The University of the Self #20

Beginning to Decipher & Articulate My Interpretations of Place: Placewriting Lyric Fragments viii - x

Image description: This is a piece of asemic writing. Its title is ‘Mapped Conversation 1’. The page is white and the lines made upon the page are in black ink. Blotchy, dotty lines travel horizontally and diagonally over the page. Asemic writing in fine-nibbed pen is written between the blotchy lines.

viii

Poetry is the utter, condensed, aesthetic expression of our lives and the world around us. Poetry is pleasure: we seek it, as did Robert Pinsky, whose “…loyalty [he has] never been able to shake off, toward the idea of pleasing or being pleased in works of art”. (Pinsky, p.3, 1983) Poetry is to some, like Fran Lock, the acceptance, allowance and acknowledgment of pain: “…we have to dare to become painfully conscious (italics Lock’s own)…” (Lock, p. 114, 2022) Poetry is place: any occurrence that can be named, from sitting thinking your private thoughts, to war, to love, to feeling one’s toes sink into the sand; indeed to any human situation or circumstance huge or miniscule, any poem we humans can make had to happen either underneath, inside of, above, at or out of place. As Robert Macfarlane says,

“Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must
happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way
that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.”
(Macfarlane, 2010, p.113)

What is place writing?

Is it something more than “…a shelf from which to indulge that hazy, incoherent spread of landscape…” (Sinclair, 2010, ed. By Evans & Robson, p.13), something to “[s]et the blood racing [, o]r clot it, making people not just prisoners but puppets of their native place?” (Mabey, 2010, ed. By Evans & Robson, p.29)

Is it the creative embodiment of human desire ? Do we need to produce place writing because “[o]ur bodies are bowls, scoured grey with waiting: a longing / for pictures, words, the shape of churches…” (Power, 2022, p.34)?

ix

Is place it somewhere you were lost or somewhere you were found?
Somewhere you know well, somewhere you regret visiting, or somewhere
you have never been?              Is it a fireplace,
                                                     birthplace,
                                                        placeholder,
                                                           workplace?
                                    Is it irreplaceable,
                                         commonplace,
                                             misplaced,
                                                 transplacental,
                                                      placebo?
Is it something we have grown complacent about?
Is it so integral to our lives that we begin to feed on it after placentation?

Is place anywhere you have existed, no matter how short the time?
Is place anywhere we might believe that we have been? Is place anamnesis?

Our first ever place was inside an oocyte or a spermatozoon.
From these we have progressed from one place to another.
Place is small—the chair I am sitting in as I type.
Place is vast—desert, sea, forest or moor.

Place is also eternal if we consider the possibility of an afterlife. I wish to explore and extend upon notions of place through responses, of both belonging and unbelonging, to notions of place. For me, as a person with autism, every place I have been has required ‘transliteration’: I have had to reshape the language of each place into a means that will enable me to ‘pronounce’ it. A mountain become The Overwhelm, The Ages of Time and Heart. A university becomes Hoard of Thrill, Palace of Unbelong. Do I have the right to exist in geographical locations, in academia, upon the page? Am I safe there? Am I free to express myself? Where am I? Who, in this place, shall I be? Does this mean, as Kathleen Shields says, in her essay Derek Mahon’s Poetry of Belonging, that I am “…cut off from the sense of community assumed to be the inheritance of other [place] poets elsewhere…” (Shields, p.68) In poems like Mahon’s Spring in Belfast, I sense the darkness and light of his belonging / unbelonging:

              “Walking among my own this windy morning…
              We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hill
              At the top of every street, for there it is…
              One part of my mind must learn to know its place.”

“Even now there are places where a thought might grow —” Mahon writes in his poem A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.

Is place our recollections of the past? Can place help us to return to our memories? How many ways can we use to return?

“…somehow, somewhere, all of my memories and experiences, though “in
the past”, are all still really there somehow, and if I can find some way to get
to them…I’ll be happy again…return to these places in person…if I could just
find some way of reconnecting the right cables, and wishing hard enough, it
would all come to life again…” (Ware (no pagination), 2003)

Is place the future?
Is place somewhere we hope to someday end up?

x

Should placewriting be understood as “human activity as a telluric force” (Macfarlane, 20)? How do external geographical locations inform and encourage emotional and creative fluency? Time and time again, writers find a powerful means of expression through the application of the self / trauma / experience onto a background of nature and place. In her book Hidden Nature, Alys Fowler frames an emotional journey against the Birmingham canal network;

“…I needed a landscape that I didn’t know by heart. I needed to examine
and re-examine somewhere that would fascinate and teach me. I needed
somewhere in which I could absorb myself and, I hoped, soak up some of
the unsettledness in me.” (Fowler, 2017)

Placewriting acknowledges the interior landscape—of memory, association, psychology etc—as a mapping onto, an interaction with the external place for example, Anita Sethi’s I Belong Here:

“My heart quickened as I looked at the miniature mappings of its mountains
and rivers…I longed to journey through the natural landscapes of the North,
transforming what began as an ugly experience of hate and exclusion into one
offering hope and finding beauty after brutality.” (Sethi, p. 11, 2021)

Placewriting can be a valuable framework for life-writing, for the projection of the self and its internal landscape onto external landscape in order to heal, to self-discover, to renew, to survive. I think here of Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, for example, where:

“Webb gives Prue her own space, the attic under the thatch of the cottage,
where apples and pears are stored, and where Prue carves out physical and
mental space to knit, to practice her writing, to gaze through the window on
the orchard, and to reflect on things said and done about and to her. Here she
can clear her head in freeing solitude.” (Precious Bane, 2021 )

How do external geographical locations inform and encourage emotional and creative fluency? How would they inform my internal landscape and my creative writing? How would they encourage emotional and poetic dialogues? How do internal / imaginary locations inform and encourage emotional and creative fluency? How do other radical reinterpretations of place inform and encourage emotional and creative fluency?

These are all interesting questions I am enjoying setting myself. They might take a lifetime (or longer) to answer, but setting oneself such intellectual challenges is a vital part of The University of the Self, where one must be one’s own tutor.

The University of the Self is “a realm of unknowing, a place where definitions are constantly in flux, a place where answers are not as important as the questions” (Miller, p.14, 2001)

It certainly keeps the creative life interesting! It is a lot to take in at once, so I shall continue writing these fragments, little by little.

I hope you enjoyed reading my latest article. Thank you so much for spending some time here with me. Times are tough, but if you feel like supporting a struggling writer so that she can continue being able to write, (every tiny bit helps) you can do so below…

Sources

Lock, Fran. White/ Other. The 87 Press, 2022.
Fowler, Alys. Hidden Nature. Hodder & Stoughton, 2017.
Mabey, Richard. ‘On the Virtues of Dis-Enchantment’, in Evans, G & Robson, Di (ed.) Towards Re-Enchantment, Artevents, 2010.
Macfarlane, Robert. ‘A Counter Desecration Phrasebook’, in Evans, G & Robson, Di (ed.) Towards Re-Enchantment, Artevents, 2010.
Macfarlane, Robert. Desecration phrasebook: A litany for the Anthropocene. New
Scientist, 15^th December, 2015. Last accessed 5^th September, 2023. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830523-200-desecration-phrasebook-a-litany-for-the-anthropocene.
Mahon, Derek. Dawn at St Patrick’s. Poetry Foundation, n.d. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92165/dawn-at-st-patrick39s. Last accessed 20^th December, 2023.
Mahon, Derek. Spring in Belfast. Poetry Foundation, n.d. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92160/spring-in-belfast.
Miller, Brenda. “A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay”. Writing Creative Nonfiction. Edited by Forché, Carolyn & Gerard, Phillip. Story Press, 2001.
Pinsky, Robert. “Poetry and Pleasure.” The Threepenny Review, no. 15, 1983, pp. 3–7. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4383227.
Precious Bane (2021) What I Think About When I Think About Reading. thinkaboutreading@wordpress.com. https://thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2021/07/21/precious-bane/
Power, Phoebe. Book of Days. Carcanet, 2022.
Sethi, Anita. I Belong Here. Bloomsbury, 2021.
Shields, Kathleen. Derek Mahon’s Poetry of Belonging. Irish University Review, vol. 24, no. 1, 1994, pp. 67–79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484600. Accessed 19 Dec. 2023.
Sinclair, Iain. ‘Water Walks’, in Evans, G & Robson, Di (ed.) Towards Re-Enchantment, Artevents, 2010.
Ware, Chris (F.C.). Quimby the Mouse. Jonathan Cape, 2023.


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