Toward a Bibliography of Place

An interview on Poetry Foundation.org called A Shifting Sense of Place: Four contemporary poets discuss where their work belongs in the world, by Jeremy Richards left me thinking there really isn't any general agreement about what is meant by Place and convinced me to continue to explore the topic here. I have said in the past that for me place is a process in which the writer/artist engages a location as an entity. The point being not simply the construction of a backdrop or setting to a series of events taking place, but the essential fact that each I/eye is constantly constructing, reevaluating, embracing, transferring, and negating within the geographic boundaries of here. I will go even further now and say that this is not a matter of just seeing but tending to your garden as well. Or as my 9th grade math teacher used to say: "not a spectator's sport." We have to be willing to allow the same amount of opposing vision to alter us as well or else we are not seeing, the act of writing about place is a two way street.

This is not to say there aren't useful insights into the process of place in Richard's interview:

"You slow down your pace, peeking under rocks, sneaking around corners, tiptoeing down alleyways that you never dared. As a poet, you search for whatever gives a place its muscle and bone. After I’ve written about a place, there’s a moment when it stands in newly stark relief, vulnerable and unveiled. If you look long enough, you’ll see stories pulsing there." -Patricia Smith

Unfortunately, I really don't see anything that might come out of the type of process she is talking about in her poem Hip-Hop Ghazal. The last interview with C.D Wright discusses an interesting difference between geography and chorography, and I think she is spot on when she says: "The mapping of the city is integral to the subject." But again there is little about her poem Lake Echo, Dear that speaks to such a mapping. Though these poems might speak to a Sense of Place, as Wright points out, this term is somewhat empty. The accompanying poems in this interview address identity informed by a place, the particulars of a landscape, or events but none of them are really grounded in any specific location. The problem with the term "sense of place" then is that it is incapable of expressing a relationship with location simply because it is too ambiguous. Place needs location to give it form.

I say this all not to call for a static definition of place, but more as an excuse to explore the idea of place as a literary event further. In this regard it makes sense to me to start with a rough bibliography of writers for whom there is a clearly expressed level of attention given to ones surroundings, the results of which greatly contributes to the significance of their work. The list below is by no means definitive. There are no doubt a great many more writers who should be included (either those who I am ignorant of or who I have just not done enough reading on to say anything significant), however, I don't doubt that the writers that are listed belong in this conversation. They are presented in a basic chronology, and other than the question of who seems to have done what first, there is no implied comment of merit in the order I have chosen.

The Place Reader:

William Blake: London is the center space of his focus into the mythological universe he envisioned. see Milton: Between South Molton Street & Stratford Place/ Putting us somewhere on Davies or Oxford Street if I am reading this map correctly. Where Blake lived before and after his ill fated move to Felpham (the only time in his life when he was not living in London).  (Johnson: 234)

Henry David Thoreau: Walden The greatest spiritual ecologist of early American writers. See Gerrit Lansing's short essay on Thoreau in the book A February Sheaf:  "…Thoreau made of his daily and local experience a rich mythological fabric, a cosmos as complex and individual as any system of totemic classification." My inclusion of Thoreau here is perhaps odd seeing as he is the only writer's who was not drawing from an urban source, but I think that there is significant reason to consider his Eco-conscious focus as a vital contribution to the writing of place. Check out an interesting essay by Eco Poetics editor Johnathan Skinner: Thoughts on Things: Poetics of The Third Landscape.

Charles Baudelaire: Paris Spleen: (Paris) Place through the imaginative engagement of Paris' poor huddled masses.

James Joyce: Ulysses: (Dublin) The first novel to explore the relationship between place (Dublin) and body,  as characters follow a course of mythological events through time and space.

(The map that Valdimir Nabokov drew based on the routes taken in Ulysses for a lecture he gave: Image source)

Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet. (Lisbon) More reading to be done here but I've read enough of BOD to see that location is the doorway into Pessoa's internal universe:

     "I love the stillness of early summer evening’s downtown, and especially the stillness made more still by contrast, on the streets that seethe with activity by day. Rua do Arsenal, Rua Da Alfandega, the sad streets extending eastward from where the Rua Da Alfandega ends, the entire stretch along the quiet docks-- all of this comforts me with sadness when on these evenings I enter the solitude of their ensemble..." #3*

     "Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they're full of meaningless activity; by night they're full of a meaningless lack of it... There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul... There is an equal abstract destiny for men and for things; both have an equally indifferent designation in the algebra of the world's mystery." #3*

"Eternal tourist of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are." #123*

*All quotes from Book of Disquiet: 2003 Penguin Classics Edition: Translation by Richard Zenith

Guy Debord: Founder of Pyscogeography: loosely defined as the examination of urban space on human behavior.Coming as it did out of the French Situationist movement, Pyscogeography has perhaps had more influence on performance art than literature best seen in the basic method of the pyscogeographer, the dérive;  a pedestrian exercise of one or more people who allow the spaces to dictate their movement. Though not really where my interest lay, there are a number of  pyscogeographic inspired groups. Flash Mob was one contemporary manifestation of this trend, in San Francisco there is a  group called SFZero a sort of social network of groups who post challenges to be conducted within the city in an attempt to redefine space. The completion of said challenges earns teams points. Some of the groups listed on their web site have names like: Bart Psychogeographical Association or Society for Nihilistic Intent and Disruptive Efforts. I  have a hard time getting over the the idea of "Play" in this branch of pyscogeography, though Debord's contribution to the examination of place is undeniable.

Two of the more interesting results of pyscogeography are listed further down in the writing of Iain Sinclair and the films of Patrick Keller. For anyone interested in both James Joyce and Psycogeography you may want to visit the site Joyce Walks: In their own words: ...a psychogeographical tool which generates walking maps based on routes from James Joyce's Ulysses in any city in the world using Google Maps. The system prints maps to be used as the basis of walks exploring the city of your choice and generates mashups using your pictures and videos documenting these walks to share with other users.

Charles Olson: All of it. The Maximus poems are an enormous body of work that I have no authority to talk to. For people looking for a way into Olson though, I would suggest starting with his prose: The Human Universe, read in conjunction with Mayan Letters will provide the main theoretical thrust of his work: ego dominated Western civilization has lost connection with the natural world. Just as D.H. Lawrence was drawn to Etruscan civilization and Mesoamerican Myth, Olson also saw in Mayan civilization a non dualistic alternative, and a possible pathway to reestablishing an "original nature" (a term I have borrowed from eastern mysticism). There is also The Post Office: which for me was the first “ah ha!” moment with Olson, for any prose writer/reader with an interest in history I would start here. The essay on Projective Verse rounds out this list and provides the necessary understanding of Olsonian poetics needed to travel 128 into Polis.

José Lezama Lima: Paradiso: the masterpiece of the Cuban Neo-baroque movement is a world contained within Havana. Where Borges wrote about the Aleph, Lezama Lima made one of his own

Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Three Trapped Tigers (Havana): Place as a "scene" . Centering around the nightlife scene of Pre-revolutionary Cuba it's characters travel different career routes and amorous trysts,  drinking, listening to music and playing elaborate linguistic pranks.

Also Check out the movie Cabrera Infante and his brother made called PM:

Italio Calvino: Invisible Cities: The maker in the eternal city:

"The city, however does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lighting rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."
(1974 Translation: William Weaver)

                                                                                             

Iain Sinclair: Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge are two long poems focusing on East London; I discovered Sinclair through Allan Moore whose graphic novel From Hell borrows heavily from Sinclair’s work. There are a number of novels worth investigating as well: Down River and Whitechapel Scarlet Tracings are perhaps the most significant but Sinclair’s more recent writing is non fiction: Lights out for the territory: 9 Excursions in the secret history of London and London Orbital are two examples of his more recent pedestrian investigation of London.

W.G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn: A walking journey through England that discuses the history of each area and the events that take place during the trip.

George Stanley : A San Francisco born poet currently living in Vancouver, Stanley was a student of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan in the 1960s and was heavily influenced by Charles Olson. His poem San Francisco is Gone is a an incredible vision that combines family history with past structures re-imagined over a contemporary landscape. 

Film: 

Patrick Keller: London and Robinson in Space are excellent. A third film called Robinson in Ruins came out in November of 2010 but has not been made available in the US yet. The first two movies are narrated by Paul Scofield, the anonymous voice that gives the viewer a first person account of a man named Robinson as he  walks through places seen through the eye of Keller’s still framed visions of London and greater England.

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There is plenty more to be said about the writers above and just what, if any, idea can be constructed on the topic and process of place. I will end here by saying that in working on this preliminary bibliography it occurred to me that much of the writing dealing with place has come from the avant-garde/experimental arts. If  we hold that the vanguard has traditionally shunned conservation in favor of creating bold new paths, only intent on change, then why is place a reoccurring theme among many of the same artists? Though new techniques justify an avant-garde label, much of that technique (at least in the list above) has served to explore and document rather than smash.