User:Geopoetry

Geopoetry / dʒɪə:(ʊ)’pəʊɪtri / noun. E21. [f. geo(graphy) + poetry.] Poetics. A theory and practice that locates poetry in the place and performance of the text. For the geopoet, the text is only the score for the performance, the performance the precipitate of the event, and the event a collective realisation specific to the time, place and makers of its happening. The point of a geopoetry reading is not to use sites as background, illustration, context or stage to the texts, but to use the texts to articulate these places, the passage between them, and the journey they compose. This journey, from one place to the other, is as much a component of a geopoetry reading as the texts themselves. The footsteps of the geopoetry walker are like syllables in the words of the poem, articulating – like the click of the tongue / in the mouth of the speaker – the space of the city they cover. The poetry of the reading is not in the text but in the act of reading itself. We want to do to space what poetry does to words.

The distinction between space and place describes something particular to the contemporary city. Space is always and everywhere the same, without inherent qualities or qualitative distinctions. Space is a commodity, with dimensions that can be measured, valued and exchanged. This has transformed our relationship to the city into one that is quantifiable, like the cost of office space per square foot. Place, by contrast, is specific and relational, with a social history and qualities produced and reproduced by the collective actions of its inhabitants. Place always has a temporal dimension within which we engage with the physical city, generating a sense of place. If space is an east-bound train on the Jubilee Line, and the time is 8.44am on Wednesday, the 2nd of April, 2014, then the place is North Greenwich tube station. Space is to place what language is to the spoken word: the abstract legislator of its concrete articulations.

As the urban environment is increasingly privatised, the space of the city has become increasingly prescribed, with the main, if not exclusive, purpose of making and spending money. The majority of city-dwellers live out their lives along a well-inscribed triangle between home, work and the repeatedly revisited sites of consumption, the distinctions between which have become increasingly blurred. But though the function of urban space is largely dictated by its design, the relationship between space and use is not as fixed as the architect, property-developer, land-owner or state would have us believe. We are still able – briefly and increasingly illegally – to appropriate these spaces, to ‘misuse’ them, and, for a moment, transgress their interdictions, opening the place they legislate to other readings. Geopoetry is one way of doing this.

http://thesorcerersapprenticeonline.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/no-54-geopoetry1.pdf