Abstract
This essay focuses on the theme of poetry and place – a project I have called Topopoetics. It introduces the idea of topopoetics drawing on the work of Aristotle, Heidegger and more recent philosophies of place, dwelling and poetics. The point is not to cover the familiar ground of ‘sense-of-place’ in poetry but rather to explore how the poem is a kind of place and the way in which poems create space and place through their very presence on the page, through the interactions of full space and blank space, stasis and flux, and inside and outside.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of topos, see Rapp 2010: 7.1.
- 2.
Aristotle Topics 163b28.32.
- 3.
Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party, a membership he later denounced. There is no doubt that these ideas of dwelling were easily incorporated into a Nazi ideology of proper authentic (Aryan) dwelling counterposed to an inauthentic (Jewish, gay, Romany) form of (non) dwelling. Following Malpas I do not believe that this necessarily means that his ideas are irrecoverably infected.
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Cresswell, T. (2017). Towards Topopoetics: Space, Place and the Poem. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_23
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