Spatial Engagement with Poetry pp 175-176 | Cite as
Coda: d’autres mappemondes
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Abstract
The tripartite nature of our spatial engagement with poetry and poetics demonstrates the important manner in which geo-, eco-, topographical, or spatial criticism of poetry can operate on an ontological level, not totally divorced from the thematic aspects of these fields of study, but certainly engaging concerns from a much wider field. As the exhortation made over a decade ago by Michel Serres, which has resonated throughout this book and provides the subtitle to this short coda, makes clear, we must continue to explore and map the ever-expanding possibilities of the universe in which we live, and, thence, the multiple spatial potentialities of our thought and our making must provoke analysis, always. The first part of this book has concentrated on a few exempla from an inexhaustible number of global poetic precedents for spatial thinking in Western poetry today. The second part of the book necessarily narrowed its focus to demonstrate some of the various analytic possibilities expounded in the first part through a close concentration on the work of four very different contemporary British poets. As I hope I have made clear throughout, the ramifications of a spatially engaged reading of the poem on its own terms is not only applicable to numerous poetries from any number of poets and ages, but is also a critical necessity in order to preserve the integrity and allow for the poetic power of, in intimate relation to each other and no particular order, the reader, the author, and the text itself.
Keywords
Intimate Relation Important Manner Ontological Level Spatial Engagement Short CodaNotes
- 1.McCaffery, Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001): 206.Google Scholar