Infinity Lyric: Lysergic Excess in the Poetry of Dana Ward
Green Letters June 18, 2026 Maria Sledmere
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.