chain coral Chorus
Geopoetics are a variety of experimental writing practices that draw on geological method and language, and consider human life, culture and society in a deep time context. Canadian Poet, Don McKay referred to it as 'the place where materialism and mysticism, those ancient enemies, finally come together, have a conversation in which each hearkens to the other, then go out for a drink'. In this way, the poet's notebook and the geologist's field journal fuse. This is about deeply connecting to the land and its primal histories, and considering ourselves in the context of its deep time awe. It's also about finding new ways of meditating on and communicating about place; who we are, where we're arriving at and from, what building materials give us life and meaning. Eco poet, Derek Sheffield notes the connections between ecology and poetry, suggesting that the notebook becomes a field journal. He says we have "Adam's task - thinking of the right name for a thing". In naming them, we give them spirit - epistemological, narrative and poetic spirit. Like Wilde said, “Nothing existed until art invented it”. For Sheffield, following the trail in ecology is the same as following the strange impulse and tides of a poem in progress; an intellectual and physical wayfinding. Drafting equates to evolution and development of the scientific method. Here, the poetics of the creative are informed by the language, processes and observations of the Sciences. Through this the poet comes to recognise, in their poetics, a community of sensory data, vernaculars and interrelationships - the same as ecology: a community of species and connecting interactions. And in this, a recognition of connectedness and otherness. We are part of the system, and yet separate - observers. The Other-Connected is as integral to science as it is to poetry. It is the other and the same together. This is what is possible with geopoetics; the observation of millennia long bonds and gulfs. One of the most significant figures in geopoetics is Kenneth White who wrote, "I had always been of the persuasion that the richest poetics came from contact with the earth, from a plunge into biospheric space, from an attempt to read the lines of the world". Going on to argue that "This can be done in two ways: either by archaeological work on a language, or by an 'exotic' recourse to other languages with different metaphysics, different initial fictions". In simple terms then, what we're looking for here is a language mine, a collecting of words and terms that offer these different illuminating potentialities. But there's more at play too. As White posits, it's "a liberation from our conditioned minds. Once outside you let things be, you let go (letting be isn't a psychological context, it's an ontological one), and you retrieve a topological presence". This presence is achieved through acute Geological or Deep Time observations. This takes us back to Mckay: "Geopoetry makes it legitimate for the natural historian or scientist to speculate and gawk, and equally legitimate for the poet to benefit from close observation, and from some of the amazing facts that science turns up. It provides a crossing point, a bridge over the infamous gulf separating scientific from poetic frames of mind, a gulf which has not served us well, nor the planet we inhabit with so little reverence or grace". This is the foundation of the Chain Coral Chorus. Since the Black Country is so richly steeped in geological wonder, it makes sense to further geopoetry in the unearthing available on my doorstep. Derek Sheffield's Conference Paper - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3zs05YhZ0k Don McKay's Essay ‘Ediacaran and the Anthropocene: poetry as a read of deep time’, Kenneth White's Essay -http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/general/resources/2008-Kenneth-White-Geopoetics.pdf Comments are closed.
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January 2022
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