UC Davis

In this dissertation, I argue that postwar American poetry offers a neglected history of animism’s re-emergence as a response to colonial modernity’s failed worlds. Through the poetry of Gary Snyder, Haunani-Kay Trask, Michael McClure, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, I examine how writers defend, recover, or construct social relationships between human and nonhuman persons. I define “animist poetics” as the formal and affective strategies through which poems compose, sustain, communicate, or contest these relationships. Rather than treating animism primarily as a belief about the consciousness of nonhuman beings or the agency of matter, I approach it as a social ontology whose value depends upon the worlds it helps produce. My evaluative horizon is eco-social viability: the historically situated capacity of animist lifeways to sustain or repair a more-than-human world amid ecological change. I therefore ask what capacities and obligations particular poetic forms enable, whose continuance they support, and how their consequences are conditioned by colonial histories.My ecological-pragmatic and Indigenous-normative approach brings the “new animism” of anthropology and religious studies into conversation with Indigenous studies and process philosophy. I distinguish immediate forms of relatedness from the relationships that acquire durability through reciprocal responsibility as well as emergent animist assemblages from worlds maintained through normative practices across time. These distinctions allow me to track a central tension between settler animisms that seek recovery or novel syncretism from modern alienation and Indigenous animisms grounded in survivance, territorial continuity, and responsibility to particular lands. I argue that animist poetics require reading poems not as representations separated from the real but as events capable of modifying relational fields. Yet making nonhuman presence aesthetically perceptible does not by itself establish an ethically accountable relationship.In my first chapter, I theorize Snyder’s “animist universalism” in Turtle Island. Snyder attempts to recover animist relation as a planetary human inheritance and to translate it into ecological praxis. I show how his poetry produces genuine forms of geo-material attunement while also reproducing the appropriative logic of settler counteridentification. In Chapter Two I turn to Trask’s “poetics of kāhea,” a mode of animist address that reterritorializes animism within Hawaiian genealogy, sovereignty, and aloha ʻāina. Her land-connected eros joins sensual relation to political obligation, while her asymmetrical forms of address call Kānaka readers into animist world-maintenance without granting settlers equivalent claims to intimacy or belonging. Then, in Chapter Three I develop “animist expressionism” to describe McClure’s attempts to make poetry participate in more-than-human fields of force. His “Beast Language” and mammalian encounters produce moments of interspecies resonance, but the colonial spaces organizing those encounters reveal the difference between affective immediation and accountable relationship. A second mode of animist expressionism I refer to as “becoming-person” instead approaches personhood as a contingent relational technology through which ecological consequences become perceptible. Finally, in Chapter Four I read Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars through Whiteheadian process philosophy and panpsychism. I call her poems “animist transversal propositions” because they invite readers to feel relations across conventional scales of relevance and to experience stars as participants in a shared cosmos. Although these propositions offer an animist reorientation toward non-anthropocentric modes of experience, their decontextualization of Indigenous ideas demonstrates how relationality without historical responsibility can to some degree extend coloniality.Across these chapters, I argue that animist poetry is most consequential when it tests whether aesthetics and practices of relatedness can form sustainable worlds that are ethical to both their human and nonhuman constituents. Animist poetics thereby reveals both the ecological promise of more-than-human sociality and the difficulty of transforming aesthetic emergence into accountable practices of world-maintenance under colonial modernity.