Geopoetics in Practice

Eric Magrane, Linda Russo, Sarah de Leeuw, Craig Santos Perez, Eric Magrane, Linda Russo, Sarah de Leeuw, Craig Santos Perez

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429626975
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Naturwissenschaften
• Categoría: Geographie

This breakthrough book examines dynamic intersections of poetics and geography. Gathering the essays of an international cohort whose work converges at the crossroads of poetics and the material world, Geopoetics in Practice offers insights into poetry, place, ecology, and writing the world through a critical-creative geographic lens.

This collection approaches geopoetics as a practice by bringing together contemporary geographers, poets, and artists who contribute their research, methodologies, and creative writing. The 24 chapters, divided into the sections "Documenting, " "Reading, " and "Intervening, " poetically engage discourses about space, power, difference, and landscape, as well as about human, non-human, and more-than-human relationships with Earth. Key explorations of this edited volume include how poets engage with geographical phenomena through poetry and how geographers use creativity to explore space, place, and environment.

This book makes a major contribution to the geohumanities and creative geographies by presenting geopoetics as a practice that compels its agents to take action. It will appeal to academics and students in the fields of creative writing, literature, geography, and the environmental and spatial humanities, as well as to readers from outside of the academy interested in where poetry and place overlap.

PART I
Documenting

1
Bodies belong to the world

On place, visuality, and vulnerability

Kerry Banazek

Late 2010—Missoula, Montana. I have been writing little poems that grammatically collapse my history as an organism and the bodies of landscapes. These poems are tiny, stalling machines. Their forms more than their phrasing suggest they are about limitation; they are my first bid at talking about how my embodiment has been held against me. They look something like this:

ANDROGYNY, A BORROW PIT. Alchemy in a mechanical culture.

Aerial excursions, mouth-viewed views and all the types of
invasion. Weeds. Glacial silt and-or ordinary runoff. Phototropes.

A body cellar. A sudden flock or orchard or warren. Some
beautiful-moving-slowly that makes a tree mean part of the sky.

An established writer asks why the poems “do not sound like me.” She accuses me of being “very eloquent in person.” We work together to create a catalogue of ways punctuation can cut lyricism off mid-flight. I do not tell her that I’ve been writing this way (in part) because I am afraid of language, or because using incomplete phrases makes the poems feel almost photographic for me, or because this helps me “get them out.” I like the poems being little rectangles with some visual intrigue. Form is the thing that binds them to my life, not content or insight. I do not admit to the established writer that for many years I almost never spoke unless I was spoken to directly. I do not yet know how to articulate that I haven’t come to Montana to be a poet or a writing teacher per se. I am here, instead, because I am carrying around an idea: If I don’t learn how to do something with the trauma stored in my body, I won’t survive.

***

This is an essay about being a particular body. A body that has moved through particular spaces. It is about training a self (my self) to talk about landscape photography in media studies terms, while training a self to work as a poet, and about how these experiences co-inform my ways of being, thinking, writing, and researching. Which is to say, it is about the training that underlies my understanding of methods and methodologies. I mean to “merely” observe and describe some salient features about one way of sensing and engaging the world, a way I think is well described by the adjective “geopoetic.” I have access to these descriptions via somewhat accidental coincidences, which is part of the point of this chapter.

When I moved to Montana, the so-called Big Sky state, one of the first things I did was buy a wide-angle lens for my favorite camera. Technically, any lens with a wider field of view than the human eye can be called wide-angle; these lenses have short focal lengths and are good for capturing dramatic landscapes. They enhance perspective (a scene’s straight lines appear to converge faster than when viewed with the naked eye; distinctions between grounds are somewhat amplified). These lenses deal in scale-change and distortion. They can produce decidedly awkward portraits or make everyday environments otherworldly. Handled well, they often make it feel like viewers have stumbled into a scene; we might say they trade in immersion more than realism.¹ Or that these lenses deal in groundedness rather than authenticity.² Immersion and groundedness are also concepts that have helped me coalesce, name, and engage with the value of geopoetic methods. Immersion, groundedness, and geopoetics are all terms that speak to styles of connection, to the existence of relationships that implicate individuals and environments in equal measure. Indeed, as methodological terms, they all assert the ongoing value of acknowledging individual entities while also insisting on each individual’s porousness and vulnerability.

Geopoetics are plural. They partake of what we might call wide-angle disciplinary trends, which include, among others: the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences (e.g., as engaged by Warf and Arias 2008; Pugh 2009; or Withers 2009), invitations to include affective objects and artistic methods in the mainstream of both English and media studies (e.g., Parikka 2015; Kara 2015; Sommer 2014), cultural geography’s phenomenological and artistic sides (e.g., Turchi 2004; Harmon 2003; Wood 2010), and interdisciplinary debates surrounding social and technical functions of locative media (e.g., Farman 2011; Gabrys 2016). These disciplinary trends are important, decidedly non-exhaustive affiliations. Like wide-angle optical devices, trends invite participants to experience scholarship in sweeping ways. They distort relationships between researchers, methodologies, objects of study, and disciplines. Where such distortions can be dangerous, they can also be productive, as long we recognize that a distortion is happening. Turns, trends, and other wide-angle images of disciplinary action expose urgencies and exigencies when taken up together and in context. For instance, a simultaneous surge of interest in both poetic articulation and spatial, geographic thought across humanities and social science disciplines can be (non-exhaustively) associated with a number of global phenomena: the rise of new technical regimes (e.g., regimes structured by the increasing affordability of Geographic Information Systems [GIS] devices or the commercialization of drone technology); the expansion of infrastructures of global capitalism; and anthropogenic climate change.

Observation itself is a situated practice performed by individuals and a dynamic epistemic category (e.g., in the histories collected by Daston and Lunbeck 2011). Moreover, observing evolving phenomena—including physical or cultural geographic phenomena and the emergence of poetic or academic trends—requires us to evolve our methodologies. In other words, active and imaginative observation of trends has the potential to expose the limits that disciplinary histories impose; whatever our home disciplines, technical and political changes serve as explicit invitations to borrow from neighboring fields. Responding when hailed in this way can be both risky and thrilling.

All research invites a measure of idiosyncrasy. No writer, scholar, or individual can know everything in their own field equally well, and each individual brings an observational history to their work. Phenomena related to researchers’ identities and idiosyncrasies are magnified in interdisciplinary research and writing. When a body acts as an interface between fields, it has a filtering effect: Not everything passes through. The more methods one tries to encompass, the more aberrations threaten—sometimes productively, sometimes dangerously. In this way, all interdisciplines engage with poetics. While the term poetics is most frequently glossed in rhetorical or aesthetic terms, thinking expansively, it is possible to understand poetics as a name for “coming together,” for arts of assembly that extend theory and praxis into one another or otherwise interfere with disciplinary bonds. Where poetics borrows from poetries, it forces attention to gaps surrounding work and understanding. If you write poems, Glyn Maxwell argues, the hungry whiteness that surrounds words or precedes them can’t be understood as “nothing” (the way it can for people who only write prose); rather, this whiteness must be understood as “half of everything” (2012, 11). Poetic interdisciplinary research, then, is research that works with gaps surrounding existing disciplinary knowledge and gaps in researcher experience; it acknowledges the “left out” and asks readers to do the same. Geopoetic research acts on this premise doubly: It draws together long literary and geographic lineages, calling attention to resultant glitches and disjunctures, and it invites the practice of poetry itself into places and conversations of interest to geographers.

Here’s one more explicit way to think about the importance of defining geopoetic methods as a subset of poetic methods: Geopoetic methods call attention to collisions between locative, non-dominant media philosophies and the politics of form. Geopoetics have the potential to reconfigure expectations surrounding the roles personal experience can play in academic research precisely because—whether or not geopoetics know it—they insist:

Bodies belong to the world.

This is a complicated lesson—one that cannot ever be fully learned, recalled, or applied. Both bodies and the world resist definition. Belonging suggests both the comfort of communion and the violation of being made or becoming property. And despite what we all might like to believe, these are not mutually exclusive suggestions. Encompassing can be a form of domination. Even when we can tell the difference between benevolent and malevolent belongings, the issue of scale sings between bodies and the world.

***

When I decided to move to Montana, I latched onto the idea that living in a new landscape might make living itself easier, and that making images with the wide-angle lens might help me connect with the landscape. Photography—as both a medium that evolves with the technical devices that support it and as a disciplined form of artistic practice foregrounding the social and creative potential in human and machinic ways of seeing—has a long-standing relationship with the idea that landscapes always have social dimensions. This relationship is fundamentally complex and conflict-wrought. It is both rhetorically and politically constitutive. The same might be said for the somewhat irrational idea I had that the Bitterroot Mountains and the Clark Fork River and the ponderosa pines might be able to help my young adult self figure out the world in ways that features of my other landscapes (mainly places in Upstate New York and Western Washington) hadn’t been able to.

Of course, having had this kind of idea wasn’t notable. It is the kind of idea that can be understood as cliché, imperialistic, and naïve, especially when it takes shape in relation to a landscape like Southwestern Montana. This is a landscape where a contemporary settler might, with unwitting ease, encounter a diorama celebrating the journeys of Lewis and Clark at a local shopping mall but then experience significant difficulty trying to figure out where to go to learn a few details relevant to picturing the landscape’s co-constitutive relationship with Indigenous cultural histories, present-tense philosophies, and experiences. This kind of idea, then, is simultaneously the kind of idea that squeaks with the whiteness of the American transcendental literary tradition and the kind of idea that recalls what trauma and addiction specialists call “the geographic cure” (the name for the often false hope that a change in location might solve one’s problems, which appears in both Alcoholics Anonymous lore and psychiatric literature, e.g., in work following Maddux and Desmond [1982]; it is common enough parlance to warrant an urban dictionary entry and to serve as a stand-alone title for a range of think pieces, e.g., Flynn [2012]). But imperialism and avoidance aren’t the only lineages that support related ideas. The premise that specific landscapes have specific things to teach and offer specific balms (e.g., see Kimmerer 2013) also has something to do with the careful crediting of emplaced, more-than-human knowledges, as well as with the wide richness of eco-literatures, Western and non-Western, colonial and Indigenous. In other words, the limits and distortionary tendencies of ideas like the ones that my young adult self pinned to Southwestern Montana do not negate the ability of related ideas to instigate meaningful, wide-angle engagements with the world. These tendencies do ask that we proceed with care if we choose to proceed.

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