Derek Gladwin, University of British Columbia and Moore Institute Visiting Research Fellow’North Atlantic Poetry and Multimedia: Environmentalism, Space and Websites’

This talk discusses the relationship between two interdisciplinary environmental and spatial approaches to literature, known as ecocriticism and geocriticism, through two interactive websites that focus on the poetry of Eavan Boland and Marlene Creates. In one website, Creates, who is an environmental poet and photographer from Newfoundland, Canada, has created a multimedia experience titled A Virtual Walk of the Boreal Poetry Garden. Across the North Atlantic, another website titled The Poetry Project: Poetry and Art from Ireland employs a similar multimedia format, incorporating short videos of place-based poetry read orally in built and non-built environments. Boland’s poem ‰Û÷In Our Own Country’, which is accompanied by Oliver Comerford’s short film Distance, is the selection from ‰Û÷The Poetry Project’ considered in this talk. What is important about these two projects is that they are meant to be experienced on the web. These online representations of environmental poetry also use elements of interest for ecocritics and geocritics alike, capturing both real and imagined spaces, while also expanding the boundaries among disciplines, genres, and platforms. Ultimately, this talk examines how these two websites demonstrate through poetry, image, and virtual experience the ability to promote environmental awareness through spatial representations of place.

Derek Gladwin is a Social Sciences and Humanities Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. His work primarily focuses on the environmental humanities in 20^th– and 21^st-century literary, film, and visual cultures in Ireland, the UK, and the North Atlantic. Gladwin is author of the forthcoming book, Contentious Terrains: Boglands in the Irish Postcolonial Gothic (2016), and co-editor of Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (2015) and Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment (2015). He is currently co-editing an issue on ‰Û÷Irish Environmental Criticism’ for the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and will serve as an Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 2015.