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An Eschatological Bestiary

The cut-up has a rich history, extending back almost a century to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, yet it seems to me a particularly apposite approach to apply to meditations on social, political and environmental fragmentation.

'An Eschatological Bestiary' (published under the pen name Oz Hardwick) addresses the paradoxical relationship between humankind and nature, in which we understand more as we become increasingly separated from unmediated engagement with the natural world. Using cut-up technique to splice together medieval beast allegory, popular science and my own academic articles, 'An Eschatological Bestiary' mimics the moralised encyclopaedic form of the Bestiary. However, the text for each beast has been run through randomisation software, the results being grammatically regularised without considering meaning. In doing so, this appropriates ‘traditional’ academic research in the service of eco-critically informed experimental poetry, thereby bringing the medieval and modern into productive creative and critical relation.

This has led to a sequence of prose-poems which employ an emphatic, present-tense voice which speaks of meanings which, for the reader, suggest themselves yet remain just out of reach. Some animals, such as the dog, fox and owl, come laden with literary and cultural allusions, whilst others, such as the ibis, quail and yale, are likely to have fewer immediate associations for the reader. The resultant ambiguity and fluidity of meaning speaks to anxieties about the natural world and the individual’s place within it, yet – something I was not expecting at the start of the project – it also articulates concern about meaning, or its absence, in a culture saturated with information.