Sean Borodale's Walking To Paradise, a collection of 12 OS-map-sized poems written in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge's tours of the Lake District. Wordsworth Trust, 1999
The Irish poet Ciaran Carson declared of the map: ‘It has to use shorthand, or symbols, or metaphor, and in this it resembles poetry’.[1] These two ‘graphic’ forms of earth writing, cartography and poetry, are historically, as well as conceptually, linked, with many early modern regional surveys involving both maps and poetry as forms of topographic notation (later used as data sources for correct spellings of names, etc: for the combination of both poetry and maps in early modern chorography, see Gordon and Klein eds., Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain). It is now commonplace to think of a text as a discursive terrain across which sites of power may be mapped – and literary criticism often falls into these voguish metaphors. Clearly, cartographic metaphors are useful in discussing texts, in that they can accommodate an examination of both the overt and covert operations by which the world has been made readable (as critic Nick Selby remarks, ‘to map the world is to make it readable’[2]). However, the paucity of knowledge of actual cartographic traditions and contexts takes its toll on these critical readings.
This PhD sets out to investigate in a more sustained way the relationship between poets and surveying in twentieth century Britain. It will begin with a brief history of their cohabitation as disciplines before this period. Examples include those writers who trained as surveyors (such as Daniel Defoe[3]), those who make reference to surveyors (Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, for instance, is partly a response to the pretensions of Herman Moll’s ‘New and Correct Map of the Whole World’, published less than ten years earlier), and those who make use of specific maps. (Rachel Crawford compares the use of the Atlas as an organising principle in Thomson’s The Seasons, the use of different economic and navigational routes in Dyer’s The Fleece, and the domestic geographies of Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour.[4]) My intention here is not to cover old ground[5] but rather to examine both the post-Romantic departure from such interdisciplinary chorographic traditions, and then introduce the contemporary poets who are now working at reviving this chorographic interaction. One example is Peter Riley, a Derbyshire poet who is crucial to this study for his deployment of old Peak District lead mining surveys and maps, 19th century excavation reports, and other forms of topographical documentation. This introduction will end with a first close reading, of his Sea Watches (1991), taking particular note of the ‘Topographical Notation’ at the end, and the question mark hanging over its status as text or paratext – impossible to place exactly as factual paratext, due to the slippery complexity of its syntax and thus referential status. This case is connected with the varied tradition of adding a map, or map references, to a text (what status should be allowed, say, to the two maps of Glanmore on the two different covers of Seamus Heaney’s Fieldwork (1979)?). As John Kerrigan asks in an article in the TLS in 1998, ‘In such cases, where does writing leave off and cartography begin?’[6]
Early examples I will consider are R. S. Thomas, whose volume The Stones of the Field was written at the same time as his wife Mildred Eldridge’s work as a surveyor-artist for Recording Britain, and who can be seen at points in his poems to linguistically recoil from her supposedly representative watercolours.[7] I will expand, for obvious reasons, on the history of the Ordnance Survey map in the twentieth century, leaning on Rachel Hewitt’s forthcoming adaptation of her PhD, Dreaming O’er the Map of Things: The Ordnance Survey and Literature of the British Isles, 1742-1842. The Donegal poet James Clarence Mangan will be considered in the context of the much-maligned Ordnance Survey of Ireland, which I will look at in terms of its cultural links (with the OS fieldworkers including James Clarence Mangan himself, as a poet in the employment of the Topographical Department, and John O’Donovan, whose work included editing, in the original Irish, The topographical poems of John O’Dubhagain and Giolla na naomh O’Huidhrin).[8] Ciaran Carson’s reaction to the same OS Ireland map contains passages ‘suspended by their syntax between referring to features of the city and to their representation on an Ordnance Survey map’, and in its ‘long-lined, mazy verse-stories about the cognitive mapping of Belfast’ recalls questions about the area’s history of projected plantation and military surveying.[9]
The specific context of the map in the British Isles will be the overarching context at all times. This country was the first to be so tightly mapped and surveyed, and so it is the country most familiar with the authority of survey mapping. In fact, as Denis Cosgrove remarks in Geography and Vision, the survey movement peaked as late as the 1930s, ‘with the recruitment of schoolchildren from across England and Wales to map the use of every parcel of land, returning the results to London where they were compiled onto topographic base maps and coloured to reveal national patterns of land use’.[10] This, alongside the history of British landscape enclosure, county boundary changes, land reclamation, and British heritage, is the specific context in which the British poetic texts are doing their ‘mapping’. Critical readings which undertake an examination of such texts must therefore consider the congested and overfamiliar landscape in which British writers find themselves (see Kerridge and Tarlo eds., Crowded Space: British Ecocriticism), and then ask how and why they may attempt to escape that system of representation. One example is the impact of the change of the British OS map from national grid survey to aerial survey, linked to the aerial survey of the entire globe, which had been completed by 1969. The pretension of this new form to complete visual representation is one context (to which Cambridge poet J. H. Prynne specifically refers[11]) for the increasing gravitation of poetic texts around ideas of mapping in the 1970s. This may explain also how it arises that the map is spoken of commonly in terms of limitation at this point, such as in Eavan Boland’s ‘That the Science of Cartography is Limited’[12], one of many reactionary poems. The attempt to write off the map, and escape this system of representation, is a desire with an important literary history in other periods in which new maps had recently been completed.[13]
This study therefore aims to investigate the overlooked contexts of British mapping in literary criticism. It will ask about the impact of such events as the actions of the Local Government Boundary Commission (1945), the setting up of the ‘Committee of Enquiry into the Handling of Geographic Information’ (1985), the completion of the electronic map of the UK (1995) or the launching of the OS’s flagship digital product, OS MasterMap (2001: ‘the scale and detail of this mapping project is unique’). Methodological changes in mapping and the introduction of new technologies organise the geographical data in new ways: I aim to show how these moments of novelty lead to novel literary responses and a return to chorographic experimentation.[14]
The focus is on British poetry, but in order to demonstrate the effect of different mapping contexts, I will provide brief samples from American, Canadian and Australian poetry, in which mapping has a very different history (as Graham Huggan observes, ‘Canadian and Australian writers are well placed to comment on the ironies involved in demarcating a terrain that was always likely to exceed the limits imposed on it’[15]). It is possible to compare, for instance, the treatment of the attempted survey of the North West Passage in Canadian writer Earle Birney’s The Strait of Anian (1948) with British writer Colin Simms’ No North Western Passage (1976), which combines the landscape of Yorkshire with latitude and longitude quotations from failed voyages to the North West passage (which is sketched on the first page). Younger mapping traditions in both of these countries, related to different forms of colonisation, leads to fresher literary debates.
Crucial to my study is the extent to which British writers have inherited experimental uses of cartographic discourse from American poetry, notably Charles Olson and Ed Dorn. Olson’s Maximus Poems, an unfinished project begun in 1950, ‘aimed to give in language a map, a map of one place, the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts’, in Donald Davie’s words, and was influenced partly by the American geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer. Dorn’s responses, Idaho Out and Geography, developed his fascination with mapmaking but also with specific maps. As Reitha Pattison observes, ‘in his archival papers held at the University of Connecticut is an unpublished and uncollected poem entitled ‘My age from a map to illustrate that the reconstructed north atlantic has an essential Structural Unity by F. J. Fitch’. The map upon which the poem draws comes from an article in the published papers of a ‘Symposium on Continental Drift’ hosted by the Royal Society in 1965. The symposium brought together masses of data on the relative ages of rocks from North America, Britain and Europe, and the shared findings implied the high probability that the North Atlantic was once a unified continent, which had drifted and fragmented due to successive orogenic cycles and tectonic plate activity’. This attention to the geology and topography of the North Atlantic is then applied to the British landscape in Dorn’s 1967 The North Atlantic Turbine about the limestone maps around Oxford.
The influence of the American poets was extensive in bringing the subjects of geology and what Carl Ortwin Sauer termed ‘the morphology of landscape’ (particularly land shift and glaciation – see J. H. Prynne, ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved’) to the fore in British poetry, particularly among the Cambridge poets in the 60s and 70s. This is an example of poetry which is not about the limitations of the mapping system as earth-writing, but also about the limitations of text as earth-writing. These texts may be inspired by maps to do something which was not previously seen in the remit of poetry: that is, to depict challenging topographical shifts thrown up by geological surveyors.
In this way, chorography shows evolving and changing textual and graphic practices from map to map, and from text to text. Disclosures may come both from the texts that point out the unsolved riddles in the map and vice versa. What Harriet Tarlo calls in her forthcoming anthology (Radical Landscapes) ‘LIP’, or Linguistically Innovative Poetry, is partly a response to new attempts to map spatial disjunction by manipulating, for instance, poetic tools such as syntax or line endings. She explains that an interest in experimental form and ‘suspicion of the referential element of language in LIP poetry is deeply desirable for the poet concerned with nature and environment … when I turned to the poetry itself, rather than its criticism, I found that it was that very sense of the gap between our language and our world that preserves respect for the non-linguistic world in these writers.’[16]
The writers she sees in these terms are all from a similar region of North England as her. This raises the question of the effect of different regions. Particular terrains can be used to test particular maps[17], and vice versa: different forms of interrogation of Britain arise from these encounters. This can be seen, for instance, in Andrew Crozier’s ‘On Romney Marsh’ or Douglas Oliver’s ‘Ordnance Survey Map 178’. Both are texts haunted by the sense of the troublesomeness of their particular geographies. The Crozier poem enacts scenes of ‘plotting’, both in the speaker’s own journey, and in the history of land reclamation and drainage across the recalcitrant wetlands, full of detours (in which the drainage system means ‘you must go a long way / from your way’). Douglas Oliver’s ‘Ordnance Survey Map 178’ instead starts with the 1945 OS map itself, morphing its visual appearance and symbolism with conjecture about the actual locale of Woolland.
The structure of the PhD will incorporate questions about different kinds of British terrains. The first chapter, on subterranean and abandoned landscapes (which literally undermine the surface boundaries of the map), will include work by Peter Riley (Tracks and Mineshafts), W. H. Auden (‘In Praise of Limestone’), Jack Clemo (The Map of Clay), Paul Hyland (Subterranean Poetry), and Colin Simms’ collaborations with archaeologist Jeffrey Radley, as well as the geological poetry influenced by Olson and Dorn (J. H. Prynne onwards). The second chapter will focus on cartography as it is characterised in poetry, for instance in the flummoxed surveyors of Allen Fisher’s Brixton Fractals, which will be compared to another London-based volume, Sean Borodale’s Notes for an Atlas. The poems considered will operate in and around boundaries: Peter Riley’s The Llyn Writings will prompt a reading of different forms of historical and contemporary land enclosure in Britain as it may be represented in syntax or poetic tools such as enjambment (one leg over the stile). Allen Fisher’s current work in progress on Offa’s Dyke, a misrepresented Welsh ‘boundary line’[18], will be linked to the American Susan Howe’s Secret History of the Dividing Line, her response to William Byrd’s two accounts (History of the Dividing Line and Secret of the Line) of his experiences as Virginia’s commissioner in charge of the surveying expedition that in 1728 determined the exact boundary line between Virginia and Carolina. The third chapter will be on fractal geographies and coastlines. It will combine work by writers such as Peter Riley (The Sea Watch Elegies) and Angela Leighton (Sea Level)[19] with documents of sea-level change and maritime surveys, including writing by surveyors, such as the Irish coastal cartographer Tim Robinson (see especially ‘Connemara Fractal’ in Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and Other Writings (1997)). The conclusion of the study will then return to the common discourses and debates about poetry and place and pull them apart with some of the tools gained. Throughout, it will be kept in mind that maps are specific artistic documents, as are poetic texts, and in comparing them, neither document should be decontextualised or dealt with in a neutered fashion.
My argument is that postcolonialism, postmodernism and other literary readings of ‘land writings’ must be balanced with a sense of the conceptual and practical range of the concept of mapping. For this we can only go to the geographers.
[1] Cited in John Kerrigan, ‘The country of the mind’, TLS 11 September 1998
[2] Nick Selby, ‘“Created Space”: Mapping America as Poem in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End and Susan Howe’s Secret History of the Dividing Line’, Journal of American Studies 39.1 (2005)
[3] See Christopher Parkes, ‘‘A True Survey of the Ground’: Defoe’s Tour and the Rise of Thematic Cartography’, Philological Quarterly 74.4 (1995)
[4] Rachel Crawford, ‘Cartography and the Poetry of Place’, Gerrard ed., A Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry (2006)
[5] See for example Richard Helgerson, ‘The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England’, Representations 16 (1986); Joanne Woolway, ‘Spenser and the Culture of Place’, http://extra.shu.ac.uk/els/iemls/conf/texts/woolway.html (1996), Gordon and Klein eds., Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (2001); Adam Stills, Against the Map: Heterotopia and the Politics of Geography in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Britain (2002)
[6] ibid. See also Tim Ingold’s chapters on notation and calligraphy in his recent Lines (2007), which begin by asking similar questions about the relationship between writing and drawing.
[7] See M. Wynn Thomas, ‘For Wales, See Landscape: Early R. S. Thomas and the English Topographical Tradition’, Welsh Writing in English 10 (2005)
[8] Bullock, Kurt, ‘Possessing Wor(l)ds: Brian Friel’s Translations and the Ordnance Survey’, New Hibernian Review 4.2 (2000)
[9] ‘Because territory is still divided along lines which are triumphantly reinscribed during the marching season (when roads and lanes and fields become a chart on which to mark community boundaries and symbolic incursions that are already cognitively mapped), artists in the North are inclined to perceive their ground (…) as cartographic projection.’ John Kerrigan, ‘Earth Writing: Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson’, Essays in Criticism XLVIII.2 (1998)
[10] Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (2008)
[11] ‘There was that unbelievably gross photograph of the earth taken across the surface of the moon, which is now in all the soap ads, which was supposedly the first picture of earth as home … My god, the stunning alienation of that piece’; J. H. Prynne, ‘Lectures on Maximus IV, V, VI’, Simon Fraser University, July 27, 1971. Reprinted in Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 28 (1999)
[12] Boland, In a Time of Violence (1994)
[13] See Richard Helgerson, ‘The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England’, Representations 16 (1986), and Adam Stills, Against the Map: Heterotopia and the Politics of Geography in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Britain (2002)
[14] New technologies include GIS mapping in which the user can go for a drive or walk with their position continually pinpointed on the screen. (This is an interesting throw back to original ‘reel’ road maps, which showed one route rather than a full map.) Although the digital technologies are more ‘impersonal’ in terms of the absence of human fieldworkers and surveyors, the products may thus be sold as ‘tailored’ or ‘personalised’ to users in new ways.
[15] Graham Huggan, Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction (1994)
[16] Harriet Tarlo, ‘Radical Landscapes: Contemporary Poetry in the Bunting Tradition’, in Price and McGonigal eds., The Star You Steer by: Basil Bunting and British Modernism (2000)
[17] Rick Van Noy has written, for instance, of the particular problem posed to surveyors by mountains as a source of cartographic error. Rick Van Noy, ‘Surveying the Sublime: Literary Cartographers and the Spirit of Place’, in Steven Rosendale ed., The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment (2002)
[18] Fisher has spoken of the alternate forms the boundary might take, for instance, if one were to consult a map of species of dormice and how they vary between Wales and England.
[19] Other possibilities include George Mackay Brown (The Year of the Whale, Voyages), W. S. Graham (The Nightfishing), Richard Murphy (Sailing to an Island) and Pauline Stainer (A Litany of High Waters).
Posted in projects
Tags: allen fisher, british countryside, cartography, coastline, colin simms, douglas oliver, fractal, landscape, maps, peter riley, place, place in literature, place in poetry, poetry, surveying, topography, twentieth century poetry
