PhD ThesisThis thesis comprises a collection of poetry, All These Rivers, and a critical dissertation Beyond the Temple, Beyond the Pond: Deep Ecology and Contemporary Literature of the American West, which collectively explore the relationship between the literature of the American West and Deep Ecology.
All These Rivers engages with the themes and tenets of Deep Ecology in its methods and principles of construction. It considers my relationship to the landscape of home, the Pacific Northwest, and how it is maintained and intensified by the process of writing my experiences into existence during a period of geographic isolation. The collection’s title responds to the many rivers in this region, but also alludes to the collection’s themes of origins, direction and cycles. The content and structure of this body of work demonstrate how nature and natural processes not only shape the landscape, but imprint upon the self. Voicing my complex relationship with this geography through the process of writing, re-mapping and recounting experiences, this collection seeks to collapse the distance between vast and intimate geographies, reconcile the wild and the civilized, and to reunify myself with home terrain.
The critical component provides a context for reading this collection of poems and further explores of the relationship between Deep Ecology and contemporary Western American literature through critical readings of Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm and Ellen Meloy’s The Last Cheater’s Waltz. Concluding this body of work, I embark on a brief critical reading of All These Rivers, suggesting that the process of writing the collection, and the poems themselves, engage in a practice of Deep Ecology
