Wandering grasses
After hearing John Brannigan’s paper on 1930s cultural associations of islands and ‘Islomania’ in poetry a few days ago at the Regional Literary Cultures Conference in Nottingham, I’ve gone back to my work on peninsulas recharged.
As a remote outlying region, and an area of land which may even have its own private ecology (as Llyn does, the area I’m studying), are islands and peninsulas seen as ‘outposts on the borderlands of the real’, as Elizabeth Bletsoe puts it in her poetry volume Landscape from a Dream (2008)? Or can they be portrayed, too, as the most globally connected of places, given that the sea is understood by the modern, in Brannigan’s terms, as ‘a means of passage, communication and connection’? This is one of the questions lying behind Peter Riley’s texts about the capitalist grid in Wales leading to the austere coastline of Llyn, where it faces the ‘connecting and severing sea’. (Connecting and severing!)
For the time being, reading proper science books about fish, tides, ‘wandering grasses’ (patches of wandering vegetation), and the mobile quality of place at sea. This will possibly lead me to a pun about migrating plaice. See below.
