Infinity Lyric: Lysergic Excess in the Poetry of Dana Ward

Contemporary American poet Dana Ward's work generates ecological thinking through an 'infinity lyric' mode shaped by psychedelic aesthetics, drifting attention, and shifting scales of perception. Close reading of Ward's two collections, alongside poststructuralist and new materialist theory, reveals an active reorganization of everyday experience that forges a psychedelic ecosophy linking mind, society, and environment through lyrical voice and movement. Ward's aesthetic of lysergic excess offers an ethical practice grounded not in transcendence but in immanent, relational forms of being. Infinity lyric models participatory, heterogeneous, and open-ended ways of attending to the world's material agencies.

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Abstract

This article examines how the work of contemporary American poet Dana Ward generates ecological thinking through ‘infinity lyric’: a mode shaped by psychedelic aesthetics, drifting attention and shifting scales of perception. By close reading Ward’s two collections, This Can’t Be Life (2012) and The Crisis of Infinite Worlds (2013), in conversation with poststructuralist, new materialist and contemporary poetic theory, the article explores how Ward performs an active reorganisation of everyday experience, forging a psychedelic ecosophy in which mind, society and environment connect through lyrical voice and movement. Situating Ward’s work within the cultural ecologies of Web 2.0 and anti-capitalist critique, the article argues that Ward’s aesthetic of lysergic excess offers an ethical practice grounded not in transcendence but in immanent, relational forms of being. It concludes that infinity lyric provides a distinctive contribution to ecological thought by modelling participatory, heterogeneous and open-ended ways of attending to the world’s material agencies.