Liquid Tissue. The Biophilia of Halina Poświatowska's Poetry in the Perspective of Queer Ecology

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze Halina Poświatowska’s poetry from the perspective of queer ecology. This concept, proposed by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Bruce Ericson, Timothy Morton, combines ecocriticism with queer theory, which draws attention to the dynamics of sexual identity and its entanglement with power relations. By using this method, it is possible to describe fluidity and fleshiness as forms of intimate recognition of sexual identity. The author analyzes poetic images of flesh associated with blood and water, showing how, through them, the boundaries between man and the world, the living and the dead, man and nature are blurred. The queer ecology perspective makes it possible to draw attention to intimacy, delight, and pleasure, which are not revealed in a reading directed solely at examining the environmental relations present in this poetic idiom. Intimacy turns out to be a formula that clearly destabilizes the heteronormative order, and the imaginarium of substance flow and seepage allows us to see unexpected biophilic and bodily correlations. In the text I analyze poems included in poetry volumes and those scattered, which represent different periods of the poet's work. The selection of works is governed by the category of meatiness. I also analyze the poems in which the tissue of animals (dolphins) represents a more complex form of the presence of the relationality of the ecosystem, which main feature is fluidness.