JAYME COLLINS, Ph.D.

Jayme Collins is a scholar, writer, and audio producer. She studies poetry, land use, climate change, and archives. She tells stories about communities and cultures navigating environmental change.

Jayme is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University where she is a project leader at Blue Lab. She has a PhD in English Literature from Northwestern University.

ABOUT

WRITING

Book Project: “Composing in the Field”
Academic
Public and Catalogue
Reviews

AUDIO

Archival Ecologies

TEACHING

Princeton
Northwestern

EVENTS

Pop-up Story Patch
Ephemera Institute

EXPERIMENTS

Coracle
Tinkering

Things I see

Composing in the Field: Situated Poetries and Environments

“Composing in the Field” provides the first literary history of a unique genealogy of sculptural poetries int he U.S., the U.K., the Caribbean, and Canada since 1960. Through readings of poems inscribed in materials from stone to neon and developed through relationships to specific sites—a river in Western Canada; a garden in Scotland; an English allotmen; a New England archive; and a strip of land near an airport in Barbados—I show how a distinct materialist aesthetic in poetry reconstructs territorial histories shaped by colonial dispossession and reshapes environmental futures by merging poetry with geophysical locales. I call these practices “situated poetics”: poetics that extend off the page and into the places of their making to connect local landscapes to patterns of land use from territorial possession to systems of property and extraction.

Some of the poets I study include Ian Hamilton Finlay, Simon Cutts, Kamau Brathwaite, Erica Van Horn, Susan Howe, Jordan Abel, Rita Wong, and Fred Wah.

Simon Cutts, “After John Clare,” 2004