Abstract
This essay treats two innovative site-specific sequences produced by women in the first decade of the twenty first century. Both are explicitly interested in the relationship between geometry, writing (as material and political practice) and geo-cultural space, a relationship each finds inflected to some extent by gender emphases. Starting from the premise that any piece of writing is itself a place, the essay considers the self-conscious textualities of its primary texts—one concerned with Exmoor; the other with a sheep-farm in rural mid-Wales—in the light of their different, if similarly rural and relatively remote, contexts. Presley’s ‘Stone Settings’ explores the relationship between some of the quasi-geometrical Neolithic stone arrangements dotted across Exmoor, and the mediation of their apparently Euclidean sometimes barely visible forms in/as text. Watts’ work-in-progress Zeta Landscape mobilises in the ‘analytical’ or ‘projective’ (ie non-Euclidean) geometry of its title the complex weave of routine care-giving and accountancy charging the contemporary (Michel Foucault’s ‘distributive’) pastoral. Both sequences wryly suggest that poetic form can finally no more adequately figure place than the abstractions of mathematical discourse can utter the cultural ecology of any environment, however concrete-seeming. Aided by Jacques Derrida’s powerful essay ‘White Mythology’, the account comes to rest on the equally equivocal recognition of the in/effectuality of metaphor in any kind of address, critical or creative.
Highlights
This essay treats two innovative site-specific sequences produced by women in the first decade of the twenty first century
Both sequences wryly suggest that poetic form can no more adequately figure place than the abstractions of mathematical discourse can utter the cultural ecology of any environment, concrete-seeming
Chiasson and Rogers help to justify Paterson’s claim. The former point out, “the poetic innovators of the early thirteenth century that produced the sonnet, as well as other number-based forms like the sestina, the strambotto, and terza rima forms, were working within a mathematical renaissance of sorts”: The sonnet was invented in the court of Emperor Frederick II [whose courtiers] included
Summary
This essay treats two innovative site-specific sequences produced by women in the first decade of the twenty first century. The former point out, “the poetic innovators of the early thirteenth century that produced the sonnet, as well as other number-based forms like the sestina, the strambotto, and terza rima forms, were working within a mathematical renaissance of sorts”: The sonnet was invented in the court of Emperor Frederick II [whose courtiers] included
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