Geo-graphy into Geo-poetry
In response to the Unit 1 Assessment I was encouraged to consider what our ‘landscape’ is and how it has been formed. I had never really considered the word Geography before: ‘earth writing’.
Geopoetics
Geopoetics is an evolving field of study and artistic expression in the 21st century.[3][20] It inspires writers, artists, and environmentalists to engage with and reflect upon the environment innovatively. In an era of increasing environmental awareness and concern, geopoetics provides a framework for addressing environmental challenges and fostering a deeper connection to the natural world
Writing (New) Worlds: Poetry and Place in a Time of Emergency
https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/292182154/Cresswell.pdf
ABSTRACT It may appear that the act of writing is fruitless in the face of the size and open-ended complexity of gathering environmental calamities including global heating, species extinction, and the appearance of plastic in everything. And yet – and yet – poets and others continue to write in ways that allow us to think about the earth’s futures and, more specifically, the future of place in catastrophic times. Geo, Eco and Topo – poetics are acts of making – making earth, home, and place. Making earth as homeplace. This paper considers Juliana Spahr’s book Well Then There Now as an entry point into thinking and writing about place in a relational way appropriate for a time of emergency. It focuses on the ways writing-as-making (poiesis) can help us to diagnose troubled worlds and prefigure new ones. The paper surveys the connections between geography and poetry, outlines the contributions of eco, geo and topo poetics and explores the hybrid poetics of Well Then There Now before advocating for the affordances of creative writerly approaches for geography more broadly.
Ecopoetics, geopoetics, topopoetics
Here, I focus on the intersection of three kinds of poetics – ecopoetics, geopoetics, and topopoetics – all terms that apply to aspects of my own poetry as well as the poet I focus on here – Juliana Spahr. Let us take each in turn. Eco stems from the Greek oikos, which roughly means ‘household’ but in the widest sense of all the ways we make the earth into a home. ‘Geo’, as we all know, also stems from ancient Greek and mean the earth but also land, ground, country, and soil. ‘Topo’ comes from topos. Topos means ‘place’ but also means literary or rhetorical form. A poem is a place as much as it is about a place, or about place in general. In this sense, topopoetics recognized the geography of the text itself and shares much with Sheila Hones’ insistence on literary geography as the study of literature as geographical events, happenings, and performances (Hones 2 T. CRESSWELL 2022).Poetics, of course, comes from the ancient Greek term for making – bringing something into existence that did not previously exist. The poetry I am focused on moves between, and often combines these three themes of house/home, earth/land/ground/soil, and place. When poetry is located at the heart of this particular Venn diagram is joins in purpose with what Yi-Fu Tuan identified as the purpose of geography – the study of earth as the home of humanity (Tuan 1991).
Eco - home or inhabitant perspective
Geo - the Earth, a biosphere
Topos - a rhetoric of shape and place making ‘topopoetics’
Juliana Spahr’s book Well Then There Now
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Well-Then-There-Juliana-Spahr/dp/1574232177
Accretion, articulation, exploration, transformation, sentiment, private and public property these are just a few of Juliana Spahr's interests. In this collection of poetry, she is performing her characteristic magic, turning these theoretical concerns into poetic odyssey.
From her first poem, written in Honolulu, to the last, written in Berkeley, California, about her childhood in Appalachia, Spahr takes us on a patchwork journey backwards and forwards in time and space, tracking change in ecology, society, economies, herself. Through a collage of “found language,” a curiosity about place, and a restless intelligence, Spahr demonstrates the vibrant possibilities of an investigatory poetics.
She includes grape varietals, the shrinking of public beachfront in Hawaii, the melting of the polar ice caps, and comparative poverty rates in her eclectic repertoire. She also knows how to sing in the oldest tradition of poetry of loss, and her lament for nature is the most keen.
We come into the world.
We come into the world and there it is.
The sun is there.
The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown
of the ocean is there.
Salmon and eels are there moving between the brown
and the brown and the blue.
The green of the land is there.
Elders and youngers are there.
We come into the world and we are there.
And we begin to breathe.
We come into the world and there it is.
We come into the world without and we breathe it in.
We come into the world and begin to move between the
brown and the blue and the green of it.
From “Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache”
Situating Geopoetics
https://www-tandfonline-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1071674#d1e141
Human/Nature Relationships | A History of Entanglement
Transformation of Landscapes
Humans have altered landscapes from the beginnings of civilization, either through agricultural practices, deforestation, dam building, or through roads, mines, tunnels, settlements, and other practices that all result in the transformation of nature and the environment. With the imperial expansion of Europe into the New World and other continents, these transformations became global in scope. This, in turn, led to more trade, greater transportation systems, and enabled unprecedented population growth, industrial agriculture, rapid technological advancements, and the systematic extraction of resources. This human impact on nature intensified radically during the Industrial Revolution and, more recently, in the Great Acceleration of the 1950s that led to the proliferation of nuclear technology and globalized trade.
Geographies of art and Environment
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/geographies-of-art-and-the-environment
Earth Lines
https://www.edinburghgeolsoc.org/earth-lines/
Representing Nature: Art and Climate Change
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44251311