30 Aug 2015

Situating Geopoetics

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My article “Situating Geopoetics” is in the Association of American Geographers’ new journal GeoHumanities. Download the pdf here.

Here’s the abstract:

The form of the ars poetica is one in which the poet makes a statement on the art of poetry. Consider this a kind of ars-geo-poetica, a groundsetting for and statement on geopoetics that intends to both situate and to break open the field. This is an invitation for geopoetic texts and practices that draw on the work of poets as well as geographers, for an enchanted, earthy, and transaesthetic approach that moves to juxtapose contemporary poetics, particularly in the realm of ecopoetics, with critical human geography. Looking to geographers, poets, literary scholars, and poems themselves, this article aims to help situate and historicize geopoetics, provide a brief inventory of the current field, and carve out sites for future work.

Key Words: creative geographies, ecopoetics, geohumanities, geopoetics, site-based poetics.

29 Aug 2015

Place-Relation Ecopoetics: A Collective Glossary

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Northwestern U.S. Forest Fire Smoke Sunset, 8/24/15 (Pullman WA). Photo by Linda Russo

Northwestern U.S. Forest Fire Smoke Sunset, 8/24/15 (Pullman WA). Photo by Linda Russo

Over at Jacket 2, Linda Russo has compiled a collective glossary of place-relation ecopoetics. Linda lives in western Washington, and in the context of the ongoing Washington wildfires, where the Okanogan complex is the largest in state history, she writes: “Some fear the fires will continue to burn until it snows; some fear we can expect little in the way of precipitation again this year. The uncertainty is disconcerting, to say the least. I don’t know how to segue into the introduction I wrote for this glossary less than a week ago. I do know that what the terms gathered below represent – attunement to unfolding earth-realities and reverence for the many living things caught up in them – help me navigate that uncertainty.”

The collective glossary includes terms like Biotariat, B-RAD: Bio-Regional Attachment Disorder, Indigenous ecopoetics, Phylogeny, Relaxation time, and Walking. My contribution to the glossary is geopoetics.