On the road map you won’t drive off the edge of your known world. In space as I want to imagine it, you just might.
Doreen Massey, ‘Falling Off the Map’[1]
Linking poetry with the epistemological study of place is hardly new, but in this study I interlink it with changing theories of mapmaking, in particular of the deconstructive analysis of the map, a subject of intense query among geographers, cultural analysts, anthropologists and social scientists in the 1970s and 1980s. I am concerned to show parallels between these fields of debate and the decisions made by poets at a similar time, even on the smallest scales: for instance, in the politics of syntax in representation. During the postmodern period, linguistic experimentation by writers such as Allen Fisher and Peter Riley was being employed to reinvestigate familiar places in the landscape of Britain; these activities are not subservient to the geographical theories I will be considering, but rather, I argue, spring from the same theoretical sources.
While the J. B. Harley essay ‘Deconstructing the Map’ appeared in 1989, together with an explosion of mainstream publications giving more credence to debates in cultural geography, I wish to demonstrate how several poets were, previously and concurrently, developing their own modes of dealing with subversive geographies. My argument is not about causality, but about poetry’s timely role as an appropriate medium to analyse the stratification and complexity of place, which was increasingly becoming the subject matter of geographical theory. In particular I want to foreground poetry’s inherent suitability to present the disruptions in the spatial, and to challenge the closure and stability of traditional cartographic representation. The close readings afforded by the context presented in this paper will thus offer a new approach to both poetry and to the theory involved, which I hope will provide a basis of entry to a wider range of texts, for which the study of ‘place’ has not been fully developed in this explicit form. Looking at place through the eyes of poets themselves often versed in trends in geographical theory not only deepens our sense of the complex connections between topography and language, but begins to educate us as readers, both of landscape and of poetry.
Topographical notation: Peter Riley’s Sea Watches
In the ‘Topographical Notes’ to his Sea Watches (1991),[2] Peter Riley links the poetry, just as in Ted Hughes’ Remains of Elmet, to a real, but changing, landscape. Reading this endnote, we can follow the poems back to their roots as a travelogue across the Lleyn Peninsula, in North Wales; yet the definition of the area is strangely open to question. Even in these seemingly factual topographical notes, we are told that the original excursions were directed ‘back and/or across’ a very unstable peninsula; for instance, ‘the marble boulder in (section) I/4 was at Porth Witlin and then, rather oddly, wasn’t’, while the features are also plagued with linguistic uncertainty, both in terms of competing languages and geological terms (e.g., the Neolithic structures ‘formerly known as ‘chambered tombs’’). The vocabulary in the topographical notes suggests the area (Porth Or in Welsh, Whistling Sands in English) is characterised by the blurring of categories: a disused track is ‘confused with a dry stream’; the voices on a beach ‘merge’ with the sounds of the sea to create strange (and strangely synaesthetic) ‘aural hallucinations’, and the whole landscape is ‘overwritten by exploitative industries of one kind or another, dead and alive’ (note the ambiguous ‘dead and alive’ rather than ‘dead or alive’). Further, the narrative is full of ‘may’, ‘maybe’, ‘almost’, and other uncertain constructions (‘I might opine that the “blast” in IV/7 retains some connection with the quarries…’), while the movements around the landscape are idiosyncratic (‘by some lapse or warp V/1 and V/3 are both in the vicinity of Clynnog whereas V/2 is already further up the coast’), mental (‘the terraced garden in V/6 is not here but is suddenly remembered from back up the peninsula to the south’), or biased (‘V/2 in approaching this arena deliberately avoids the road recently blasted down to the village and takes a little used old trackway’).
The ‘retrograde solo excursion’ into ‘wild solitude’ in Set V is undermined by its navigating the same ground as old and new mass foot routes, an old village, and the ‘large gravel and slate industr(ies)’. Historically minded views of the landscape are also obscured, however, given that ‘Cape Anelog has vanished without trace’, and the ‘chapel on the cliffs above’, another principal harbour for pilgrims, is ‘now reduced to turf lines in bracken’. Both the presences and absences in the landscape are therefore problematic – for, as Riley put it in the earlier, more explicitly geological Tracks and Mineshafts (1983), ‘the land is riddled with failed promises / and premature returns’.[3]
The fact that the factual notes are full of such riddles even before the translation to poetry is telling, for the poems themselves are not seated firmly in the landscape: as in IV/6: ‘the road leads down / Into the valley, up and over this shifting, sliding geography’.[4] The poems’ hold on the topography is tenuous, and they are full of warnings; even the book’s first sentence is placed evasively, as
Almost there we hesitate, and turn, high on the soft
Edge of Britain, to view the whole story: the sea barking
Up both sides of the peninsula to the point, top
Crest of land, pilgrim’s goal or final extent
Of a life’s coming and going called together when
There is after all a focus, an intellectual love.[5]
The first word of the poem, ‘Almost’, immediately places it in an evasive zone (indeed, the first line of the second stanza, immediately following this passage, is the curt ‘That we shall not reach today’). In these opening words the fact that at the last moment before getting ‘there’ ‘we hesitate, and turn’ while on the ‘soft / Edge’ speaks to the actual form of the text. This is full of attenuation: ‘soft edge’ and ‘top crest’, for instance, are denied a mimetic position at the end of their lines, and are broken anticlimactically across them instead (breaks emphasised by the decision to have upper case letters at the start of lines). The finality suggested in phrases like ‘whole story’, ‘the point’, ‘top crest’, ‘pilgrim’s goal’ and ‘final extent’, meanwhile, is undermined by their being redefinitions of each other, and embedded in the middle clauses of a long sentence. This long sentence continues through ‘a life’s coming and going’ and finally refuses to come to a halt on ‘after all a focus’, adding instead a further redefinition, ‘an intellectual love’. This use of redefinitions creates a scene which is not fully synthesised, as in the second stanza, where sunken roads lead through ‘fields that / Carry sea glow, yellow scatter, proud, tall and thin’, where the grammar delivers a set of multiplicities which refuse to be resolved. This is apparent also in the later VIII/1 (‘The sea is blue green white, / The sea is grey and folds … / … Truth is never / Quite the same’).
A similar evasive tone to the topography, which Riley calls, in IV/7, ‘Nothing but evasion’, comes out at striking points in the poems. In section II, ‘Sandlogged’, the speaker describes the sea as ‘duplicitous’ and chooses land instead: ‘I send my soul out like a night bird or a witch / To fly over the dark roads now silent of cars / … / To settle on the headland’. In the parallel stanza of section III, ‘Sailing, Sailing Away’, the speaker declares, ‘I send my consciousness out like a gull / Over the sea … indeed away / From the untruthful land’. Neither sea nor land proves stable: a truthful landscape is an ever-retreating or impossible thing in these poems. The scenery is characterised by its unstable or semi-permeable distinctions: whether in the physical makeup (‘a corrugated breach / Between fields of sheep and wheat’, II/1; ‘the stream purls and slips through / Old manganese workings: here and there a ruined wall’, III/4; ‘There is a torse / In the pastoral disc, an incision at the quarry beds / Letting through the dark’, IV/5), or in the language (for instance, the play of verb and adjective, and the confusion of multiple adjectives, in V/3: ‘Curving away the waves grinding the quarried cliffs / Roaring into shingle, difficult walking’).
Determinacy is also denied through the use of ‘half’: the sea birds above are ‘Half crying’ (I/8), the marble boulders ‘Half sunk’ (I/4), and described in contradictions: ‘red / Veins in the white mist, smooth watery surface / Half sunk in grey sand, so hard and clear a thing that / We are put to guess’, so that hardness and clarity is followed by guesswork, as ‘mist’ and ‘watery’ followed into ‘hard and clear’. This is described in V/5 as ‘riding the meniscus to what point or / Purpose we don’t know’[6]: this transitional or contingent experience of geography confirms Riley’s later description of stable topography as ‘the impossible landing’ (VII/7). Traversing these poems the reader finds him or herself slipping on their syntactical shifts and semantic instability, just as the persona finds himself stumbling over the indeterminacy of their literal topography.
The forerunners: Douglas Oliver’s ‘Ordnance Survey Map 178’
This paper sets out to investigate the context of these troubling poetic geographies. The concept of ‘the impossible landing’ is by no means anomalous, I argue, and though it relates to the rise of new geographical methodologies in the 1970s and 80s, it also has significant earlier poetic sources. The growing acceptance of cultural geography as a discipline, however, did bring about an increased deconstructive focus on the concept of landscape. In terms of poetry, this has two accompaniments: one is a set of texts in which theories of landscape and different systems of representation are explicitly drawn from and even remarked upon (as in the work of J. H. Prynne, Peter Riley and Allen Fisher, all of whom are widely read in geological, cartographical and historical texts, which are often cited in bibliographies or footnotes to their poems). The second is a set of texts in which this problematic mode of writing about landscape has been absorbed. Examples of this are drawn here from the work of Andrew Crozier (All Where Each Is, 1985), because of his consistent and critical focus on this theme, but it should be understood that this second category extends across a wide range of texts, often in a more dilute form (in terms of a fleeting or casual engagement with the ideas); there is also a wide influence on contemporary poets.[7]
The two most important poetic forerunners to this convergence of poetry and geographical debate are the American poets, Charles Olson and Ed Dorn. The former’s Maximus Poems, an unfinished project begun in 1950, aspired (in Donald Davie’s words) ‘to give in language a map, a map of one place, the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts’[8]; early editions in fact had a map of Gloucester on the cover. This tapping in to cartographic culture to write a new epic of place was partly inspired by the American geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer, renowned as the founder of cultural geography as a discipline; in his most influential essay, ‘The Morphology of Landscape’ (1925), he writes of the anthropological processes of the environment which are ‘beyond the competence of the geographer’.[9] This essay, and Sauer’s ‘Environment and Culture during the Last Deglaciation’ (1948), both in fact appear in Olson’s pamphlet ‘A Bibliography of America for Ed Dorn’.
Dorn, having encountered Olson during his time at Black Mountain, was in turn heavily influenced by Maximus; his 1960 essay What I See in the Maximus Poems developed into his own take on the setting, From Gloucester Out (1964). His two volumes of 1965, Idaho Out and Geography, developed his fascination with mapmaking, but it is North Atlantic Turbine (1967), written during his residence at the University of Essex at Donald Davie’s invitation, which applied this for the first time to the British landscape (mainly around Oxford). This was another volume which bore a map on the cover; while Dorn started work on The Cosmology of Finding Your Spot (1969), meanwhile, an indigenous volume of poems was released bearing as its cover a map of the oil fields of the East Midlands: British writer J. H. Prynne’s Kitchen Poems (1968).
Donald Davie’s survey of the impact of the influence of these poets on their British inheritors is valuable (‘Landscape as Poetic Focus’ and ‘The Black Mountain Poets’, from The Poet in the Imaginary Museum), as is Ian Davidson’s in Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry. It is worth remembering particularly that the American landscape in which Olson is developing his theories of ‘open field’ poetry as a spatial practice[10] is one which is, in Davidson’s words, still ‘a place under construction’. Thus the incoherency of place is revealed in a poetry which is ‘additive rather than reductive, resulting in sprawling poems that seem to contain swathes of information difficult to reduce to an overall theme’.[11] British poets, on the other hand, ‘with centuries of evidence around them … had to use methods of historical analysis to break through the ideological surfaces of a traditionalized, colonized or commodified world in order to discover an identity the modern world was concealing from them’[12]. It is this British development of cartographic anxiety I will be focusing on, particularly in a cluster of poems preceding the 1989 publication of J. B. Harley’s ‘Deconstructing the Map’. By this time, ideas of cultural geography and of the questionable processes involved in mapping spaces had become much more available, as I will demonstrate.[13]
It was twenty years before this point, however, that J. H. Prynne’s The White Stones (1969) was published, including the Sauerian poem ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved’. This poem, like many in David Jones’ text of Britain, The Anathemata, notes an Ordnance Survey Map in its references (the Ordnance Survey Limestone Map, Sheets 1 and 2, 1955 edition). However, this source is balanced with a range of other sources from geology, archaeology and climate studies, and the end result is not a poem stabilised by reference to an official Ordnance Survey, but rather, a poem plagued by shifts and uncertainties, like the weathered landscape it seeks to represent. The poem is deserving of a full critical examination, particularly in its constantly shifting tenses, and the uneven motion of its syntax and line endings as it implies the ‘ridges and thermal delays’, the ‘ice front’, ‘sea level’, ‘drift’, ‘contour’ and ‘separable advances’ intermixed among the named places. It is beyond the present study, however, to do full justice to its linguistic qualities. Striking, however, is the use of quotation marks to question the shape and emotional resonances of the environment: ‘hills rise into / the “interior”’; ‘the eustatic rise / in the sea-level curls round the clay, the / basal rise, what we hope to call “land”’; ‘the sentiment / of “cliffs” is the weathered stump of a feeling’. The nouns, meanwhile, are complicit in the mutability of the landscape, because they are mostly tethered to verbs: ice is ‘smoothing’, roads ‘dripping’, dew ‘receding’, while the most stationary line in the poem, ‘the thrust slowed and we come to / a stand, along the coast of Norfolk’ is itself followed by the reminder, ‘That is a relative point’. The ‘stand’ is already undermined by its position not ‘on’ the coast, but, more slippery, ‘along the coast of Norfolk’. But in terms of it being ‘a relative point’, it enacts in the British landscape what Davie sees in the Black Mountain poets: the place ‘where geography and geology, oceanography and climatology, anthropology and archaeology and pre-history meet’ in the question of ‘just what it means to have ‘a standpoint’ – the place on which you stand, the place which necessarily conditions everything which you see’[14].
This kind of perspective is the forerunner of a poetry which aims to show the neutral, or holistic, understanding of space to be untenable. In the British landscape such poetry battles against the fact that, as Denis Cosgrove remarks in Geography and Vision, this is the country most familiar with the authority of survey mapping: indeed ‘the survey movement peaked in 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’.[15] He commences the same chapter, however, by stating that in the postmodern period, the ideological authority of maps was subject to new forms of scrutiny, and attempts were made to escape the normalizing power of this system of representation. One of these early moments of scrutiny, or attempted escape, is in the poem ‘Ordnance Survey Map 178’, in the collection Oppo Hectic (1969) by J. H. Prynne’s fellow Cambridge[16] poet, Douglas Oliver.
This is a poem which explicitly meditates on standardised concepts of space. The site of the poem escapes simple geographical limitation, because it exists partly in the realm of the official, stabilised record of landscape (that is, as the titular Ordnance Survey), and partly as a disordered, personal journey through that same landscape. This enacts, in other words, Labov’s distinction between ‘map’ (a frozen, ordered tableau of knowledge) and ‘tour’ (a series of spatializing actions)[17]. In fact, the title of the poem encourages us to remember that both are interwoven in spatial knowledge, because a map such as the Ordnance Survey is created from the knowledge drawn from just such tours. It is the attempt to divorce the map from the original, or future, movements through the terrain, and hold it instead as objective truth, which is known as the ‘cartographic fallacy’.[18]
The liminal quality of the space in this poem – between map and territory – is obvious from the first sentence: ‘I have never been to Woolland, downhill from / Long Wood, the park on our right until Skinner’s farm / at the corner’[19]. Here, the status of the first comma is grammatically uncertain, holding in suspension two contradictory clauses. Woolland, the unvisited place at the end of the first clause, is the unlikely beginning of a set of directions which, though apparently parenthetical, graduate from the neutral name-dropping of Long Wood to the two personal possessives (‘the park on our right’ and ‘Skinner’s farm’[20]) which indicate personal knowledge of the area. In the next sentence, the address sinks into present tense action (‘My hands turn you / across the road, we don’t take the left fork: it / peters out’), which implies a transition from the map surface to a real journey through the landscape,[21] while still retaining the slightly artificial quality of the reader being guided by the poet’s ‘hands’ (perhaps suggestive of a finger tracing a route on a map), and without giving up a seemingly cartographical knowledge of the left fork not taken. This poem thus exists as an excursion into a strange new space, neither belonging exclusively to the map, nor to the actual territory, of Woolland.
The metaphors for the environment that follow, from an unbuttoning grey cardigan (perhaps a reference to the shape of the grey parklands on the Woolland Ordnance Survey map) to electric brain impulses, strike the reader as surprising, against the more conventional experiences in the poem, such as the tiresomely similar churches (‘I’ve seen too many churches, / enough like that one over the field, so Victorian / and weakened with green light’). The more surprising encounters with metaphor seem indicative of a first-hand, rather than conventionally symbolic, experience, as does the attention to the tactile or transitional movement through the area: ‘We define objects / first by symbols, eventually by movements / away from them / (…) / For each of us a body we now lay down’. This ‘body’ is undeniably immersed in the environment in a way which alters the perspective, as when the trees are morphed into the sky in the phrase ‘deciduous sky’, seen from the point of view of a person always caught between that and the ‘floor of growth’. The foliage, meanwhile, is described as ‘disordered’ and ‘disturbing’, while the colour green isn’t the kind of green to be found on a map, but instead ‘the deepest / green I’ve known’, which is described as ‘cluttering our heads’. Aside from the cluttered heads, the ‘us’ in the poem also have, by the end, earth blotched cheeks and rain spotted clothes, in a constant meshing or interaction of the travellers and the substance of the environment (something we can observe 9n the line ‘Your own / loose grip has filled with etheric water’, with its disturbing implications of anaesthetization). This first hand experience finally comes out on top in the line:
Soaked, filthy, bursting
upright, transitional, we, the black earth fountaining,
detach ourselves from a lost field on the map
Here, the syntax mimics the situation, with the word ‘we’ detached from its completing verb and just placed after its adjectives (soaked, filthy, etc.) and next to ‘the black earth fountaining’. This abstracted experience of the ‘we’ is then followed by the sentence ‘Join me / on the road going out; glance back if you like like / Lot’s wife, at a family behind us walking to / Woolland, the parents of an old schoolfriend, / or maybe my parents’, which both demonstrates the mythical or mirage-like status of what has taken place (‘glance back if you like like / Lot’s wife’), and, on the other hand, the accessibility of Woolland as a public place, shown in the progressive familiarity of ‘a family’, ‘the parents of an old schoolfriend’, and ‘or maybe my parents’. At the same time, however, Woolland is also being described as terra incognita, as a blind spot or ‘lost field’ on the map, for in the next sentence we are reminded that, finally, ‘no one I’ve met has ever been to / Woolland’, followed by the destabilizing last line, ‘I’ll check / the rest of these facts tomorrow’. At the close of the poem we are no surer of our factual footing in ‘Woolland’ than at the start.
But why use this dislocated geography? The deconstruction of spaces in this poem is generated by the context which Rebecca Solnit describes in A Field Guide to Getting Lost: a world in which the modern terra incognita does not reside in blank unknown spaces, but rather in a questioning of what is known. As she puts it, ‘to acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge, and the unknown is visible as terra incognita but invisible as selection – the map showing agricultural lands and principal cities does not show earthquake faults and aquifers, and vice versa’.[22] In Douglas Oliver’s poem, the ‘disordered’ foliage and the ‘deepest / green I’ve known’ are just such unknowns, discovered only in the terrain, beyond the land of the map.
As Alison Russell has observed,[23] travel writers in postmodern Britain were faced with a problem much like that of fiction writers of the same period:[24] ‘a sense of exhaustion of the planet and exhaustion of the forms we use to write about it … (for example) the title of Wheeler’s book, Terra Incognita [date], seems to signal the yearning of many contemporary travel writers for unknown and unmapped lands’.[25] One of the reasons behind this ‘global exhaustion’ is the completion of the aerial survey of the Earth by 1970. This meant that every part of the Earth’s surface was now, if not known land, then at the very least assumed to be ‘knowable’. This has a permanent impact on imaginations of landscape; its aftermath is a growing interest with places that could be, like Oliver’s Woolland, a ‘lost field on the map’. Wilderness is thus moved from being represented by the pre-social, pre-discursive spaces on the map, open to colonisation, to being whatever qualities are evasive or unrepresented in the familiar landscape: whatever evades becoming part of the currency of place. It is the knowledge of these recalcitrant or hidden geographies which leads to the re-opening of space: when ‘a multiplicity / opens at the terminals of vision’, as Riley suggests in his Tracks and Mineshafts.[26]
J. H. Prynne, in his 1971 lectures on Olson’s Maximus poems, complains ‘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’[27]. He sees in Olson instead a valuable recovery of man’s ability to poetically dwell on the earth, in Holderlin’s terms, which is turned round into self-investigation: first, in the speaker ‘asking himself what is the condition of being that makes it possible for man to be at home on the earth’.[28] Remembering that Gloucester is Olson’s own home town, Prynne picks upon the fact that the first Maximus is ‘the sea’ and the second Maximus is ‘the land’ to understand the new approach to the area. He uses the line ‘I stood estranged from that which was most familiar’ to remark upon the status of the speaker looking out to sea:
and how does a man standing on his particular piece of coastline, which is not the same as land, know what the land is? And by land I do not mean that superficial notion of terrain, but the whole compact history of the planet. How does he know that? There is only one place you can see that from and that is from the curvature of the limits.[29]
It is the ‘condition of coast’, Prynne continues, which creates the possibility for mythography, ‘that myth which is telling the story of where you are … of what sand you have on the bottom’, and which enables the ‘delicacy’ of the spatial investigation of land in the lyric. A similar reconstructed approach to the known land can be seen as an influence in both Oliver and Prynne’s poems, whether it be in terms of a lost field on the map, or the evasive, shifting movements of a landscape post-glaciation.
Mapping in the 1980s: Allen Fisher’s Brixton Fractals
According to some prevalent geographical debates in the 1980s, however, the map is in fact made up of such lost fields. It is neither possible for it to be fully representative, nor fully synthesized: developments in 1980s cartography saw maps and landscape referred to, more and more, in terms of textual analysis. This involved a significant altering of geographical metaphors. As Denis Cosgrove observes, ‘rather than using natural-science analogies such as system, organism or machine as the preferred spatial metaphors, we find text (Duncan and Duncan, 1988), theatre (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1989), carnival (Jackson, 1988) and spectacle (Ley and Olds, 1988; Bonnett, 1989) being used, all of them self-consciously representational’.[30] The textual analysis of spatial documents was partly inspired by Clifford Geertz’s textual approach to culture; he had imported terms from the deconstructive movement in literature to describe the field of the ethnographer (as ‘fragmentary … fleeting’ and ‘full of omissions’).[31] The textual approach to a landscape, territory, or map increased the focus on the problematic nature of transcription, which was becoming more prevalent in cartographic thought just as it was in ethnographical debates.[32]
The growing focus on the instability of geographical meaning, and on cultural geography as a discipline (the journal Society and Space had an issue fully devoted to ‘New Directions in Cultural Geography’ for the first time in 1987, for instance), was an interdisciplinary phenomenon[33]. Cosgrove and Daniels’ 1988 The Iconography of Landscape, for instance, drew together geographers, sociologists, literary historians, art historians and anthropologists in an intertextual study of the idea of
landscape.[34] This was predated, however, by the revival of cosmology in certain areas of British poetry; that is, the text’s interconnection with the poet’s multi-disciplinary philosophies. Allen Fisher’s sequence Place (1970-82), which I will be considering in this section, is a prime example: it has a bibliography which runs to 169 texts, including amongst the obligatory Olson essays works as various in period and approach as Oke T. R.’s Boundary Layer Climates (1978), Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1619), C. C. Knowles and P. H. Pitt’s The History of Building Regulations in London, 1189-1972 (1972), and Matthieu’s Ricard’s The Mystery of Animal Migration (1971), as well as several different kinds of maps. Fisher in fact consciously remarks on the overdetermined, intra- and intertextual nature of geography – in which every ‘reader’ of a landscape or map is lost between texts, none of which hold the final ‘key’ to understanding the terrain. In this situation, the terrain itself becomes the lost or retreating signified, not contained in any one perspective: as he puts it,
what we have lost is geographical
how in hell did i expect to cover all this ground
it takes me more than half an hour to walk to the library
to look this much up[35]
This promiscuity in different ways of reading and representing space is one way of responding to the threat posed by the map: that is, the map as seen in its worst, most conservative, light, in J. B. Harley’s 1989 essay, ‘Deconstructing the Map’.[36] Here, citing the influence of Foucault and Derrida, Harley argues that ‘we should encourage an epistemological shift in the way we interpret the nature of cartography … deconstruction urges us to read between the lines of the map – “in the margins of the text” – and through its tropes to discover the silences and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of the image’.[37] The synthesising nature of a map is problematic: it draws upon various means to gather knowledge (bedrock geology, surficial hydrology, ground-truthing), but in their compilation these multiple forms of boundaries and regions are reduced to a normative symbolism.[38] Thus, the processes which go into the building of a map may disguise or cover up what Lefebvre calls the ‘hypercomplexity’ of space, and what Anssi Paasi calls ‘the polymorphy of spatial relations’.[39] Harley’s objection is to the use of maps as a tool to ‘tame’ understandings of space; this silencing of ‘heterotopic’ space is a form of ideological domination which is difficult to dislodge, he concludes, except by reopening alternative spaces. He concludes, ‘Postmodernism offers a challenge to read maps in ways that could reciprocally enrich the reading of other texts’[40] – and this is exactly what the poets I am dealing with are trying to do.
What J. B. Harley’s essay might mean in terms of poetry is the recognition of the non-objective nature of the mapping process, as in the titular poem of Peter Sansom’s 1989 Making Maps, or the figure of the ‘young mapmaker’ in Douglas Oliver’s ‘An Island That is All the World’ (1990).[41] It may also be related to such movements as Kenneth White’s International Institute of Geopoetics, which was founded in 1989 with a manifesto he had been working on for the previous ten years. (The manifesto states that ‘the richest poetics (comes) from contact with the earth, from a plunge into biospheric space, from an attempt to read the lines of the world’; that ‘the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a poetics which places the planet Earth at the centre of experience’; that ‘a new or renewed sense of world, sense of space’ involves a certain amount of ‘de-conditioning’, as well as embracing such disparate fields as ornithology, meteorology and Taoist meditation; finally, and rather touchingly, that ‘We invite all those who feel concerned by such a project to get in touch with the secretary’.)[42]
However, I would argue that neither of these are representative of the potential of poetry to use, or contribute to, the geographical debates. What is far more striking are the moments where the poets beat the geographers at their own game, so to speak. In place of the many poets exploring the mythology of place in the 70s and 80, who I am not able to cover here, including Basil Bunting[43] and Roy Fisher,[44] I wish to turn my attention to one of the staunchest advocates of poetry as an artform to precipitate cartographic debate, Allen Fisher. The publication of Fisher’s 1970-82 project, Place, as a single volume by Reality Street Editions in 2005 prompted Pierre Joris (author of A Nomad Poetics) to assert that ‘witnessing the elaboration of Place during the seventies in London was a founding experience for my own poetics … (it is) a psychotopography of South London as only Blake had managed to draw in another century’.[45]
Comprised of the complete texts of the five books Place Book 1, Becoming, Stane, Eros:Father:Pattern and Unpolished Mirrors, the entire volume reroutes alarmingly through different forms of spatial engagement, from a scattered series of quotations about vagrant tribes, via long paratactic lists of street names, through tight lyric stanzas on Lambeth fossil types, to the broken rhythm of lines on the meandering course of the river Thames. The layout of the words on the page comes to represent anything from chronology to continental drift, whilst the manipulation of syntax and line length induces shifts in the spatial thinking. Often readers have to retrace their steps to work out which map they are currently on. Place XXVI, for instance, takes a geological focus: ‘the white chalk veined to / through the roots / the ochre / & the sand / we try to penetrate / within ourselves / as if towards an earth / grey / London and the chalk’. The lines are placed at varying degrees of slightly skewed horizontal angles below each other, sometimes approaching the diagonal, giving the impression of different levels of sediment in the earth. The first line ‘the white chalk veined to / through the roots’, meanwhile, in its grammatical overlap ‘to / through’, supports this image of overlapping levels. The print on the page therefore moves mimetically ‘downwards’ through a ‘porous’ structure, to end on the final line at the deepest end of the page, ‘the flower of which is deeper than the seed’. Finally, the full spatial layout strikingly resembles the silhouette of Britain; the reader is thus encouraged to draw a spatial conclusion about the porous, geological substance of which the whole of Britain is made.
Elsewhere, the migration of birds is dealt with by lines which half repeat, and, through the use of spatial and aural rhymes, suggest at ‘nature permeated with oscillation with pulse / the rhythms of behaviour’.[46] The form is not rigid, however, because ‘migration belongs to the framework of energies / which is the stuff of populations / and not rigid formula’. There are ‘partial’ migrants like the wood pigeon, ‘within cycles migrating / haphazardly’; there are also partly revisited rhythms in a sentence, such as ‘we are less often faithful to a certain nest location / we are not as faithful’.[47] The kind of movements one makes across the space will enact and formulate the terrain; the partial ‘bird’s eye view’ Fisher is taking at this point therefore releases an unfamiliar geography for inspection. In contrast, a much more circumscribed geography is described on the previous page in Place XXVI, where straight black lines link the scattered words ‘Borough High street’, ‘crossing from high / ground in south to Thames’, ‘low natural sand bank / raised one metre above / the marsh’ and ‘Stane street’ in a territorial diamond. This map perhaps records a previous personal movement, or such markings in the land as the ‘elevated and well-drained’ banks mentioned in the first line on the page.
The countering of such official, contained, spaces as the well-drained banks against more unexpected movements is a topic throughout Place. Different discourses often appear differently, as in Lakes XXXII, in which the touristic voice (‘“In clear weather Castlerigg Castle may be seen to the north”’) arrives in inverted commas, and the rest of the unadorned text is interspersed with official instructions in upper case, such as ‘FOLLOW THE ARROWS’ and ‘YOU ARE WARNED NOT TO CLAMBER ON THE SLAB / THE LAYER OF VEGETATION HAS NOT YET FIRMLY KEYED TO / THE ROCK SURFACE AND MAY GIVE WAY UNDERFOOT’. This nod to official and authorised spatial instructions may also appear in direct references to the map; a later section in fact includes a thumbnail sketch of river flow from the 1819 Ordnance Survey map of Swale Cliff.[48] The movement of water is a compelling subject in Place (the front cover in fact depicts a map of the Thames), partly because it is involved in so many different systems of representation. This includes the building of embankments and human directed ‘artificial’ parts of the flow, the water systems in houses (Fisher includes an extensive personal letter on water attraction and the electro-osmotic system), and the changes or evolutions in movement created due to rainfall, the moving of sediment, the permeability of mortar, and so on. The ‘sealed’ spaces and the ‘leaking’ movements (Lakes II) thus play out a Deleuzian map of roots and routes, of structured spaces and ‘lines of flight’[49]. The poems become diagrams of the different spaces language might inhabit, to which we can apply Davidson’s description of experimental visual poetry: ‘during the process of reading, the crude distinctions of the mapping exercise break down and the discourses begin to jump the barriers’.[50]
Fisher’s 1980s projects carried on his concern with the mapping of space: notably, the first poem in Bending Windows (1983) ends the page with the line ‘you can measure the length of Railton Road but your measurement will be slightly wrong’, a line which is itself out of sync and slightly wrong in length, with ‘be slightly wrong’ continued on a lower level. Of the poem collections in the Gravity as a consequence of shape project (1982 – ), however, it is Brixton Fractals (1986) which is the most involved with deconstructing the map-making process.
Fractals, as Fisher observes in the preface, has come to mean since its invention as a noun ‘an extremely irregular action, broken design, or fragmented object … (this) cultivation of plurivocity again brings back to the language all its capacity of meaningfulness’.[51] The ‘irregular’ or ‘fragmented’ nature of the poems lies in the fact that their topic is ‘The contradiction in situ’,[52] which is to say, either ‘the contradiction, placed’, or ‘the contradiction that there is in place’. The poems are full of disjunctive readings of the geography of Brixton. This may be in terms of time zones; as well as William Blake’s several appearances in modern Lambeth, there are deliberately illogical jumps in time, such as the line ‘Older parallels and pseudo-parallels overlap / “Tomorrow we went to the forest”’.[53] It may also, however, be in terms of the conflicting movements taken across the space: one short succession of options includes ‘Down Electric Avenue in a garbage press’, ‘Walking down the drain and laughing’, or ‘Buckled beneath a fruit stall crying’,[54] while elsewhere, ‘Rooks carry aubergines over Tulse Hill station’,[55] a Burglar crosses through rooms leaving all the doors open,[56] and an imaginative child has to ‘Escape over the gate from a tiger’.[57] This is entirely opposed to J. B. Harley’s concept of ‘standardized space’, that which ‘enabled cartographers to build a wall around their citadel of the ‘true’ map’ because ‘its central bastions were measurement and standardisation and beyond there was a ‘non cartography’ land where lurked an army of inaccurate, heretical and … subjective images.’[58] Fisher instead openly observes, of going down Electric Avenue in the garbage press, that ‘this isn’t universal experience’ but instead ‘Tripped up by details’, like ‘Counterpoint reduced to fracture two and three beats’.[59] The replacement of counterpoint – a sophisticated underpinning of melodies – with the more arrhythmic ‘fracture’, represented by grammatically uneven sentences like this one, is a reminder of how far we are from a synthesised or neutral survey of the environment. Named as the poems are as dances (African Twist, Atkins Stomp, Boogie Break), they are designed to speak to different modes of movement, and the sites of spatial alterity which these release. This is mapping as a creative practise, which, in James Corner’s words, ‘discloses hidden topographies within ruling, dominant structures in an attempt to re-territorialize seemingly repressed or spent ground’.[60]
Amongst these tangential geographies are in fact frequent scenes of radical maptaking, in sketchings, rubbings and other simulations. A Painter matches the pattern of a star map into a knitted pullover[61] and throws sand at a painting of her garden;[62] an Inspector ‘climbs from a bike / to check a cast cover / in the road makes a rubbing’;[63] instructions explain how to make an etching ‘derived from direct perception of / sewage repair’;[64] a Mathematician draws a tangent to a coffee spill on a table cloth.[65] These are throwaway documents, maps-on-the-go which are examples of what Anssi Paasi calls ‘the ‘fast geographies’ of the contemporary world, (those) that emphasise and celebrate all kinds of flows and networks, hybrids, and the mobile and temporary character of all kinds of identities’.[66] Those who are not mapping are involved elsewhere in the physical reconstruction of the environment. Kids ‘work sand on dead lichen’;[67] an Engineer rakes sand over the snow;[68] a man lays down new paving on the walkway in the middle of the night;[69] ‘a buzz / saw takes out a dozen trees / in a row / breaks a power line’;[70] later someone drags one of the felled limes into the walkway, leaving a trail of leaves, while another one is set alight. The extreme permutations to the geography on view are emphasised by a surreal mixing of fact and fiction: ‘On the traffic ice / two skaters superimpose / figures of eight … / the ice cracks as the lights change’,[71] while later ‘The noise of the workforce / forms a Moebius strip in front of us’,[72] in a synaesthetic morphing of sound and vision.
The disorder leads to a cameo by several theory buzzwords, when the speaker declares ‘Endless destruction / makes Brixton / Call it the coexistence of prohibitions and / their transgression / Call it carnival and spell out jouissance and horror, / a nexus of life and description, the child’s / game and dream plus discourse and spectacle’.[73] The flooding of Brixton, partway through the book, encourages these rebellious geographies, as ‘a street in havoc, exasperates authority’ (note the disorderly comma) and is ‘involved in the disorderly performance / made necessary by the floods’.[74] However, it is the settling of ice over Brixton which has the most impact. This leads to the prose poem ‘Boogie Stomp’, in which the imagery of fractals is implied again in the ‘glide of dislocations / rhomboided’,[75] which leads in turn through icy description to an announcement about ‘why we need to know about control. pre-empt its ability. / … / search for alternatives to coherence. range of perceptive angles.’[76] This brings to mind the importance of the plurality in the title, Brixton Fractals. In a later section, the speaker cycles up the flooded high road past the Engineer, who is in the middle of digging holes and trying ‘to decode the district’, and instead ‘rest(s) on a kerb contemplate(s) / ice shards my tyre jaggd with / glass’. Against the backdrop of the Engineer’s attempts at constructing a whole theory, the speaker concludes instead that ‘Each fragment changes the vocabulary’.[77] The ice shards and the ‘range of perceptive angles’ thus share meaningfully in the poem’s sense of being broken into multiple ‘fractals’, an idea therefore not linked to a determinate image, but fittingly using the plurivocity of the word which Fisher had noted in his introduction.
Into this uncertain world come the surveyors, the Mathematician, the Poet, and the Engineer, determined to create a map that sums up all there is to know about Brixton under the ice. Their map-table discussions form a significant part of the final long three poems, beginning with ‘Black Bottom’:
A Mathematician, a Poet and
the Engineer sit across a map table
on the High Road
to begin analysis of the ice.
The Mathematician opens an English copy of
Klopstock, 1811.
A running walk can be checked from
ground prints
alternative hind-foot-hind-foot footfall sequence
reads as one foot close to the surface to take
body weight should the support foot slide.
Every so often saliva has frozen, formed discs on the path.[78]
The disputes between these characters over which authorities to use, and their surreal determination to get to the bottom of the matter (which includes burning down a hill ‘to read latticed recurrences / in the ice’[79]) are heightened examples of the idolatry of the map. The capitalisation of their names also means they fit well into Pile and Rose’s formula for map idolatry, which involves the structuring gaze ‘of white male bourgeois knowers’ and which ‘limits the possibility of critique by refusing to acknowledge other kinds of knowns.’[80] The ‘white male bourgeois knowers’ are parodied in the behaviour of the Mathematician, who notes that in the ice ‘the wet and the solid were in a fractal dimension and / required a dialectical procedure of domination and attribution / It burnt his eyes and gave him an erection / In embarrassment he relaxed back at the map table’.[81] Here, the sexual humour is mixed with a parodied academic stance of ‘dialectical procedure’.
The ideological power of the map therefore finds its best representative in the Mathematician. Even his body posture is constantly invasive or dominant, as later, for instance, he ‘leaned over the ice / measured the displacement of markers / to compute its creep’, and thereby ‘determined how / such might be organised and thus controlled’.[82] As opposed to the radical character, the Painter, who earlier talked of the changeable composition of ‘violent motions’, ‘unknown forces’ and ‘decomposable distances’,[83] the Mathematician struggles to construct a map as a dominating narrative, a ‘paradigmatic reading’ which is ‘manifested as if in a static mode, / as a base for dynamic generation of his narrative syntax’.[84] His co-conspirators, the Poet and the Engineer, do not come off much better. The former is a self-conscious projection of a poet who is obsessed with finding ‘where the road’s ground provided rules, so to speak, for / ellipsis’,[85] which ‘became a control over the ice presence / as an extension of his powers of production over its surface’.[86] The latter, meanwhile, discovers that ‘through the use of a sapphire-anvil / squeezing could be simulated and the deformation / could be profitably studied’.[87] In the name of profitable study, then, ‘The two of them continued their search / for nonlinear creep, or basal sliding, until the light dusked’, while ‘The topological syntax of transfers / organised their narration as a value-making process, and / provided meaning’, and also ‘put their action back into the traditional male role’.[88]
Throughout Brixton Fractals, fidelity in representation is undermined, and the discontinuous geographies of Brixton are prioritised. This is shown also in the space and syntax of the poems, which relish disjunction: one example is the diagonal lines in the poem ‘African Twist’. Only in the last lines of the book is some sympathy extended to the Mathematician and his cronies, when it is suddenly revealed that they are nothing but pressurised agents of the state. The Mathematician ‘battery-shaves and makes / notes on squeezed light using a notation’, reflecting on the glaciated, Sauerian landscape he finds himself in, where ‘Subject to meaning gets / replaced with morphology’.[89] The exasperated surveyors are threatened by the fact that ‘Brixton abandoned / challenges the closure of meaning’, by the evasive ‘autonomy of the subject’, and by the fact that the ice that they want to give stable meaning to is, finally, too slippery. In spite of all this, in the closing line of the poem, which falls after 83 pages of unstable geography (even branching into a sixth dimension of space at one point), inevitably and irreversibly, ‘The irrational State insists upon control’.[90] It is the fractal properties in the subject matter of place – also represented here in the arrhythmic line beats and fragmented textual forms, as well as explicitly in the events and characterisation – which will always ultimately resist this control by author, authority or state.
Resisting closure: Andrew Crozier’s ‘On Romney Marsh’
Peter Riley’s Noon Province (1989), like his earlier Tracks and Mineshafts (1983) with its literal undermining of the boundaries of sites,[91] is concerned with the temporary drawing of territories, indicated in the title (perhaps suggesting a province that exists only at noon?). Where the conservative map is a record of bounded places, Riley shows instead the shifting, evasive nature of such horizons. One initial poem enacts the attempted ‘drawing of the landscape / curved / Further than we know’;[92] elsewhere ‘the earth turned ahead of / Our silent, petrified thought’, and, in walking towards a red cliff in dark green woods, the observation is made that ‘As you get / Closer it is difficult to see’. Boundaries fade in and out of existence, or in and out of determinacy, across the poems. The frequent use of verbs in the continuous present, for example, catches a moment in the midst of action, as in the voices in the ground ‘between the stones / Dealing and deciding, / In a lost tongue’, the moon ‘en-/ closing the air’, the Alpine swift ‘carving the air’, and the lines of houses ‘trailing into the ridged fields’. Meanwhile, ‘the sun dies constantly’, and even static boundaries, for instance between rock and trees, have a sense of being caught in action, for instance in the line ‘As the white rock breaks on the wooded slopes / Over there’.
This landscape, Riley writes, ‘is a thought thing’; that thought is complicated by boundaries which vary in material, visibility and permanence. The walker has ‘Slight and simple script to read his way’ in a terrain which is characterised by ‘ruined walls and broken arches’, ‘A veiled and separated ground’, ‘Streaks of paleness on the ground’, ‘Gulleys and terraces of a complicated hill’ and ‘the small zone of electric light’. In the final section of the book, ‘Unfolding turns at last / To shore, to earth’s arc, bright / Moon on the tree jagged edge of the / Black hill out there for a moment’. Yet it is only for a moment that this horizon is brought out of hiding, because a few lines afterwards the poem retracts this moment and concludes: ‘Then a slight paling begins, night / Turns and trots down the valley, dreams / Wrapped in darkness and world / Break into day.’ (A previous poem by J. H. Prynne, ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ (1974),[93] similarly rejects a totality of spatial knowledge in the concluding line, ‘Only at the rim does the day tremble and shine’.)
All these boundaries and redefinitions of boundaries matter because Riley’s publication was released[94] into a context in which boundaries were a key concept in geographical debate. The same year saw a summarising of the power-driven ideologies and commodifications of bounded space in the publication New Models in Geography: The Political Economy Perspective (1989).[95] Anssi Paasi was writing on the overlay of countless visible and invisible symbolic boundaries in social space,[96] observing that boundaries are not absolute phenomena, that not all of their components are objectively apparent, and that ‘individuals continually produce and reproduce territoriality, adopt, bear and produce new meanings’.[97] These complex spatial configurations involved relations between both synchronous and historical territories; there is therefore a constant interplay ‘between decay and emerging forms’.[98]
And yet the boundaries cannot be entirely ignored, for boundaries which give direction to experience are in fact the precondition of their own transcendence.[99] Rather than living in a boundless world, it is important to approach those bounded spaces with a more sophisticated reading-practise, and with more agency, and cease to see them as a static framework. Robert Crawford argues that poetry, particularly, ‘abstracted from boundaries … loses its soil’, for, following Bakhtin’s concept of what is ‘extra-territorial’, or has no sovereign internal territory, poetry ‘always lives through and is determined by a “debatable land”, a shifting, dynamic border territory’.[100] The poems I am dealing with take a much more self-aware approach to this situation: the Bakhtinian traversing of bordering metaphorical landscapes in the poem by a reader or writer is crucial, for these poets, to determining the form of the poem. Finally, boundaries may be enriching, as they provide the means to in some way re-navigate or re-imagine those boundaries – as London poet Bill Griffiths does with the shires of England in his poem ‘Moving’, for instance, in which he travels through and between regions, unmarked, on the roads, and measures them only by passing ‘flower-workers and long-ears / whistling the bylaws as they piss’.[101]
Peter Riley’s co-editor on The English Intelligencer, Andrew Crozier (who was once tutored by Charles Olson, and who also accepted a lectureship at Essex under Donald Davie), has a particular ken for such anti-closural uses of geographical boundaries. ‘Walking on Grass’,[102] for instance, considers the intermingling of rural and city space after the melting of snow beside a motorway, when the grassy verge ‘yields underfoot … and the water that wells up / reminds one of walking by the sea just after the tide / goes out’. Within one sentence, the motorway becomes both a seaside and a Californian mountain range, as he notes that ‘like seagulls here are various birds / scattered over a bleached sandy-looking stretch of turf / which, from a distance, looks I’m told like the Sierra Nevada’. In these conditions a bird is ‘just as / at home in the botanical gardens as on the verge / of the A 604 after a flood of melt-water has flowed / on leaving in its wake one suspects a valuable sediment’. This poem, in pointing up the hybridity between motorway and botanical garden, assumes its role as a modern British pastoral, undermining not only boundaries, but more specifically the containment, commodification and valorisation of ruralised spaces[103].
A much earlier poem by Crozier, however, originally written in The Litter of Time Spent (1967), shows that the awareness of stratified boundaries was a means by which poetry could attempt an epistemology of place even then. This shows that the poetry I am dealing with is not simply a literary reworking of the thoughts of cultural geographers, but an independent field of thought which was tackling the same, unstable grounds. In this way cultural geography and poetry were, between them, performing a pincer movement on the concept of empirical and bounded space. They were not working together, but independently querying these concepts of static boundaries from two sides – through the use of geographical theory on the one hand, and through the use of the arena of the page as a practical field for textual exploration on the other hand. Crozier’s poetry throughout the period I am dealing with often puts in play different forms of contingent geographies, often through the self-conscious use of temporary ways of binding the landscape – for instance, in footprints in snow, or the various conflicting contours of thickets, barbed wire, roads and place names. The most consistent study of this, however, is in ‘On Romney Marsh’, from that collection.[104] Here, the reader (or the speaker) finds himself in a contradictory field of semiotic excess. The very first line is already an uncertain proposal: ‘The sheep on Romney Marsh / have probably been there since the sea withdrew / or at least since the salt was drained and the land / become pasturage’ (italics mine), with the uneven verb structures enacting a disorientation in time. Next, a break and long indentation mimetically indicates that pasturage ‘cut through with dykes / to hold the land high, and so low, to walk across / in series of right angles / seeking the plank bridges, you might go / a long way from your way’. Across the poem, the transition without a pause into and out of the third person address (and later, a first person narrative) indicates a landscape difficultly entangled with different points of view. Meanwhile, the poem continues at a new alignment: ‘the sheep at least have been there / long enough to be a known breed’.
The entire poem is one unhierarchical long sentence, punctuated only by commas and spatial disjunctions. It thus reroutes through different forms of geographical attention; the return to left alignment, in the next section, heralds the fact that the sheep were / are ‘just mutton’ grazing the fields below the all important fortifications against French pirates. This is ‘the rise of the Queen’s Head at Icklesham / as you look over the marsh to the humps / on which stand Rye and Winchelsea’. As the speaker remarks later, ‘names record / the old topography’ – but they are also just clauses caught up in the relentless forward movement of the sentence, which goes on to describe the ‘French / pirates who brought their boats up where the sea ran / now inland, Land Gate, Water Gate … / a strategic importance / further, as the sea drew back’. Here, the named locations function as outposts against a process of disremembering and absorption, in a poem which investigates the tensions between fortifications, history and named places on the one hand, and the landscape’s process of absorption on the other.
This process of absorption is bound too with the movements of the sea, as the next fragment, appearing at an extreme indentation, continues, ‘further, as the sea drew back / along the Rother’s course, did it then / turn inland, westward, to drown seven parishes’. The word ‘further’ may indicate further along in time, further along the landscape, or further along the page, jutting out to the right as this section does. As the poem lies, it seems that each spatially discrete section offers a different fragment of chronology, showing not just the historicity of space but, in one geographer’s words, ‘the stratifications that give it its individual form’[105]. Yet these spatially discrete sections are also grammatically inseparable in such a way that their tenses tend to get bound up together. The past tense of ‘the sea drew back / along the Rother’s course’ thus morphs uncertainly with the past tense of ‘I stood plotting a course’ in the next, final section, returned to the left-aligned position:
By the Queen’s Head I stood plotting a course
along the dykes across the marsh to the facing slope
catching the afternoon sun
and sheltering me from the wind as I walked
along its contour to enter Rye
across the sluice
from the other side[106]
The combination of this spatial distinction between time zones, and the lack of grammatical distinction between them, gives a sense of the partly continuous life of the past landscapes in the present landscape. This invokes the situation in which the past boundaries are still half-valid, and ‘when experiencing space, when crossing a territorial perimeter, you are most likely to be on someone else’s ground … Time is inscribed in space through the agencies that territorialise it; therefore the experience of space and the appropriation of space will inevitably have to come about as a negotiation with one’s predecessors’.[107] The negotiation in this poem ends, self-consciously, with the awareness of the current writer. He recognises his own agency, shaping out a deliberate navigation of the space by ‘plotting a course’ for the benefits of sunshine and shelter from the wind, which both follows the established marking in the land (‘along the dykes’, ‘along its contour’), and breaks new trails across them (‘across the marsh’, ‘across the sluice’).
The mapping is drawn from history, but also from a contingent present; it manipulates a wide range of temporal evidence by means of its layout and syntax. This poem is thus an early representation of the fluid geographies in a landscape, and the disjunctions in a map, which were later to be the subject of more prolonged geographical debate. It refers merely to the history of the landscape, rather than, as in Allen Fisher’s case, to a wide cosmology of geographical texts and readings. It therefore shows an early interest in geographical rendering which takes as its focus only the very intimate processes between the landscape, the viewer, the writer, and the page. Without needing to delve into theoretical spatial debates, it therefore demonstrates how poetry was on a very fundamental level entangled with such problems. This explains why poetry’s moments of self-questioning about its own representations of geography arose before and during the cartographical debates, which it both helped to elucidate and was elucidated by.
Conclusion:
Although it might seem like a footnote in history, this engagement by poets with the cartographic dilemma of the postmodern period offers an incitement to readers to pay more consistent attention to the use of space in these, and other, more canonical texts. The tools at the poet’s disposal for navigating the construction and representation of the landscape, and for framing geographical imaginations, are elucidated by such tools as Riley’s modes of syntax, and Fisher’s characterisation of the Poet as surveyor in Brixton Fractals. Texts such as Oliver’s ‘Ordnance Survey Map 178’, meanwhile, indicate both the way in which the poetic medium rendered recalcitrant geography, and the way in which that recalcitrant geography served the poetic sense. The suitability of the poem to represent spatial indeterminacy ensures that syntax, language and the space of the poem are valid tools for rethinking geographical spaces. More importantly, the linguistic strengths of the resultant texts show not only that this is a valid subject for poetry, but also that poetry can map the contours of landscape and, especially, explore the specific limitations of this mapping in a more nuanced way even than the cartography or geographical theory which sets out to explicitly deal with the issues.
As the poems set out to reorient our approach to the discursivity of the land, similarly, we can be redisciplined by the geographical debates as readers of poetry. Specifically this concerns the self-analytical means by which the poem may set out to elucidate the very processes of geo-graphy, or land-writing. Poetry’s relationship with topographical notation is a valuable critical theme; this brief introduction to where its concerns overlapped with the new explorations in cartographical representation is, I hope, a valuable step in rethinking the matter of poetry and place.
[1] Doreen Massey,
For Space (2005), p. 111
[2] Peter Riley, Sea Watches (1991), ‘Topographical Notes’. All the following quotations are from here.
[3] Riley, Tracks and Mineshafts (1983), p. 50
[4] Riley, Sea Watches, IV/6
[5] Riley, Sea Watches, I
[6] The image of ‘meniscus’, ‘rim’, or ‘horizon’ as a metaphor for contingent or transitional landscapes is a compelling one in Riley’s work; a fuller study might investigate this, up to and including Alstonefield (2003): ‘the hill crests take / the surge of territory to its break and / mark it as on paper, ink under blue wash / Making clear what I thought I knew, that / Truth is at the rim’, p. 9.
[7] This is an extra reason for the usefulness of this study. Alice Oswald’s Dart (2002), for instance, follows the movement of the River Dart in Devon, using three years’ worth of recorded conversations with the people who live alongside it. This is preceded by Kim Taplin’s Muniments (1987), in this period, which considers ten places in Britain where nuclear targets have been created, through the gathering of observations of local inhabitants.
[8] Donald Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum (1977), p. 180
[9] University of California Publications in Geography, Vol 2, no. 2, 1925. Reprinted in Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer (1969), p. 315-350.
[10] See OIson’s essay ‘Projective Verse’, originally published in a New York poetry magazine in 1950, available in Donald Allen ed., Human Universe and Other Essays (1965); see also the essay ‘Proprioception’.
[11] Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (2007), p. 59-60
[12] Ibid., p. 60. For an investigation into the difference in American and English landscape, see Daniels, Fields of Vision and National Identity in England and the United States (1993).
[13] Although cultural geography was, of course, already being used as a term at the start of the century, it became a much more centralised part of the debates in the postmodern period.
[14] Davie, p. 182-3
[15] Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision (2008), p. 166. On this topic see also David Matless, ‘The Uses of Cartographic Literacy: Mapping, Survey and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Denis Cosgrove ed., Mappings (1999).
[16] This is a questionable term, although during Oliver’s time in the city he did make the acquaintance of J.H. Prynne, and thus became associated with the group loosely termed as ‘Cambridge poets’.
[17] See the evolution of Labov’s theories in de Certeau’s map/tour distinction in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984).
[18] See Tim Ingold’s chapter ‘To journey along a way of life: maps, wayfinding and navigation’, in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (2000).
[19] Douglas Oliver, ‘Ordnance Survey Map 178’, Oppo Hectic (1969), reprinted in Crozier and Longville eds., A Various Art (1987)
[20] It is worth noting here that ‘Skinner’s Farm’ is an actual location which appears on the Ordnancy Survey map of Woolland; the lower case ‘f’ in Oliver’s ‘Skinner’s farm’, however, personalises it.
[21] This is rather like the story of the captive painter who, at the Chinese emperor’s dictate, paints so wonderful a landscape that he is able to escape into its depths.
[22] Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), p. 155-176. See also Gary Snyder’s The Practise of the Wild (1991), in which he writes: ‘Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild’, p. 27. See the chapter ‘The Place, the Region and the Commons’ for a brief survey of the differences between English regions and those in America and Canada.
[23] Alison Russell, ‘Introduction: Surveying the Territory’, in Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern Travel Literature (2001).
[24] See Barthe, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, in The Friday Book: Essays and other Nonfiction (1997).
[25] Russell, p.9. On postmodern travel narratives which respond to this, see also Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986) and William Least Heat-Moon’s Prairy-Erth: A Deep Map (1991).
[26] Ibid., p. 51. See also Alexandre Gillet’s essay, ‘Geopoetical Considerations’:’But I must be clear, what is at stake here is not reaching a distant horizon or advancing through unknown landscapes. The aim here is ‘undisciplinating’ ourselves … to open out our person, and let it move into what will soon become not an open space but an open world’, in Liz Bondi, Laura Cameron, Joyce Davidson and Mick Smith eds., Emotion, Place and Culture (2009), p. 364
[27] Jeremy Prynne, ‘Lectures on Maximus IV, V, VI’, Simon Fraser University, July 27, 1971. Reprinted in Minutes of the Charles Olson Society, Vol. 28, April 1999, unpaginated.
[28] Ibid., unpaginated.
[29] Ibid., unpaginated. The following quotations are from the same.
[30] See Denis Cosgrove, ‘A terrain of metaphor: cultural geography 1988-89’, Progress in Human Geography, 1989, vol. 13, no. 4
[31] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 141
[32] Geertz’s breakaway from positivist ethnography (the traditional approach of Parsonian system-building) involved him in a much more textual process[32], with the analyst having to keep in mind that ‘the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong’ (The Interpretation of Cultures). For essays originally published in the period I am dealing with, see Geertz’s ‘Art as a Cultural System’ in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983), in which he announces ‘there has been an alteration in the principles of mapping’, as well as essays later collected as Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (2000). See also James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988), particularly the chapter on ‘A Poetics of Displacement’. As a side-note on how literary deconstruction may be used to reform ethnographic debates, which may then in turn reflect back on literature, see J. H. Prynne’s Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper and others (2007), a study on Wordsworth which takes as its model James Clifford’s ‘Notes on Field Notes’.
[33] Though I am currently concerned with poetry, S. Quoniam’s 1987 artwork ‘A painter, geographer of Arizona’, for example, is informative on spatial practises: it combines painting, sketchwork, and textual investigations of Arizona. However, the text is deliberately illegible. Quoniam observes of the work:
‘This emphasizes the impossibility of really defining the space and landscape which surround us. Words and their use betray both the discourse of the geographer and the space which originates this discourse. … The spatial structuring of the text goes back and forth between legible phenomenon (intelligibility) and illegible phenomenon (inintelligibility), in the continuity/discontinuity of our experience’. S. Quoniam, ‘A painter, geographer of Arizona’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 6, 1988, p. 9
[35] Allen Fisher, Place (2005), section X
[36] J. B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the Map’, Cartographica, Vol. 26, no. 2, Summer 1989. See also J. B. Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge, and Power’, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels eds., The Iconography of Landscape (1988), and Natter, W. and J. Jones, ‘Response to J. B. Harley’s Article ‘Deconstructing the Map’’, Cartographica, Vol. 26, no. 3/4, Summer 1989.
[37] Ibid., p. 3
[38] On the processes involved in producing a map, see Denis Cosgrove’s chapter ‘Moving Maps’ in Geography and Vision (2008). On creative developments within the field, see D. Taylor ed., Graphic Communication and Design in Contemporary Cartography (1983), particularly Petchenik, ‘A Mapmaker’s Perspective on Map Design Research, 1950-80’.
[39] Anssi Paasi, ‘Is the world more complex than our theories of it? TPSN and the perpetual challenge of conceptualization’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 26, 2008, p.406
[40] Harley., p. 15
[41] the young mapmaker descends to salt flats, gulls
everywhere for bread on burnished grass.
Boy’s hand in red exercise book, his Wellingtons moving,
as the pen, unguided by cartography,
enlarges a shore line
according to enthusiasm’s measurements
until the map exists.
‘An Island That is All the World’, in Three Variations on the Theme of Harm (1990), p. 65
[42] All quotations are from White’s 1989 ‘Inaugural Text’ for The International Institute of Geopoetics. His own, much later, criticism on geopoetics is collected in the volumes Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World (2003), The Wanderer and his Charts (2004), and a presentation of his 2005 ‘North Atlantic Investigation’ lectures, On the Atlantic Edge (2006). Of particular use are the essays ‘Elements of a New Cartography’, ‘Writing the Road’, and ‘The Remapping of Scotland’, in The Wanderer and his Charts. During the period with which I am dealing, White was publishing only poetic investigations of these themes, collected as The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems (1989) and Handbook for the Diamond Country: Collected Shorter Poems (1990). I would argue that the lack of linguistic experimentation forbids the inclusion of these poems in the current study, but a reader who wishes to follow them up may consult Tony McManus, The Radical Field: Kenneth White and Geopoetics (2007).
[43] For a geographical take on Basil Bunting, see Tony Lopez, ‘Under Saxon the Stone: National Identity in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’ in Richard Caddel ed., ‘Sharp Study and Long Toil: Basil Bunting Special Issue’, Durham University Journal, and John Kerrigan, ‘Divided Kingdoms and the Local Epic: Mercian Hymns to The King of Britain’s Daughter’, in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 13, no. 1, 2000. See also chapter 5, ‘Briggflatts, Melancholy, Northumbria’, in Keith Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles (1998).
[44] For a geographical take on Roy Fisher, see John Kerrigan, ‘Roy Fisher on Location’, in Kerrigan and Robinson eds., The Thing About Roy Fisher (2000). The Kerrigan interview with Fisher in Jacket 35 (‘Come to Think of It, the Imagination’) has an almost entirely topographical focus; the 1989 interview in Jacket 1 is also available online. There is a brief focus on Fisher in Jeremy Hooker, ‘‘The centre cannot hold’: Place in modern English poetry’, in Ludwig and Fietz eds., Poetry in the British Isles: Non-Metropolitan Perspectives (1995).
[45] Pierre Joris, ‘Allen Fisher’s Place’, blog entry, May 23rd, 2005, ‘Nomadics: A place for tracings, translations, meanderings, explorations of a mainly writerly nature. Travelogue, too.’
[46] Place, p. 56-7
[47] Ibid., p. 56
[48] Ibid., p. 46
[49] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987). For a further consideration of Deleuze, Guattari and their poststructuralist theories of nomadic thought in this period, see Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (1996), particularly chapter 2, ‘Becoming Nomad’.
[50] Davidson, Ideas of Space, p. 162
[51] Fisher, Gravity, Preface to Brixton Fractals
[52] Ibid., p. 40
[53] Ibid., p. 41
[54] Ibid., p. 38-9
[55] Ibid., p. 37
[56] Ibid., p. 45
[57] Ibid., p. 34
[58] Harley, p. 4-5
[59] Fisher, Gravity, p. 38-9
[60] James Corner, ‘The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention’, in Denis Cosgrove ed., Mappings (1999), p. 235
[61] Fisher, Gravity, p. 46
[62] Ibid., p. 50
[63] Ibid., p. 56
[64] Ibid., p. 59
[65] Ibid., p. 73
[66] Paasi, ‘Is the world more complex than our theories of it?’, p.409
[67] Fisher, Gravity, p. 23
[68] Ibid., p. 70
[69] Ibid., p. 51
[70] Ibid., p. 53
[71] Ibid., p. 67
[72] Ibid., p. 69
[73] Ibid., p. 81
[74] Ibid., p. 45
[75] Ibid., p. 63
[76] Ibid., p. 65
[77] Ibid., p. 68
[78] Ibid., p. 71
[79] Ibid., p. 67
[80] Pile and Rose, ‘All or Nothing: Politics and Critique in the Modernism/ Postmodernism Debate’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 10, 1992, p. 131
[81] Fisher, Gravity, p. 77
[82] Ibid., p. 75
[83] Ibid., p. 52
[84] Ibid., p. 75
[85] Ibid., p. 77
[86] Ibid., p. 78
[87] Ibid., p. 78
[88] Ibid., p. 79
[89] Ibid., p. 83
[90] Ibid., p. 83
[91] See also his Distant Points: Excavations Part One, Books One and Two (1995), a series of prose poems arising from meditations on the 19th century excavation reports of prehistoric burial mounds in the north of England.
[92] Peter Riley, from section marked ‘(b) Peering over a shoulder’, in Noon Province, unpaginated. All further quotations are from Noon Province.
[93] In Wound Response (1974). Reprinted in Poems (2005), p. 223
[94] In limited numbers; it only had a ‘Provisional publication’ of 150 copies by Poetical Histories, Cambridge, although an earlier 1987 version had also been presented to Douglas Oliver.
[95] R. Peet and N. Thrift eds. See particularly Daniels, ‘Marxism, Culture, and the Duplicity of Landscape’.
[96] The essays are later adapted alongside a field study in Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border (1995).
[97] Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border (1995), p. 210
[98] Ibid., p. 203
[99] See Antje Schlottmann, ‘Closed spaces: can’t live with them, can’t live without them’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 26, 2008
[100] Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth Century Poetry (1993), p. 11
[101] Iain Sinclair ed., Future Exiles (1992), p. 279
[102] Reprinted in Andrew Crozier, All Where Each Is (1985), p.81. In this collection, see also the poems ‘Natural History’, ‘There Are Names’, ‘Duets’, ‘What Spokes, And To What Hub?’ and ‘Seaside Fragments’. See also the prose sequence, ‘Driftwood and Seacoal’.
[103] Cf. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace, Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001), p. 4:
‘We developed Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism to take on the challenge of applying ecocritical theories and methods to texts that might seem unlikely subjects because they do not foreground the natural world or wilderness. Environment need not only refer to ‘natural’ or ‘wilderness’ areas; as the essays in this collection indicate, environment also includes cultivated and built landscapes, the natural elements and aspects of those landscapes, and cultural interactions with those natural elements. One way ecocriticism can and should widen its range of topics is to pay more consistent attention to texts that revolve around these less obviously ‘natural’ landscapes and human attempts to record, order, and ultimately understand their own relationships to those environments.’
See also Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer, ‘Shifting Ground: Metanarratives, Epistemology, and the Stories of Nature’, in Environmental Ethics, Vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 1996
[104]In Loved Litter of Time Spent (1967). Reprinted in All Where Each Is, p. 26
[105] Frederik Tygstrup, ‘Changing Spaces: Salman Rushdie’s Mapping of Post-Colonial Territories’, in de Lange, Fincham, Hawthorn and Lothe eds., Literary Landscapes: From Modernism to Postcolonialism (2008), p. 202
[106] Crozier, All Where Each Is (1985), p. 81
[107] Ibid., p. 202
