellating format, the scripts have been adapted for performances of varying lengths, environments and audiences, being most at home in intimate venues. With performed poetry synchronised to my photojournalistic images, my creative practice creates a continuity of material presence from poet and place through to a shared making of meaning with audiences. A number of these poems are to date presented only on the page, embedded in the thesis. These focus on the nexus of poet and spiders within the wider systems of backyard and bioregion, including our severe tropical cyclone-bringing weather-world.

The fear and revulsion I felt at my first startling sight of the Nephila in my backyard alerted me to the significance of emotion in encounters within the more-than-human world. In returning for another look, camera in hand, fascination was drawn into my emotional mix, prompting the extended inquiry: What meaning do I, as a poet, make of a meeting with a member of another species so different from me? In response, my investigation actuates the dynamics of the role of a poet-natural historian through sustained, repeated, continuing engagement, observing and recording inner and outer phenomena in poems, journals and images, also considering the further question: What does it mean to be both a natural historian and a poet?

To describe the material-poetic relationship with the Nephila, in an extension of Plumwood's (2002) concept of the familiar as a free-living wild animal, I define the Familiar as a specific entity, aspect or quality of a habitat or bioregion to which the poet-natural historian has developed a bond. Where there is no sign of reciprocation, this necessitates a poetic act of approach, a movement towards. My writing and performing to the Familiar in the Wet Tropics has taken on the style of poetic profusion, which approximates the environmental experience (Brathwaite, 1984) in my poet-natural historian's perception of the moods and lushness of the bioregion. Elements of this style are discussed, with examples from my work and the work of other poets writing in and of the Wet Tropics.

In conceptualising my research activities and processes, I redeploy Smith and Dean's (2009) iterative cyclic web model, following the metaphor of an orb web to show it as a recursive system that inacts fresh content and processes into the creative practice-led inquiry so that it continually enriches, re-frames and re-contextualises. A recursive interplay develops between my physical engagement with the environment in active observation and my theoretical, cognitive engagement through inductive and abductive inferencing. My inferences take the form of both hypotheses and metaphorical models, where I allow the living source of the metaphor to take the lead by providing new mappings and inviting fresh looks at the assumptions of the target domain.

Putting into action Elizabeth Sewell's (1971) postlogical thinking mode as a dance between science and poetry, while taking into account the effects of emotion, this thesis becomes a poetic and discursive artefact which evinces the relationships, processes and products of the poet-natural historian creative research mode. As embedded in the more-than-human world, this mode incorporates the extension of a field of conscious awareness into our sensory world through abduction, the poet's use of inner and outer observation, poetic reverie and unitary consciousness within a polycentric, non-hierarchical ethical and artistic view. Lived experience reveals the importance of appreciating the co-presence of earth-others and the inherent materiality of life processes, so that the effects of presence oscillate with the effects of meaning-making (Gumbrecht, 2004, 2006) in a field of relationships which is not only aesthetic but touching into an enlivened style of living that embraces Weber's empirical subjectivity and poetic objectivity (2013).

From within the emotional loop between arachno-revulsion and arachno-compulsion, I consider the relationships humans have towards aspects of the other-than-human world that induce fascination and sometimes also fear. My experience highlights how affective bonds can form and feed into the dynamics of physical presence and creative, symbolic meaning. In the territory beyond my new-found fascination for the Nephila pilipes, multiple responses buzz for attention: anthropomorphic nurturing, arachnomorphic identification and a growing curiosity which morphed into intellectual avarice, a collecting of photographic data like a Nephila's food cache hung on a trophy line above the web's hub. Where the processes of environmental writing involve shared lived experience in a human-and-more world, filaments of practice lie tensed between the power of interspecies contact and the threat of disastrous intrusion. When my camera's contact-lens became an impact-lens, I understood that sometimes these threads are best woven into a barrier web which alerts me to where to draw the line.

From my deepening relationship to one individual spider, a bond has grown to others of her species in my backyard. As this enhanced feeling of connection extends out more widely to my Shire and the Wet Tropics bioregion, the Nephila pilipes and other entities, aspects and qualities of the bioregion have become my Familiars, so that my evocations of the Wet Tropics environment find meaning in poetic acts of writing and performing to the Familiar.

Item ID:	60992
Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Copyright Information:	Copyright © 2016 Helen Jane Ramoutsaki.
Additional Information:	Full thesis embargoed. Embargo expiry TBC.
Date Deposited:	01 Feb 2021 23:05
FoR Codes:	19 STUDIES IN CREATIVE ARTS AND WRITING > 1904 Performing Arts and Creative Writing > 190402 Creative Writing (incl Playwriting) @ 100%
SEO Codes:	95 CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING > 9501 Arts and Leisure > 950104 The Creative Arts (incl. Graphics and Craft) @ 100%
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