This study is comprised of two parts: a collection of poetry: The Henwife, followed by a critical dissertation in five chapters. The dissertation defines and explores the possibilities of a ‘new domestic’ landscape and how experimental women writers might approach this emerging space in their own work. It also identifies how contemporary feminist and ecocritical discourse might inform the writing of this space and also discusses my own creative practice as informed and underpinned by these concerns. I examine the work of other women writers who have written from the domestic perspective in intriguing and sometimes challenging ways, such as Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Gillian Clarke and Lynette Roberts. Their poetic approaches and concerns help to foreground attempts to write a new domestic experience in ways which are truthful and reflective of the rapidly changing nature of this space. Useful theoretical approaches include contemporary feminist perspectives on the domestic, ecopoetic approaches and wider consideration of the post-human and writing in the Anthropocene.
Paying particular attention to the work of Harriet Tarlo and her radical landscape poetics, Charles Olson’s poetic manifesto PROJECTIVE VERSE and the playful work of Robert Duncan, I suggest that the poetic approaches used by these poets presents useful routes into exploring the ways in which it is possible to write a ‘new domestic’. The interplay of ecopoetical concerns and open experimental forms engenders and supports ways in which expression of indoors and outdoors or public and private space may mesh and transform ideas
4about what the domestic space may now encompass in the Anthropocene and late stage capitalism.