&Now 2019 Conference

This panel seeks to explore the effects of what cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove described as “the patterns and interactions of human culture, both material and non-material, in relation to the natural environment and the human organization of space” on new poetics. Inspired by the critical tradition of Raymond Williams, whose work explored the concepts of 'structure of feeling' and 'knowable community' as tethered to and determined in part by landscape, these poems deal with the embodied practices and dynamic processes emergent from a variety of locations, engaging with emotion, lyricism, politics, memory, and both exterior and interior identity production.

The panelists will each briefly present poems which function as personal markers of place in the context of both personal and political history, followed by discussion and Q&A. Eudora Welty writes that “Place, to the writer at work, is seen in a frame. Not an empty frame, a brimming one. Point of view is a sort of burning-glass, a product of personal experience and time; it is burnished with feelings and sensibilities, charged from moment to moment with the sun-points of imagination.” In keeping, the panel’s poetics themselves are representative of a variety of approaches to dealing with the influence of divergent geographies, from the physical to phenomenological and post-industrial to post-colonial. By presenting and discussing work that spans the poetic spectrum we seek to highlight and discuss points of convergence within the panel.