Abstract

This paper contributes to the debate about the creative (re)turn to geography through the lens of poetry. In considering the potentialities and limitations of geopoetics, I explore three issues in particular: evaluation of the poetic creative moment; poetry as a means of expressing an embodied, affective geopolitics; and the limitations involved in this particular creative move as a means of empathetic, passionate storytelling. The paper highlights the ambivalences and complexities of using poetry as a creative literary form of geographical world‐writing.

Highlights

  • Geographers have been researching geographies of creativity and employing creative methodologies in various guises for some time, as the geography discipline has an enduring engagement with the humanities/art world, suggesting a creativeturn rather than a creative turn (Hawkins 2012; Tolia-Kelly 2012)

  • The first relates to geographies of creativity while the latter refers to the creativity of geography

  • There has been a privileging of scriptural and visual multifaceted creative forms over the aural and oral (Pinkerton and Dodds 2009), more recent work has concerned the embodied performances/participation involved in multi-sensory encounters with creative works

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Summary

On poetry

Geographical work on poetry is a relatively narrow field, poetry has been employed in various different ways in geography. If meaning is created at the point of contact between the audience and creator of the poem, if poetry provokes, if it causes thought-change, ‘the validity of a poem lies in its ability to resonate in the reader, to communicate emotional truths in a language that is fresh and engaging’ (Sherry and Schouten 2002, 231) This raises challenges for reviewers of geopoetic works about how legitimacy might be appraised (for example, though affective resonance or through the transference of meaning), how aesthetic worth might be evaluated (for example, through the creative act of making that can be experienced and felt or through the explanatory potential of an aesthetic work) and by whom (for example, by the geopoet, editor, reviewer, reader, audience, ‘subject’ of the poem). Poetry may hold particular purchase in ‘knitting together’ the passionate and the political, as discussed below

Affecting geopolitics through the embodied poetic encounter
Conclusions
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