OPEN STACKS | #48 All Things Poetry: Places – Andy Fitch, Miquel Àngel Llauger, Joshua Beckman, & Patrick Morrissey
“In his magisterial study of the implications of the German word Stimmung, or ‘attunement,’ Leo Spitzer explores the unity of such feelings between persons and their environment,” writes Susan Stewart in The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making. “Spitzer... emphasizes that the environment is not only spatial but also temporal—that a sense of Stimmung arises often from the moment to hand.” If a point is that which has no part, then prior to idea, person, and thing must be... place. We conclude and attune our poetry month series on all things poetry back where we started from, we think, with a look at how places, like poems, are made. To help us find our way are poets Joshua Beckman on The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks and Patrick Morrissey, who reads from his latest collection, World Music. Plus poems on place and on foot, with Andy Fitch and Miquel Àngel Llauger. Oh, the places we'll go!
From Jonathan Skinner on ecopoetics:
For some readers, ecopoetics is the making and study of pastoral poetry, or poetry of wilderness and deep ecology. Or poetry that explores the human capacity for becoming animal, as well as humanity’s ethically challenged relation to other animals. For others, it is poetry that confronts disasters and environmental injustices, including the difficulties and opportunities of urban environments. For yet others, ecopoetics is not a matter of theme, but of how certain poetic methods model ecological processes like complexity, non-linearity, feedback loops, and recycling. Or how “slow poetry” can join in the same kind of push for a sustainable, regional economy that “eating locally” does. Or how poetic experimentation complements scientific methods in extending a more reciprocal relation to alterity—ecopoetics as a “poethics.” Or even how translation can diversify the “monocrop” of a hegemonic language like English. “Greener than thou” claims finally are the least interesting dimension of ecopoetics, especially given the ease of “greenwashing.” Rather than locate a “kind” of writing as “ecopoetic,” it may be more helpful to think of ecopoetics as a form of site-specificity—to shift the focus from themes to topoi, tropes and entropologies, to institutional critique of “green” discourse itself, and to an array of practices converging on the oikos, the planet earth that is the only home our species currently knows.
Poet Craig Santos Perez offers a wealth of resources for diving into ecopoetics, including this series for the Hawaii Independent as well as within his own poetry.
- How to Navigate by Nostalgia: The Linguistics of Place Names
Having a sense where you are isn’t just a matter of knowing the stars. And relying on old maps and old names to describe a different view of the world isn’t just for astronomers. There’s a curious parallel, where linguistics, the environment, and culture intersect: consider the toponym or the place name. Toponymy is a little-studied branch of linguistics which nevertheless holds a lot of the answers to how we situate ourselves in the world—where are we, and how do we tell others what we have seen here? It’s all in the history of the place name. Indeed, without the stars, whimsical linguists might be able to navigate their way around by place name, up hill and down dale, as long as they understand its etymology. But what happens when the name comes from another place, or from a borrowed language, with no bearing on the new landscape?- Uncatalogued: Reading the Landscape
Related Titles
