Writing the New England tablelands region of Australia: Radical plant poetry and the gorge-text

Abstract

Gorge is an experimental, heteroglossic poetry sequence composed collaboratively with the plant life of the Northern Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. This article theorises Gorge as a work of 'radical plant poetry' and as a 'gorge-text' derived from - rather than merely representing - the chasmic environments of the Tablelands. Radical plant poetry attends to the phenomenological interplay between human and vegetal domains while highlighting the embodied percipience of plants. My conceptualisation of a gorge-text, moreover, is predicated on the writing-back - the modes of communication and signification - of nonhuman dwellers and, in particular, plants. A gorge-text encodes the writing that plants themselves do in - and about - their worlds as well as the human writer's composing-with plants to create a poetic work. Towards the enactment of these conceptual frames, Gorge experiments with vegetal script, poetic composting and sonic composition across its three parts, extracts from which are included in the article.