Monthly Archives: July 2013

Poetics of Emplacement – Map3

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Arielle Greenberg

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

When I moved to a small town in rural Maine after a lifetime of living in big cities and suburbs, I struggled to imagine how I might shift my poetics to suit my new landscape and life.  Maine is blessed with a long and important lineage of place-based poets, but I myself have little expertise or passion, and thus little to contribute, to the many great poems about the sea, the woods, and the farm.  I live in town.

(I was about to say that here in Maine, I do enjoy spending more time outside by choice, interacting with that thing we call “nature,” than I did when I lived in New York City or Chicago…but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. In New York, I walked everywhere, and made decent use of Central Park.  In Chicago, I ran along Lake Michigan several times a week.)

What seemed important to me, though, was to find my own role, my own voice, as a poet “of Maine,” and of this new life which I did in fact choose for reasons related very much to place: access to local food, to clean air, to small communities, to small farmers.

The poetry I’ve ended up writing, almost exclusively, since moving to Maine, is not what I expected to be writing, but it’s a direct response to this notion that I am here, and no longer in a city, living a more “wholesome” life.  The poems, a series, are engaged in the notion of the pastoral—and in ferreting out both the wholesome and the earthy “dirtiness” of that tradition.  These “country” poems are the most sexually explicit, culturally taboo, and provocative things I’ve probably ever written, and in each one, I am thinking about the very direct correlation, to my mind, between issues like clean air and water and issues like gender politics, BDSM, the human as (sexual) animal, and graphic language.

It seems to me this is writing on a  kind of border, yes?

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Arielle Greenberg is the author of several books, including My Kafka Century and, with Rachel Zucker, Home/Birth: A Poemic. She writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review and teaches out of her home in Maine and through the new low-res MFA program at Oregon State University-Cascades. At the moment, she is interested in all things “primal.”

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 2

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Emily Ronay Johnston, SRPR Managing Editor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

As Kirstin Hotelling Zona (SRPR Editor) writes, “A poetics of emplacement is interested in borders and thus borderlands: beings and ways of being that are often overlooked.” A poetics of emplacement looks—looks over, looks beyond knowing and into the generative realm of wonder. Knowing becomes a beginning, a starting point, not the destination. The destination, rather, is rupture. I am totally on board with not knowing. I mean, how cool is it to have permission to write my way into rupture rather than out of it, avoiding messy-ness at all costs?! When I need to light a fire under my intellect, to override that insatiable addiction to knowledge, I turn to Rumi, Jelaluddin Balkhi. His poetry emplaces me squarely in temporality, in permeability, calling us (human beings) to house the guests of our emotions, regardless of their actions in and through our beings, to “Welcome and entertain them all!/Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,/who violently sweep your house/empty of its furniture” (from “The Guest House”). We mustn’t stop at emotion, though. A poetics of emplacement beckons us to welcome the violence of emotionality, not to indulge in suffering, but quite the opposite: to love. To be sure, “The door there/is devastation.//Birds make great sky-circles/of their freedom./How do they learn it?//They fall, and falling,/they’re given wings” (from “On Children Running Through”). We might say that a poetics of emplacement is not only “interested in” that which is overlooked, it is also the road there, the looking beyond itself, the surrender to being “filled with you [love]./Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul” (from “We Three”).

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Emily Johnston's PicEmily is from Boston, San Francisco, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Central Illinois. Holding a Ph.D. in English Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry, her work emerges at the intersections of writing studies, social justice pedagogy, trauma theory, film theory, and narrativity. In particular, she researches and publishes on students’ literacy learning in relation to issues of sexualized trauma. She has taught courses in academic writing, public writing, creative writing, gender studies, literature and film, and English as a Second Language. Emily is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Writing Pedagogy at The University of Delaware, and Managing Editor of Spoon River Poetry Review (SRPR).