Ecopoetic Interventions: Poets Critiquing Canadian Petrocultures and Pipelines

Abstract

This project examines how petrocultural narratives, and infrastructure, are created and sustained through official rhetoric. I explore how ecopoetic interventions can be leveraged to influence public policy, articulate political will for a transition towards low-carbon energy futures, and galvanize social movements by reading two collections of poetry, The Enpipe Line and Once in Blockadia, to compare how language was created, deployed, and interpreted in defence of and opposition to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline. By comparing the ecopoetic interventions of Canadian poets and activists alongside state and corporate policy documents, I explore how petroculture has shaped the dominant narrative and material infrastructure of the Canadian state. I argue that ecopoetics offers modes to resist official rhetoric that obfuscates petroculture and forms of participatory public praxis that can be leveraged to transition Canadian energy systems, policy, and imagination towards a just low-carbon future.