The University of the Self #21

Beginning to Decipher & Articulate My Interpretations of Place: Placewriting Lyric Fragments xi - xiv

Image descripton: ‘The Roads that I am Travelling’. A piece of asemic writing by myself. Long, lose black and grey fractured brushstrokes cascade down the white, rectangular pare. There is fine-pen scribbled writing on top.

xi

Place writing is often reliant on actual physical occupancy of place (for example, Phoebe Power’s pilgrimage to Santiago de Comostela, Nan Shepherd’s treks into the Cairngorms). It can be the voice of place itself (as in Ghosts of Greenland by Francis Berry, 1966, p.6):

              “Greenland:   So I am Greenland and on my back
                                 Is a ten-thousand-foot thick ice-pack
                                 Bowing my spine down
                                 Rock black as black, ice white as white,
                                 Greenland.”
                                                                                               (Berry, 1966, p.6)

It can be amalgamated with our emotional and cultural responses to that place and its history (as in André Naffis-Sahely’s collection High Desert, for example:

“I met you in LA / and ferried you south to San Antonio Del Mar…
You always did say / that true migrants ought to be buried upright /
like the Kurdish warriors of old…” (Naffis-Sahely, 2022, p.15)

and in Carolyn Forché’s Gathering the Tribes:

“She remembers her childhood in rural Michigan, evokes her Slovak
ancestors, immerses herself in the American Indian culture of the
Southwest…” (Kunitz, 1976, p. xi),

or used as a means of framing grief, as in Clare Shaw’s Flood:

“Today is over / allen bank I have come…I love you and so much is
broken…” (Shaw, 2018, p.18)

Projects like the 2019 Places of Poetry (www.placesofpoetry.org.uk) allowed writers throughout England and Wales to “…reflect on [their] national and cultural identities, and celebrate the diversity, heritage and personalities of place.” (The Poetry Society, n.d.)

Is place writing a way of binding faith or mythology to the landscape (as George Mackay Brown does in poems like The Eleventh Stone (of the Ring of Brodgar)

              “They say, never such loveliness between the lochs
              As that girl.
              In the pause between two stones
              She became a swan.
              She flew from us into sunset and stars”
                                                         (Mackay Brown, ed. by Bevan & Murray, 2005, p.308)?

Place writing is a locus for our identities, a means of articulating the prosody of life in any version of landscape. Even after we are gone from the Earth, place is somewhere many of us need to know we can be.

Valhǫll or Fólkvangr, Shamayim, Eretz or Sheol,
Nirvana, Heaven or hell, Svarga, Paradise, Mbinguni,
Purgatory, Limbo, or Pialrâl

are some of the places we believe that we might go when we die. Maybe there’s a planet Heaven just like there is a planet Earth and we can visit around the whole universe of afterlives — take weekend breaks, maybe purchase second homes. Maybe the problems on Earth follow us wherever we go. Maybe people will still be driven from our version of heaven by war, climate disaster or poverty. Maybe we will all, in the end, be perfectly content because in the Good Place there is no violence, hate, fear, discrimination, want or greed. Maybe there will be nothing. Maybe that place is simply peace.

xii

Places both real, imaginary and redefined have equal value and allow a more complete accessibility for everyone. If we consider place to mean only geographical location, then a mountain excludes those who, for myriad reasons, cannot climb it. A moor, a beach, a garden path can be equally exclusive. If they are not redefined, if their presence, history, structure and meaning are not translated into a more accessible means, they risk remaining places that might never be experienced. What are the different ways place can be experienced, and how do these ways feed my poetic practice?

If imaginary places / imagining a place helps us write, then that is wonderful.
In The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood, Hugo Hamilton wrote:

                    “Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind…
                    not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people
                    you meet and places you visit…”

Must we, as place poets, rely on “[g]etting to know a landscape, its biography through
walking” alone? (Procter, 2017) Is this expectation of physical occupancy restricting
the development and equality of place poetry? I admire Kathleen Jamie so much for saying this: “…I admit, only those of us privileged to get there can…have all the challenging, solipsistic experiences you please.” (Jamie, 2008)

Are we missing out on crucial, fascinating inspiration?                                      

If I want to visit somewhere I have never been—including geographical locations or imaginary locations—I can place myself there through research, art (which adds to my dialogue into place-writing the fascination of ekphrasis), reading and imagination. This widening of approach to the placewriting genre increases accessibility for those who feel excluded.

In this way, I have found a means of opening out the world for myself.

My contention is that this should be considered a valid visit to a landscape / place—as used by Mervin Peake, Ursula Le Guin, Tolkien, Hans Christian Andersen, for example. This may parallel the humanity, depth and connection ascribed the fictional characters who occupy these imaginary locations.

Is place an archive? The question shifts from ‘what is place?’, to who is place?

Place is more to us than the ground beneath our feet.

Place breathes. Place knows. Place is alive.

Place sees everything, speaks to us in its own tongue (and we must shape ((translate)) its language, so that it might somehow fit into our own lives).

Place is friend, place is foe. Place is personified.

I refer to literature such as Cold Comfort Farm, and Gormenghast etc., to demonstrate this—an unlocking of life, the internal journey through the lens of location. These journeys, to me, are real, and none of the incredible characters or writing within would exist without these imagined locations. Places like Gormenghast are alive in their own right:

“One summer morning of bland air, the huge, corroding bell-like heart of Gormenghast was half asleep and there appeared to be no reverberation from its muffled thudding. In a hall of plaster walls the silence yawned.” (Peake, p. 381, 1999)

I propose to move away from the stigma of the “internal journey” or “finding the self”, towards a more postmodern vision in which we openly acknowledge and work with the reality that we only ever really translate our experiences of the exterior world—we have just decided that some translations are more valid than others.

Is place anywhere you have existed, no matter how short the time?

A phenomenal example of visitation through imagination is Urville, by Giles Tréhin: it is a book which contains an abundance of architectural and town-planning drawings of Urville, an invented city, together with written histories of the place.

“In 1984 I became interested in designing an imaginary city. I called it Urville…from
the Latin urbs, urbis, a town…I have been drawing different views of this city and compiling for myself a historical, geographical, cultural and economic description…a description of the

architecture, the history and the people…as well as the titles of books, plays, films or paintings.” (Tréhin, p. 13, 2006)

This reconceptualization of place has important implications for place writing: for example, extending its reach to people who are unable, for whatever reason, to travel and find it difficult or impossible to physically occupy a space in a particular place. If it is an acceptable narrative that human occupancy both shapes place and is itself shaped by external geographical place—

“…both the community and the environment of [a] place…each has shaped and continues to shape the other.” (Lichtenstein, p.4, 2019)

—then ought it not follow that it is equally legitimate to shape and be shaped by internal / imaginary environs? If so, then how might I use it? How might it be used by other people?

However, its implications also extend beyond place writing, through epistemology to psychology to disability studies and mental health practice. Can we find places and spaces that we weren’t previously aware of to occupy? Can we slip between the gaps in our own existence and discover the unknown?

the interior landscape to have equal epistemological value as exterior place, becasue, as an essay on the Manchester Centre for Place Writing states,

“…to think and to write about place is to think and to write about
emplacement and displacement, placedness and placelessness, material
and digital environments…characterised by an attentiveness to the textural
particularities of specific sites: an attentiveness that is often generated
through the embodied experience of walking-through-place. By extension,
place writing invites readers to find ways of (re)connecting with the material
landscape.” (Cooper & Lichtenstein, 2020)

“[W]alking-through-place” (Cooper & Lichtenstein, 2020) can be done physically, digitally, or though research, ekphrasis or imagination. Thinking this way has helped legitimise my placewriting approaches and helped me to believe that these varied approaches I use in my own work are equally valid.

xiii

Can the immensity of place be held within any specific genre? Is poetry, prose, art or the essay enough? Can the infinity of place be held in fragments and their “manipulat[ion of]its space [its place] on the page” (Carson, p.xxi, (5^th ed.) 2014)? Is hybrid writing and the lyric essay the way forward for me? I don’t know. What I do know, is as soon as I try to limit myself to one particular style or way of thinking, I instantly rebel. Hybrid writing has become a place of existence for myself — an important, necessary place. A place in which my autistic, creative and academic selves can establish, jointly and productively occupy, and mutually nourish.

Different ways of interpreting contextual material, and different ways of approaching poetry, place and lyric essay provide and discover access routes into my writing. What may seem indecipherable at first, is exciting and new. It’s up to the poet

“…‘to utter, to explain, to translate’(Zimmermann, 2017)…” and to rebuild, creatively and hermeneutically, “… the art of understanding and of making oneself understood (Zimmermann. 2017).”

I am very much enjoying this thinking out loud, and even in a small way, it is lending my work legitimacy, if only to myself (and that is a really important thing).

xiv

I have a favourite place name and it just happens to be part of my beloved North East.
I had to wait for twenty years to find a place I felt welcomed me, roughed me up a little (in a nice way), thrilled me, scared me, offered endless varieties of terrain, histories and sources of inspiration. The place names around here are so interesting. They remind me of a recipe for a charm, so I wrote them into one. Here are a few of them—

Do not       Pity Me,
for I shall charm myself fleet as the       Slit Foot.
At dawn, throw a        Two Ball Lonnen.
To ward off a       Killhope,
dance under the moon while       Fanny Barks,
collect five tears from the eye of the        Wetwang,
then skip three times round        Stony Heap.
Always obey the        Maiden Law
while gathering moss from the        Wallish Walls.
Unthank        the one that brings you yellow blooms.                 

The North East place name I love the most is
                                                                                    No Place.
Where do you live?              No Place.
What’s your address?            No Place.
Where shall I meet you?          No place.

It's like the double negative of places. The place that is and isn’t a place.
I get disappointed if I see it on a map, as if its secret code is somehow broken.
I get excited if I see it on a map, for how can No Place exist? One day, I dearly hope to live there, then my address will be No Place, for there is No Place I have ever truly, so far, belonged.

Sources

Berry, Francis. Ghosts of Greenland. Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1966.
Carson, Anne. If Not, Winter (Fragmens of Sappho). Virago, 5^th edition, 2014.
Cooper, David & Lichtenstein, Rachel. What is Place Writing? Manchester University, June, 2020. https://www.mmu.ac.uk/media/mmuacuk/content/documents/english/What-is-Place- Writing-June-2020.pdf
Jamie, Kathleen. A Lone Enraptured Male. London Review of Books Volume 30, No. 5, 6^th March, 2008. https://www.scribd.com/document/454197098/Kathleen-Jamie-A-Lone-Enraptured-Male-The-Cult-of-the-Wild-LRB-6-March-2008.
Kunitz, Stanley. 1976. Foreword. In: Gathering the Tribes Carolyn Forché Yale University Press, 1976, xi-xv.
Lichtenstein, Rachel. Contemporary British Place Writing: Origins, Definitions, New directions. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Published Work, 2019.
Mackay Brown, George. The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, edited by Archie Bevan & Brian Murray. John Murray, 2005.
Peake, Mervyn. Edition: 1693831953. Gormenghast Trilogy. Vintage Publishing, 1999.
Power, Phoebe. Book of Days. Carcanet, 2022.
Procter, Eddie. Deep topography practice – landscape walks as PhD fieldwork. Landscapism, 10th February, 2017. https://landscapism.blogspot.com/2017/02/deep-topography-practice-landscape.html#:~:text= Self%20has%20described%20deep%20 topography,magnitude%20of%20response%20to%20landscape.
Shaw, Clare. Flood. Bloodaxe, 2018.
The Poetry Society. The Places of Poetry. https://poetrysociety.org.uk/projects/the-places-of poetry /#:~:text= Places %20of%20Poetry% 20helped%20us, on%20local%20and%20national%20identities.
Tréhin, Giles. Urville. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006.
Zimmerman, Jens. 9 facts about hermeneutics. OUPblog, 23^rd June, 2017. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160601084649.htm


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