Bipolar Magpie: A 21st Century Embodied Eco-Feminist Poetics

Drummond Percy, Anna Mary (2025) Bipolar Magpie: A 21st Century Embodied Eco-Feminist Poetics. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

Preview

Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (3MB) | Preview

Abstract

This mad-informed creative-critical thesis provides an alternate view of eco-poetry, focusing on my experiential knowledge of bipolar disorder and the influence this exerts on my hybrid writing about the environment, with eco-feminism at its core. Ancillary to the emergent critical discipline of mad studies, I introduce the bipolar magpie approach as a mad eco-feminist critical mode. I am seeking to communicate my observation of the changing climate/environment and the impact of mental illness on the body through the medium of hybrid works: journal/poem poetry and the critical analysis. This thesis utilises the writings of, amongst others: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Charles Olson, Audre Lorde, Diane Di Prima, R D Laing, John Ashbery, C.D Wright, Selima Hill, Sophie Collins, Sally Barrett, through to Zoe Skoulding and Harriet Tarlo of the recent Radical Landscape Poetry movement. These poets inform a feminist, experimental, embodied, mad, hybrid eco-poetics. This is a poetics rooted in interrogating the very nature of current eco-poetry and landscape via my concept of the chronic illness inspired domestic as landscape, intersecting with themes of place and eco-feminism. My work also highlights the importance of the oft neglected flora and fauna of liminal, edgeland urban/suburban areas.