Pipe Lines: Navigating oil's impasse through petropoetry

Numerous urgent, compelling, and obvious reasons demand that societies enact broad-scale transitions away from crude oil dependency and yet this is either not happening or is being addressed too slowly. This gap between knowledge and action presents an opportunity for literary approaches to address the problem of oil dependence. However, despite the burgeoning field of eco-literature addressing climate change, there remains a surprising scarcity of published prose and poetry, particularly from authors and poets from the Global North, that explicitly engages with oil’s saturation in contemporary modes of living.

This doctoral thesis consists of two discrete yet interconnected components. The first section is a collection of poems (55pp) titled Five Hundred Swimming Pools. The collection is oriented around four long poems and interspersed with several other poems, each using fragmentary interjection and parataxis intermingled with lyric elements. Five Hundred Swimming Pools thematically meditates upon what it means to know or see oil in a (Global North) setting removed from more visible consequences of extraction, as well as the entanglement of oil in all modes of cultural production and the author’s personal relationships and experiences.

The thesis’s second section provides an exegesis that situates the creative work in a current environmental, political, and academic context. It begins by arguing that oil dependency requires urgent attention by literary authors, and particularly poets, in the Global North. The exegesis then surveys existing reasons for this gap, discussing four separate (but connected) “obstacles”: invisibility, enormity, banality, and embarrassment, to explain the strategy developed for the author’s petropoetic composition. Chapter three discusses the intended effect of using parataxis to re-envisage oil’s effects within a local context as a strategy of engaging readers, in view of Sianne Ngai’s articulation of the “interesting” aesthetic. Chapter four discusses the use of “disaster” as a way of knowing oil after Frederik Buell’s characterisation of oil culture’s cyclic fusion of catastrophe and exuberance, both as something depicted in the creative work and as a manifestation of petroculture’s influence in all kinds of media. Chapter five considers the paradigmatic influence of inevitable complicity with oil while writing from a place of privilege, discussing how the deliberate ‘noticing’ of oil in poems changes the possibilities for framing of other ‘normal’ biographical poetic paradigms. Finally, the exegesis concludes with some rhetorical discussion about the limits that oil awareness places upon forms of creative writing, and future possibilities for petropoetic projects.