Abstract
This contribution is a reflection on the process of becoming a poet as a geographer. It charts my journey into the world of poetry and reflects on the cross-overs between academic geography and poetic practice in the past. It considers the way in which geography and poetry can inform each other in the practice of writing creatively, and tentatively suggests how this engagement might influence my on-going writing practice now and in the future.
Desire Lines 3
I recently decided to become a poet. Not just someone who writes poems (I have done that for as long as I can remember) but someone who works hard at writing poems and gets them published in places where it’s an achievement to be published. A peer reviewed poet. It is hard to say exactly when this happened but it might have been at the AAG Annual Meeting in Boston in 2008 when I was chatting to a fellow geographer outside the Museum of Contemporary Art while looking out across the river. This fellow geographer admitted to being a creative writer. My response, I think, was to say ‘aren’t we all?’ And there is something odd about the expression ‘creative writing’ as though it were possible to write without being creative. I had written poetry for many years before that afternoon in Boston. I recall, for instance, in 1985 being asked to pick a piece of paper out of a hat during a lecture at University College London (UCL). On the piece of paper was the name of a place in London. Our task, as students in a course called ‘humanistic geography’ taught by Jacquie Burgess and Peter Jackson, was to keep this place secret, go to it, write about it creatively and read our efforts back to the class. I wrote a poem, as did several others in the group.
Creative writing was very much on the curriculum at UCL. In a third year class we focused on travel writing as a form of environmental expression. I remember reading Donald Meinig’s essay ‘Geography as an Art’, an essay I returned to when thinking about writing this. It seems that there is a creative turn in cultural geography at the moment that might be finally fulfilling some of the expectations that Meinig and others were then developing. ‘Could geographers actually create literature as well as borrow from it?’ he wrote, ‘I see nothing in the logic, needs, or possibilities of our field to prohibit it.’ 2 At the end of his essay he asserted that his paper was ‘a call . . . for greater openness, a clearing away of pedantic barriers, for a toleration of geographical creativity wherever it may lead’. ‘We shall not have a humanistic geography worthy of the claim’, he continued, ‘until we have some of our most talented and sensitive scholars deeply engaged in the creation of the literature of the humanities. Geography will deserve to be called an art only when a substantial number of geographers become artists’. 3
While working on my PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison I had been a part of two guerilla poetry groups – the Cultural Workers Alliance and then the Cheap at Any Price Poets Collective – a group that exists to this day. 4 I wrote very bad poetry and sprung it on unsuspecting audiences at coffee shops and in laundromats. Then, of course, I graduated, got a job and turned my attention to writing ‘serious’ geography, but nevertheless accumulated a few poems a year for precisely 15 years leading up to Boston.
I admired my colleague’s willingness to admit to creative writing in the context of a geography conference. I am not sure why, but there is potentially something a little embarrassing about it. Perhaps it is that advertising of creativity – making writing seem special and noteworthy in the face of all that other writing in the social sciences. It seems like an easy claim to make and a hard one to substantiate. Nevertheless, by the time I got off the plane at Heathrow I had decided to write a bit more seriously.
In the spring of 2009 I applied for a place on a course run by the publisher Faber and Faber. It was called ‘Becoming a Poet’ and was the first of its kind for the brand new Faber Academy. I had to submit a portfolio of poems and a rationale for why I wanted to do it. In this rationale I wrote that I was a cultural geographer and wished to bring something of my experience to creative writing – to write about place, landscape, betweenness, belonging and not belonging, travel. I also claimed that I believed that focusing on poetry would make me a better writer in general by paying attention to writing word by word. By being precise.
I did not expect to get on this course and then I did. Eleven of us met every Tuesday and some Saturdays from October 2009 until March 2010, mentored by the wonderful poet Daljit Nagra. It was very intense with frequent workshops in which we were expected to carefully and closely critique our colleagues’ poems word by word, beat by beat. Some of us still meet twice a month in London.
During the course we were visited by some of the great and the good of British poetry including Jo Shapcott, who happens to be one of my colleagues at Royal Holloway, which is home to one of the best creative writing programmes in the United Kingdom. We met for coffee after the course was over and she talked me into starting a PhD, part time, supervised by her. It is a practice-led PhD, which involves creating a body of 60 strong poems as well as 40,000 words of criticism. For this I get to meet Jo Shapcott once a month and talk about poetry. I am approaching the end of year two. There are up to five more to go.
Jo is as interested in geography as I am in poetry. This was also true in the Faber course. My colleagues frequently asked me about place, landscape and mobility. They are surprised and impressed by what a cultural geographer gets up to. And recently the conversations I have been having with Jo have taken a new turn. We are launching a new Masters course called ‘Creative Writing: Place, Environment, Writing’ to begin in September 2012. The course will also involve Andrew Motion, another wonderful poet, biographer and novelist. It will introduce creative writers to the geographies of place, landscape, mobility, the wild, the rural, the urban and the global at the same time as it will ask geographers to think of the possibilities of being creative writers. All of this in a context where environmental writing is experiencing a surge in popular interest in the United Kingdom, where the so-called psycho-geographies of Ian Sinclair and others have received slots on the evening news and in the popular press. 5
There is a relatively small tradition of geographers becoming (published) poets. Perhaps the most successful was the Canadian geographer James Wreford-Watson, the author of the collection Of Time and the Lover, which won him the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1951. 6 The collection, very much of its time, is full of geographical terminology such as in the poem Nunatak, which speaks of ‘all the nunataks of time’ and ‘the sheet erosion of the heart’. 7 Wreford-Watson was not the only geographer to engage in poetic practice. Jay Appleton, a geographer from Hull, has been publishing poetry for decades. 8 Simon Armitage, one of the stars of the contemporary British poetry scene, took a BA in geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic before becoming a poet. His first pamphlet collection is called Human Geography. 9 Recently he has evangelized about the relationship between geography and poetry arguing that geography (through the theme of place) is the one continuous strand in the canon of British poetry. 10
And then, of course, poets have frequently enrolled geography in their poetic practice. In addition to Armitage we have Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III 11 and Ed Dorn’s more modernist collection, Geography. 12 Recently there has been a plethora of poets using geography in their titles to connote the themes of belonging and lack of belonging that have become prevalent refrains in an increasingly mobile modern world. In Geography for the Lost, Kapka Kassabova mobilizes geography to illuminate a world of displacement and migration – of being permanently in a process of translation: ‘The outlines of the hills are clear, very clear. / The stones are full of stately glee. / We don’t know what has brought us here. / We don’t know what will make us flee. 13 The Canadian poet, Gillian Wigmore, meanwhile, uses geography (in a poem and collection with the title Soft Geography) to signify intimate landscapes in a small working town in Northern British Columbia. The title poem carefully produces an atmosphere of a particular place as inseparable from the self and from intimate human relationships. The ‘skin and air intermingle / each so near to the other / there is no space / between thought and water / regret and growth’. Geography becomes fully embodied and lived within the weather and elements – ‘if here is the centre / of my own geography / and I am the remembrance / of yours – how is it / we are so far from ourselves? / we are so close / we are almost attached’. 14 These two poems are, on the face of it, very different. One reflects on an immigrant world in a vaguely specified landscape while the other conveys a sense of intimacy in a precisely defined world. Both mobilize the word ‘geography’ as a poetically suggestive term. In both cases it connects self and world – the small worlds of human relations and the large landscapes they dwell in. Perhaps the strangest coming together of geography and poetry was the visits the highly modernist poet Charles Olson made to the other-than-modernist geographer, Carl Sauer. Indeed, Sauer was one of the main inspirations for Olson’s poetics. 15 Geography, it seems, is very much part of the poet’s toolkit.
I am several years into my journey into poetry. It is hard work. A good, long-established poetry magazine gets in excess of 10,000 poems a year to consider for publication. They are not blind reviewed so, naturally, well-known poets find it easier to get published. Typically they will publish about 150 poems a year. As I write this I have had 27 poems published or accepted for publication in reputable poetry magazines, including the two that start and end this reflection. Clearly I am no longer embarrassed to call myself a poet in front of strangers.
There are a number of ways in which I have been transformed as I have become a geographer/poet. My poetry is led by geographical themes and I still think through my poems a little too much in advance in the way a trained academic might. This is a hard habit to let go of. Writing poetry and writing academic geography are very different and my belief that the poetry would help with my prose was a little naive. Nevertheless, new terrain has opened up for me. I have been invited to write more in the space between academic prose and poetry – essays for instance, as well as art catalogue entries. Slowly, I am letting the attention to form, the use of the space of the page, and some elements of repetition and rhythm enter my academic prose. I am writing a book about Maxwell Street Market in Chicago. In that book I am allowing myself to be a little more creative – using more of an essay style, including bits of montage, reveling in the found poetry of lists wherever I find them. I am well aware of the risks involved. Some attempts at creative writing in geography have been miserable. Writers suddenly think they can ‘be creative’ without enough attention, practice or training. No-one would think they could do complicated mathematics just because they feel like it but there are no such inhibitions when creative writing is concerned. Creative writing involves reading endlessly and writing with discipline. I hope and believe I am on that road and am willing to risk failure.
Littoral
this is where the lugworms live samphire grows water deposits its salt crabs crawl side- ways and dunes creep imperceptibly old bottles for medicines and ginger beer appear and disappear saltmarsh bog bodies estuary mud the negation of measurement the invention of fractals migrant birds make temporary homes archaeology emerges old harbours inscrutable circles of stone someone swore they saw the shadow of a ship and twice a year on a low low tide stumps and trunks of petrified trees bring rumours of Atlantis!
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