Poetry, Women, and Nature

Clary’s been lucky enough to benefit from our cure through dialogue—not adversarial, confrontational dialogue, but a listening dialogue where one accepts the other uncritically, allowing them to preserve their identity; the creative writing is the fruit of this dialogue. And we’re extending this therapy through creative writing to the whole community outside as part of OfTru’s programme of Public Art!

Poetry such as Clary’s does indeed show what a uniquely female consciousness can teach us. It allows us to see women’s difference as a creative force. Clary has transgressed the boundaries of humanity and nature, subverting the binary oppositions imposed by patriarchal desire. She shows how male aggression wounds the environment in the same way that it violates women’s bodies. I think an ecocritical approach that sees poetry imbricated with the natural world is far more fruitful than Dr Feramor’s—if I may be a bit blunt—rather reductive Literary Darwinism. Clary teaches us that a new spirituality can emerge from a feminocentric perspective that rejects all artificial dividing lines and restores our oneness with each other and with Nature. A universal healing community of wholeness where the destructive tendencies of human civilisation are replaced by a world where Nature is re-enchanted and an organic nation is nurtured from biotic communities whose strength is in symbiosis and diversity, like the natural world itself. The rhythms of this self-regulating biosphere become one with poetic metre and our own heartbeat and libidinal pulsations. Just as the Green movement fought for a clean physical world, this new ecosophy imagines a clean inner world; we want our social and mental lives to be free from the alienating pollution of twenty-first-century life. And we begin with rebuilding community values and purging ourselves of the toxins of antisociality.