A Poetics of Place: The Poetry of Ralph Gustafson

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I included several poems below that have spoken to me — some of which are less well-known than others. Topo-poetics differs from geo-poetics and eco-poetics two other approaches to poetry that responds to the earth and its environment, both because of its explicit attention to place and places, and because it acknowledges that a poem about place is in some degree itself a place.

At least two recent books of poems are simply titled Place (one by Allen Fisher, and the other by Jorie Graham).He focuses especially on the personal, emotional response to buildings both in life and in literary works, both in prose and in poetry. As Calvin says in the podcast, “If I hadn’t been a fashion designer, I would have become an architect. Another sequence, Noon Province, unfolds among the villages, hillsides and field margins of Provence, southern France, while other poems from the collection A Map of Faring (2005) are prompted by locations in Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy and Spain. It thus radicalizes “nature poetry” by offering far less utopian visions than the romantics did, often through the formulation of urban modalities, nonorganic metaphors, and an increased scientific inflection on the everyday objects that appear to mind.

In his Poetics—still the most respected of all discussions of literature—Aristotle countered Plato’s indictment by stressing what is normal and useful about literary art. It follows, I think, that good poetry of place sees significance in things and landscapes to which most of us would pay scant attention, and embodies the imagination needed to draw unexpected associations that amplify this significance. She has exhibited widely across the UK, and produced a number of temporary public art commissions for UK heritage sites. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. With varying visual languages, artists Fiona Curran, Yva Jung, Dave Nelson, Kirke Raava, Amanda Ralph and Imogen Welch all share an inherent interest in the process of moulding and re-shaping experiences of memory or place.Y.: November 5, 2005, and at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Conference, Eugene, Oregon, June 24, 2005. by French classicists from Aristotle’s Poetics; they require a play to have a single action represented as occurring in a single place and within the course of a day.

Contemporary poets, including Cresswell, take a more inclusive view of the modern world with all its comforts and challenges. Using contemporary literary representations of place, this study focuses on works that have participated in the emergence of new conceptions of place and new place-based identities. Neither Tintern Abbey nor the River Wye is mentioned except in the poem’s title, yet Wordsworth’s descriptions of “steep and lofty cliffs,” “plots of cottage ground,” “hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines/ of sportive wood run wild,” and “pastoral farms,” evoke the specific character of the Wye valley and make it recognizable even to those who may not be familiar with it. He is interested in interstitial places, not just to highlight their flaws, as it is very often the case, but rather to analyze them as “emergent geographical spaces” because “it is possible to make something good in even the most inhospitable environments” (1, 4).This conference is being organised by the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University and theUniversity of Notre Dame’s London Global Gateway, in association with The Tablet and Farm Street Church. The notion of dwelling comes from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, much of whose thought has been shown by Jeff Malpas to be a disclosure of the essential role of place in being, a role that Malpas describes as topology.