the usefulness of placelessness
I went to hear Iain Sinclair’s talk at University College Falmouth today on the subject of place in literature. He covered a range of authors particularly interested in locality, including Herman Melville, Charles Olson, James Joyce, Ed Dorn, and T.S. Eliot, and anchored his talk around the construction of the new 2012 Olympic site in Greenwich.
The talk had a sort of wandering structure, moving seamlessly and naturally through ideas with total fluidity and clarity, which was a sort of perfect accompaniment to his speaking about the beauty of wandering aimlessly in wildness (or wilderness) — albeit as something now lost beneath the more popular 21st-century pastime of roaming through shopping malls under police camera surveillance. (He also talked about the prison wandering of Adolf Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, one of whose projects during his 20 years’ imprisonment was to walk the distance from Berlin to Heidelberg in carefully measured circles around the prison yard.)
Sinclair mentioned once asking the poet Ed Dorn, whom he had interviewed (and who was apparently very taken with the quality of the light in the West Country), whether or not he thought that poetry was redundant. Of course it is, said Dorn, and what’s wrong with that?
There were also frequent references made to Charles Olson’s Maximus poems as a poetic attempt to inhabit, to observe, and to record the ‘economics’, the locality, and the history of a particular place. > I’ve been reading Olson of late, particularly the essays ‘Proprioception’ and ‘Projective Verse’ (partly because I started using the typewriter last summer and am fascinated by the idea of breath, syllable and line operating like a kind of musical score transcribed by the movement of the body). And whilst listening to Sinclair I started thinking about what Olson says at the beginning of PV, which is that verse has to be ‘of use’, and whether or not this idea of usefulness finds its methodology in a literary fidelity to the particularities of place. As if the qualification of literature as relic, archive, or artefact were what made it useful.
Sinclair also talked about how the Olympic site was referred to by its backers as having previously been ‘nothing but a wasteland’, as if that somehow made it okay that they had uprooted this historical site, disrupted settled reserves of toxic heavy metals and polluted the surrounding river waters, forced residents out, etc. But yes, said Sinclair, it had indeed been a wasteland: of wanderings, surprises, odd jobs, odd merchants, and beautiful walks: a wasteland in the sense of its not being yet another private space turned public, in the sense of its being unpredictable, and particular, and the product of a specific history: and that it was better that way.
In losing the wasteland, cultural specificity is lost, uniqueness is lost, individuality and particularity are lost. Meanwhile, the literature of place (which for Olson is also the literature of use), we have the constant archiving of this individuality as it disappears, a kind of salvage project that exists to remind us where we come from. And whilst imagining and possibility perform their toxic and CCTV-recorded swan song on the pages of the Guardian and in the expanses of Westfield, literature attends to place and specificity in a bid to ensure that they are not forgotten. It ‘does its duty’, so to speak.
And I am wondering where the role of the poet goes in all of this, if the poet is not attentive to place or record, and whether this is why poetry is so frequently perceived as redundant. What is the role of the poet, the imaginator, the captain of the redundant craft? The one who wants to be absolutely modern, to stomp all over culture, to live in imaginary futures and pasts rather than mourn the real ones?
Is art only useful if it is descriptive, archival, or tied somehow to an attempt to witness (or create) historical truth? Is there a usefulness of placelessness/fantasy/imagination? (Briefly thinking of Benjamin’s Angel of History in a flashing image of art as a future that never comes.) Too many questions, probably. But one more.
I wonder also whether this is a crucial means of differentiating between two very distinctive styles in current British poetry: one that always seeks the imagined reality, the poem written through the methodology of creating a future / and the other that prefers to work with -what is already there-, as a means of ensuring that it doesn’t disappear. I mean, because if those styles exist, we must need both of them.
4 notes /
