Mapping 2: The Poem of Space

Abstract

Alongside the textual spacings of the avant-garde poets and deconstructive literary critics, a renewed awareness of topographical sensation, the relationship between poesis and our perception and articulation of the world, is another factor that contributes to an analysis of the poem under the sign of Foucault’s époque de l’espace. Ian Davidson notes that, due to our “increasingly spatialized world,” “notions of place” and “notions of poetry,” too, will have to change.¹ As we have seen Denise Riley note, in Chapter 2, it is all too easy to sink into use of metaphors of space rather than think critically about it. Yet it is impossible, and would be foolhardy, to eschew space entirely. Ideas of space have long been tied up with human thinking, providing passage into flights of abstract thought and imaginative realms, even the possibility of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “onto-typo-logy.” Stephen Levinson sums up the spatial tendency of human thought well:

Human beings think spatially. Not exclusively, but it is no doubt one of the fundamental tricks of human cognition. Casting nonspatial problems into spatial thinking gives us literacy, diagrams, mandala, dream-time landscapes, measures of close and distant relatives and of high and low social groups, and much much more. Just as maps stand in abstract spatial relation to real spatial terrain, so spatial relations can give us symbolic “maps” to other domains [… in] the extended symbolic world that human beings inhabit.²