| Abstract |
Places are deeply specific, and often richly resonant for us in terms of memory, emotion, and association, yet we nevertheless frequently move through them insensible of their constitution and diversity, or the shaping influences they have upon our lives. As such, place affords a vital window into the creation and experience of poetry where the poet is herself attuned to the presence and effect of places; the challenge for the scholar is to articulate place's nature and role with respect that poetry. In "Des Espace Autres", Foucault argues that a radical reconstitution of space over the past three hundred and fifty years has desanctified space. According to Foucault, space has been reduced to specialized sites of action; one of these, the heterotopia, a kind of "enacted utopia", illuminates the study of poetic practice vis-avis place. Given Bachelard's assertion that poetry affords a change of being, poetry may be understood as a liminal space, or a heterotopia of crisis, into which poet and reader may enter by means of the poetic image's reverberations (Bachelard). "Even at the level of the isolated poetic image?the phenomenological reverberation can appear... . Here we are in the presence of a miniscule phenomenon of the shimmering consciousness". (Bachelard xxiii) The poet enters the space of the poem this crisis heterotopia in order to "place" herself in the implaced world of the poem. Via the "sacred", liminal space of the poem, she forges an imaginative engagement with place: "a process", observes Jerome Rothenberg writing of poetics, "of cognition...[articulating] our sense of being in the world, however changeful, dangerous, or slippery". (Rothenberg 6, added emphasis) This paper explores that slippery, changeful sense of being in the world for John Kinsella, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Christopher Dewdney, and Eavan Boland, and its shaping influence on their |
