Geopoetics: Bodies and Landscapes

‘Geopoetics’ encompasses a range of creative approaches to geography, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, geophilosophy, as well as visual and performance arts. Eric Magrane explains that a geopoetic approach focuses on “embodied engagements with place”, and demonstrates awareness of “cultural constructions of […] place, space, landscape”, practicing “a relational perspective to human–environment interactions [my italics].”[1]

In preparation for writing my MA dissertation, I looked for examples of geopoetic writing that expressed embodied empathy with landscapes. Interestingly, although perhaps not surprisingly, my research repeatedly led me to works by disabled and chronically ill writers.

In her poetry collection, ‘The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk’, Kate Davis explores the geography of south Cumbria, alongside her experiences of disability. Through finding synchronicities between local geology and her own body, Davis creates intriguing juxtapositions and fresh poetic frames for both things.

For example, in ‘Boulder Drift’, Davis compares two different names given to glacial rocks, and relates the qualities inferred in each name to different states of her body:

The men who mined here called it Pinel….
…the hint of fixing in place,
pinned on display like an insect.
She would have preferred the one
geologists gave it – Boulder Drift.
To imagine those stones suspended,
all weight gone, their pock-marked bodies
lifted and held like dancers.[2]

Through a geopoetic exploration of language, Davis reshapes how we view both the landscape and her disabled body. Boulders and disabled bodies, though usually thought of as being heavy and pinned in place, instead become beautiful, drifting dancers.

Emily Hasler produces a similar effect of embodied geological empathy in her poetry collection, ‘Local Interest.’ Here Hasler explores the history and geography of the Stour river estuary, an area just north of the Naze and Hamford Water. The poem ‘At Cobbold Point’ in particular taps into an embodied sense of emplacement, describing Hasler’s experience of swimming near a breakwater constructed from “imported Norwegian rocks which pin the shore / in place.”[3] Hasler describes the breakwater “like a curved spine/my curved spine / breaking the water.” Through using recurring verbs that relate to both her own body and the movements of silt around the pinned shoreline – moving, accreting, eroding, thinking, coasting – Hasler builds a cycle of mirroring resonances that connect her intrinsically to her environment:

I am accreting thoughts… The coast, for the most part, is thinking… Coast is what I swim, what I think, moving in more than one direction.

These poetry collections helped me feel into how I might be able to articulate commonalities between my own body and local landscape - the eroding coast at Walton-on-the-Naze and the flooding of its adjoining backwaters, Hamford Water. 

In both the essays and poems of ‘Inundation’, I sought out verbs to describe shared experiences between me and the coast. At the end of the essay, ‘Erosion’, for example, I realise my own ‘verb-nature’ through reflecting on the ever-changing physical forms of the eroding cliff. The title of the poem ‘Nazing’ is itself a verbing of the landscape – my attempt to express the emotional and physiological effects that spending time at the Naze was having. By referring to my body as becoming more like the Naze – that it was nazing – I am conveying the healing effect of imagining my body becoming yielding like the cliffs, rather than hard with tension like the seawall.

Further inspired by Davis and Hasler, I also experimented with using historical and geological information to form poems. For example, Davis forms a poem from a geological quarter sheet from 1873, even naming the poem ‘Explanation of quarter sheet 91 N.W.’ In a similar vein, my poem ‘Tidal Refrains’ uses excerpts from Hilda Grieve’s The Great Tide: The Story of the 1953 Flood Disaster in Essex to collate a brief overview of the history of flooding on the Essex coastline, as well as peoples cyclical surprise at each flooding event.  With this poem, my aim was to highlight what geologist, Marcia Bjornerud refers to as our “temporal illiteracy”[4]: while reading Grieve’s account of Essex seawall construction, I was struck by the repetitious comments about the height of the flood tides; there seemed to be no significant ancestral or cultural knowledge about the flood-prone nature of the coastal regions, and rather than accepting the nature of these places, landowners simply put more effort into dominating them, building higher and stronger seawalls. As Bjornerud argues, “we accelerate into landscapes and ecosystems with no sense of their long-established traffic patterns, and then react with surprise and indignation when we face the penalties for ignoring natural laws.” 

Now, as we face our uncertain future in the Anthropocene, it is more important than ever to recognise, respect, and attune to environmental patterns. As writers and artists, taking a geopoetic approach seems a wonderful way of developing and promoting this awareness of the landscapes we shape, and are shaped by.

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My collection of essays and poems, Inundation is now available in paperback and ebook.

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[1] Eric Magrane, “Climate Geopoetics (the earth is a composted poem),” Dialogues in Human Geography 11, no. 1 (2021): 11, https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620908390

[2] Kate Davis, “Boulder Drift,” in The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk (London: Penned in the Margins, 2018), 51.

[3] Emily Hasler, “At Cobbold Point” in Local Interest (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023), 8.

[4]Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 7.