Poetics of Place - Episode 1

Follow along with my winter Downtown Writers' Center workshop

Over the next several weeks I have the pleasure and responsibility of facilitating an 8-part iteration of my workshop, Poetics of Place. The workshop takes place online each Thursday until the end of March, hosted by one of two YMCA-based writing centers in the United States: Syracuse, New York’s Downtown Writers’ Center.

Each week over the course of this workshop I’ll take to Substack to share topics we discussed, examples we studied, as well as my own personal thoughts. For me, this kind of reflection in public is not just a chance to widen the space of the workshop to a broader audience, but moreover to openly engage in a generous auto-criticism that will challenge and evolve my practice. Together, we’ll bring the work out of the shop and take it for a walk in the worlds in which its contents and participants interface.

But let’s rewind for a moment. What’s poetics of place in the first place, and why as a writer based in Mexico City and Toronto am I offering this workshop with DWC in Syracuse?

The answers as pretty simple : 1) Poetics of Place is a workshop that engages, questions, and plays with the idea and form of the map; 2) Syracuse, NY is my hometown — where I learned a respect for the natural world. You can learn more about the history of Poetics of Place, and the related publication COUNTER-MAP, on my website here, and more about Syracuse (and specifically Onondaga Lake) here on my Substack.

Now let’s dig into the first session. . . .

23 January 2025 - Session 1 : Indigenous Land

First workshop sessions are always a special moment — since I started facilitating experimental co-learning spaces in 2015, I’ve learned how much the first moments of encounter between new learners sets the tone for what’s to follow. Building a solid foundation of trust is even more important for this iteration of Poetics of Place because, at 8-weeks long with a total of 16 hours, this is the longest workshop I’ve facilitated (and, to be honest, it feels like a course more than a workshop in the depth and breadth of it all).

Last Thursday I met the workshop’s 8 participants, and almost all of them have a connect to Syracuse and Central New York in some way. Even though we’re convening this workshop online (and I’m facilitating from my home in Ciudad de México), it’s important to me that we situate each one of our selves, and the group as a whole, in a specific geographical context. After all, this is a workshop about place.

For this reason, we focus the first session on Indigenous Land, and particularly the context of Syracuse, NY as the current and traditional capital of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (aka Iroquois Confederacy aka Six Nations). As someone who grew up in Syracuse, I was fortunate to learn about the Haudenosaunee, and specifically the Onondaga Nation, from a young age. Their creation story of Turtle Island, the Great Law of Peace, Thanksgiving Address, and matriarchal representative government all factored into my childhood education — not for the benevolence of settler Education, but for centuries of resistance and advocacy on behalf of the Haudenosaunee.

What I didn’t learn until later in life were the specific wampum covenants — agreements made between Indigenous nations and settlers and codified in belts made of quahog clam shells — that still apply to today: the Dish With One Spoon and Two Row wampums. The first, Dish With One Spoon, depicts a single dish in the centre of the belt and deals with equitably sharing natural resources between nations for present-day harmony and future posterity. The second, Two Row wampum, depicts parallel purple and white bands — each representing Indigenous and settler societies and living in peace side-by-side.

In our fist session of Poetics of Place, we talked about the two wampum agreements and what they mean for us today as people connected to the land of the Onondaga and Haudenosaunee. Participants mentioned how far we have strayed as settled societies the spirit of these agreements — that industries pollute waterways, settler nations have taken Indigenous territory by force, and many of us still don’t know what it means to live in right relation together were all examples that participants offered.

It’s important to me to start off this 8-week workshop reckoning with this history we’re living as a foundation on which to continue building our poetics of place. It’s not a land acknowledgement; it’s a land unsettling. Our counter- (or anti-narrative) about what it means to be in this territory and on this continent unsettles our understanding and our relationalities into somethings more amenable to material decolonization.

Session number two is tomorrow and the theme is Poetics of Place — a conceptual practice I’ve been building since 2022 that seeks alternative understandings of the environment and their representations. We’ll ask, what are maps, what do they do, and how? As throughout this workshop, we’ll work with an eclectic group of thinkers to respond to these questions: Jorge Luis Borges (On Exactitude in Science), Mackenzie Wark (Dispositions), John Pickles (A History of Spaces), and Alfred Korzybski (A NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEM AND ITS NECESSITY FOR RIGOUR IN MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS*). The idea of exploring these ideas tomorrow in workshop excites me more than you know. . .

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Besides facilitating Poetics of Place, these days I’m busy working on a chapbook manuscript about Edges, polishing up an essay on labyrinths, and re-cutting my short poetry film for an exhibition. More info to come! This is going to be a busy winter, spring, summer, and autumn, and I’m really grateful to be able to share it with you.

Warmth,

Darian