Poetics of Place - Episode 3
Here is my third post reflecting on the 8-part experimental writing workshop, Poetics of Place. I will try to make this post briefer than the last — I’m ill with a bad cold or mild flu and I hope to fall asleep soon.
Third in the series of workshops, we focused on “site-writing” — the deceptively simple idea that we can write places, rather than just write about them. Site-writing comes from the architecture critic and University College London professor, Jane Rendell, whose work I first came across in the anthology Engaged Urbanism: Cities & Methodologies (edited by Ben Campkin & Ger Duijzings) and has influenced by work ever since.
In last week’s two-hour session, participants had time to share their experiences reading site-writing projects archived by Rendell on the website: https://site-writing.co.uk/projects/. Projects we discussed with some depth include:
Learn to Read Differently, Simon Morris (2018)
One wound. Two wounds. The body as site for writing, Catalina Mejía Moreno (2010)
A Non-Aligned Narrative in and Around KSEVT, Vid Žnidaršič (2019)
Skye Edge, Charlotte A Morgan (2021)
Spaces of Grief, Max Olof Carlsson Wisotsky (2018)
From these conversations, a few themes arose that caught my attention: the difficulty of language, the making and un-making of maps, the many bodies of site-writing. I’ll reflect on each theme here in a few words.
Difficulty of Language
Language is hard. We often forget this, using it every day for mundane and complex tasks alike. We forget the intricacies of grammar and syntax, take for granted our choice of words when we use frequently so few of the many. Some participants voiced their frustration with this difficulty — words in a language we thought we knew now start to seem less familiar than we once thought. Jargon — a word that carries the weight of expertise — is something that we often are told to avoid in our own writing and criticize when we find it in others’.
I have a different read on jargon. I find that every writer uses their own specialized vocabulary, whether they’re noting the weather or discussing thermodynamics. As writers, we have a special agreement with our intended reader to give them what they expect (a poet writes poems, while a chef writes recipes, for example). Yet, when a writer pushes past this agreement and surprises the reader with something new and unexpected, they are often celebrated. On the flip side, a reader comes to the text not knowing fully what to expect. In this liminal zone, the reader reaches out to meet the writer halfway, or puts the book down. It’s within the reader-writer relationship where specialized vocabularies sink or swim.
The difficulty of language, especially jargon, also reminded me of a chapter in Paulo Freire’s Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach, in which the acclaimed pedagog speaks to the serious nature of reading and writing. In it, he points out how tradespeople are expected to come equipped with tools — the mechanic’s wrenches, the carpenter’s saw, the potter’s wheel — except when it comes to writers (and readers). Freire ties this back to the de-valorization of education and how, once we pass its tests of general fluency, we are expected to make do. Dictionaries and thesauruses, he says, are just as much tools of the master as the novice.
I want to continue thinking of the difficulty of language in this workshop. I love that there is space to express frustration and confusion. At the same time, I want to make room for us to sit with the discomfort of not always knowing, and where that might lead us. Or, as one participant Clo put it, dealing with “the anti-gravity of words that refuse to be taken seriously.”
Making and Un-Making of Maps
One of the first ideas that came up in last week’s workshop arose from Simon Morris’s Learn to Read Differently, in which the artist describes his creative process as un-making the already made and re-doing the already done in order to make something not quite new but somehow different. The anti-authentic art movement, to which I would say Morris belongs, includes his contemporaries like Kenneth Goldsmith while tracing its way back to Marcel Duchamp and his infamous Fountain. While I have my personal qualms with this movement, I also value the way it pushes me to question the ideas of truth, honesty, and originality. In a modern world, what makes one thing more true than another, other than I say it is so? What makes a copy worth less than the original? How honest am I in writing this?
One participant, Suzy, made the cunning observation that by recasting original art pieces through practices of destruction and reconstruction, new meaning was achieved. By starting with the idea that maps are already un-made — that they are already false, dishonest, and unoriginal — where does that leave us? As writers, we can re-make places through site-writing, not through the single voice of the map, but through the polyvocal resonances of counter-maps.
Many Bodies
This last theme came up around our discussion of One wound. Two wounds. The body as site for writing, Catalina Mejía Moreno (2010): an artists’ book using the idiom of the personal diary to trace the edges between the author’s body and Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth installation at the Tate Modern. Mejía Moreno mapped the crack in the Turbine Hall’s floor, which Salcedo installed as a representation of the experience of borders, onto the scar on her chest resulting from treatment for a life-altering health condition. We ended our conversations in this session on the idea that, through multi-media writing like this, we can tie together the human body, the building’s body, and the social body — levels of corporeality usually kept apart. As one participant, Pete, pointed out, this is where healing for all three bodies may begin as one.
This week’s session no. 4 is on Pauline Oliveros’s practice, Deep Listening. Like with site-writing, I’m worried that the idea is deceivingly simple, and that in practice we might get a bit lost. As a person who feeds off the abstract, I also want to balance the tangible needs of my participants. This week, I’ll prioritize time for in-class exercises straight from Oliveros’s book, in hopes that the lofty ideas in Poetics of Place begin tethering more to the ground.