1st Edition
Geopoetics in Practice
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.
List of Tables and Figures
Preface: Harriet Hawkins
Introduction: Geopoetics as Route-Finding
Eric Magrane, Linda Russo, Sarah de Leeuw, Craig Santos Perez
Part 1: Documenting
1. Bodies Belong to the World: On Place, Visuality, and Vulnerability
Kerry Banazek
2. A Cosmology of Nibi: Picto-Poetics and Palimpsest in Anishinaabeg Watery Geographies
Kimberly Blaeser
3. Terma: A Dialogue
Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley
4. All Visuals Have Sound: The Verbalization of Geography and the Sound of Landscape
Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim
5. Karankawa Carancahua Carancagua Karankaway: Centering Indigenous Presence in Southeast Texas
John Pluecker
6. Geopoetics of Intime and ( SUND ): Performing Geochronology in the North Atlantic
Angela Rawlings
7. Seismic, or Topogorgical, Poetry
John Charles Ryan
8. rout/e
Chris Turnbull
Part 2: Reading
9. Lyric Geography
Maleea Acker
10. Ekphrastic Poetry as Method
Candice P. Boyd
11. The Topopoetics of Dwelling as Preservation in Lorine Niedecker’s Paean to Place
Tim Cresswell
12. Poking Holes in the Colonial Canoe: Creative Writing as Intervention in a 19th-Century Travel Writing Narrative
Sophie Anne Edwards
13. Thukela Poswayo’s Poetry of Dwelling
Emily McGiffin
14. Islote Poetics: Notes from Minor Outlying Islands
Urayoán Noel
15. The Unbending of the Faculties: Learning from Frederick Law Olmsted
Jonathan Skinner
16. Borne-away: Tracing a Gendered Dispossession by Accumulation
Diane Ward
Part 3: Intervening
17. The Limits and Promise of Urbopoetics: washpark, Collaboration, and Pedestrian Practice
Patrick Clifford and Tyrone Williams
18. Geopoetics as Collaborative Encounter: Performing Poetic Political Ecologies of the Colorado River
Elissa Dickson and Nathan Clay
19. Negro-Mountain-Wolves/Notes on Region
C.S. Giscombe
20. Hurricane Poetics and Crip Psychogeographies
Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers
21. Geopoetics, via Germany
Angela Last
22. Indigenous Pacific Islander Geopoetics
Craig Santos Perez
23. Agitating a Copper Lyre; Or, Geolyricism for the Age of Digital Reproduction
Jennifer Scappettone
24. The Poetic Lexicon of Waste: From Asarotos Oikos (A) to Flowers (F)
Lucie Taïeb
Contributor Bios
Acknowledgements
Index
Biography
Eric Magrane is an assistant professor of geography at New Mexico State University. His work takes multiple forms, from scholarly to literary to artistic. He is co-editor of the hybrid field guide/anthology The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide.
Linda Russo, a clinical associate professor at Washington State University, teaches creative writing and literature and directs EcoArts on the Palouse. Her published works include Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way and Participant, both poetry, and the co-edited Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene.
Sarah de Leeuw, a professor with the Northern Medical Program of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine, is a poet, critical geographer, and anti-colonial feminist researcher whose multidisciplinary work focuses on marginalized peoples and places. She is the author of multiple journal papers, entries, chapters, and books (both creative and academic), and a Canada Research Chair in Humanities and Health Inequities.
Craig Santos Perez is an Indigenous Chamorro poet and scholar from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of four collections of poetry and the co-editor of three anthologies. He is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa.