Witnessing places of meaning through poetic call and response

Abstract

This paper presents part of a poetic ‘call and response’ exchange between two poets who have never met. It shares the contemplative witnessing and ‘responding’ of an Australian poet to the poetic ‘calls’ of an Indian poet. Whilst the focus for the project was exploring the physical geography of place, the style of the Indian poet’s calling poems – and indeed the Australian poet’s responding poems – were entangled with ideas encompassing much more than geography. Dreams, desires, despair, loss, and hope wove around, and in ‘place’ of, geographical descriptions. The inquiry process was imperfect, and traversing time differences, language, culture, ways of understanding, and technology to share lived lives was no easy task. Yet, aesthetic methods invited socially and ethically engaged scholarship and contemplation. This paper offers glimpses of how two women poets produced poetic data to explore and witness lives and see and be moved by the other.