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Post-Festival Discussion

This is an opportunity to join in discussion about the Festival and how its innovative work can be continued. In particular, one of the key issues is how we can develop our understanding of geopoetics and apply it in our daily lives and creative work.

The poet and fiction writer Elizabeth Rimmer took part in the Festival and has opened a discussion on her blog Burned Thumb at  http://networkedblogs.com/p7746391?ref=mf and on Facebook.

Tuesday 21 July 2009, Neo-geo-poetics

Although the thing I was at last week was called the Atlantic Islands Festival, it was also the summer school for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, and many of the speakers talked about the impact of geopoetics, and in particular the work of Kenneth White on their particular discipline and artistic practice.

We struggled, though, to find a workable and concise definition of what we meant by geopoetics. Norman Bissell provided an overview at the start of the school, which may be rather brutally summarised as
1. a world view that is critical of western philosophy and civilisation in particular the division between mind and body and the isolation of the human from nature.
2. it has a holistic view of the universe - a poetics which places the planet earth at the centre of experience.
3. it is influenced by people Kenneth White defines as 'intellectual nomads'
4. it has a new sense of world combining the responses of the intelligence and the senses, using techniques such as meditation or tai chi which 'decondition' the mind to produce a poetics which is the expression of this interaction, in language but also in all forms of artistic expression. It encourages collaboration and multi-media work.
5.it involves networking with all forms of intellectual and scientific knowledge and activity.

There are some extraordinarily sweeping statements here, and if we go into it, we can find plenty of ignorance, prejudice and some rather neat moving of the goal-posts which leave Kenneth White in the privileged position of defining the game and imposing his own rule. However. it is certainly the case that modern civilisation consists of a lot of over-specialised and over-organised (but seriously under-educated) individuals who are capable of living a lifetime in ignorance of what the weather is like or where their food is coming from. We know we are not as aware of the seasons or the state of the moon and tides as our parents were. Many of us can't identify common wild-flowers, or lay a fire or set a budget without a calculator. Scientists do not know history. Linguists don't understand physics. In short we no longer have our feet on the ground. We don't know who we are or what we really want or what is likely to happen to us.

Geopoetics has a counter to this, and the summer school was an excellent demonstration. We had, among other things, film, poetry, art, sculpture, botany, geology, history, and tai chi. But the most common comment, which came over and over again, was, "It leaves so much out."

Mostly this came from women. Geopoetics is overwhelmingly a guys' game, and it's not because the guys are mean and won't let us play. On the contrary, the guys are not mean at all. But women do not get the 'intellectual nomad' thing. It's not just that society makes it hard for women to be nomads ( a real issue, though, nonetheless), we just don't seem, by and large, to think like that. It's not that we can't stop worrying about the state of the kitchen and has someone remembered to feed the cat, it is simply that if you have ever undertaken those responsibilities, you don't see the world in quite the same way. It's not even the difference between Ents and Ent-wives (remember Tolkien saying the Ent-wives had gardens so that things would grow where they set them?). Even Tolkien's Ents, though freer and more nomadic than the Ent-wives, were shepherds and took care of the forests. I, for one, found it hard to believe in the value of a world-view that does not lead to involvement and action.
This is where we get to the next generation of geopoetical thinking, and I'll get to it tomorrow.

Norman Bissell writes:

Thanks for starting this post-Festival discussion about geopoetics and what it means for us. I can't see how terms like 'ignorance' and 'prejudice' can possibly be applied to Kenneth White or how he can 'impose his own rule' on free thinkers like us - even if he wanted to. Yes, geopoetics is about grounding ourselves in the world but I can't for the life of me see how this is a male preserve. In fact in my experience women are already more of the way there than most men.

Intellectual nomads don't necessarily leave home and roam the earth, except in their minds, and many women read more widely than men and certainly care about the future of the planet. Involvement and action needn't mean immersing oneself in political activity but can be taking the long road of reaching out to other like-minded individuals, sharing ideas and creative expression, and forming networks that in the long run can make for a more fundamental change than involvement in day to day issues.
To be continued I hope.

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