"She believes she is herself": Contemporary Feminist Poetics Under Late-Stage Capitalism

Abstract

This thesis explores the prosumptive relationship between contemporary feminist poetry and the defining forces of the last 50 years of late-stage capitalism including consumer culture, racism and colonialism, the patriarchy and sexism, the climate crisis, and neoliberalism. Close readings of the careers of poets Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Gig Ryan, Dawn Lundy Martin, Ariana Reines, and Melinda Bufton reveal the complex, fluid, and sometimes indistinct conceptions of the contemporary subject as an embodied figure, positioned in relation to others in social, political, economic, and cultural spheres through language. This thesis demonstrates how these poets do the work of poetry as a feminist, artistic, activist practice of being in the contemporary world.

These poets vary greatly in style, from Berssenbrugge’s collaged long lines to Martin’s fragmented performance pieces to Bufton’s ironic internet-speak, and their bodies of work feature other art forms including theatre, music, and visual art, which exemplifies the multi-faceted approaches of their poetic practices to engage dimensionally and dynamically with the work, the audience, and the world. These poets’ oeuvres form a chain of overlapping themes of spirituality, environmentalism, violence, race, activism, feminism, and labour which are explored in circling, repeating, at times contradictory ways but which continue to figure embodied subjectivity as a central concern in their poetics.