Geography
and Poetry and the Geographer as Poet
Michael
Ratcliffe
GeoPoetics: The Poetry of Place
Towson
University
October
10, 2014
I am pleased to
participate in this gathering, bringing together two of my passions. When Alan asked if I’d be willing to talk
about my experience as a geographer and a poet, I gladly accepted. And, the focus of this gathering—the poetry
of place—resonates with me since one of my responsibilities at the Census
Bureau is to define places so that we can provide meaningful data for
communities. My colleagues and I spend a
fair amount of time thinking about how people perceive and understand “place.”
The word “geography”
has its roots in the Greek words for “earth” and “writing” or “description.” Geography, in very broad terms, concerns
itself with the study of all there is on earth.
It is a subject that does not limit itself to specific components of the
physical landscape or portions of the human experience. The same can be said for poetry.
Geographers are
observers. We observe people, the
landscape, interactions between people and between various phenomena across
space. We are interested in
distributions and variations. Why is one place different from another? Why do different cultures utilize similar
landscapes in different ways? How do
people’s life courses play out across space and the places in their lives? We observe, question, describe, analyze, and
try to explain.
My academic
background is primarily in cultural and historical geography. I studied with British geographers, both in
the U.S. and in Britain, who were taught to “read the landscape.” These professors of mine came out of a
geographic tradition that saw landscapes as reflections of the personalities of
cultures that inhabited them, and the tableau on which myriad historical and
cultural possibilities were painted. Reading
and describing the landscape, distributions of phenomena, and the connections
between peoples and places across space and time was central to their approach
to geography. They talked and wrote
about the “personality” and “identity” of places and regions. Accurate, clear, well-written description was
as important as a map. Indeed, maps were
often adjuncts to the text. This may
seem odd for those who associate geography with maps, but there are quite a few
of us for whom a thousand well-crafted words are better than a picture.
To those of us
trained in this tradition, the landscape is a palimpsest. For historical geographers, Faulkner’s words
are apt: “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” It’s all around us, if you know what to look
for. The old wooden fence posts with
strands of wire amid regrowth in a suburban neighborhood mark the edge of an
old farm field. The small cemetery in my
North Laurel neighborhood that is the last vestige of the rural Black community
that was once there. And, the nearby
Sterling Drive, which leads to office buildings located on land that was once
the African-American poet Sterling Brown’s family farm, and the setting for his
poem, “After Winter.” Each of these
could become the launching point for a study of a place, how the landscape has
changed, and what that change might mean to us.
And, each could provide a prompt for a poem.
The discipline of geography
has become more technical, more quantitative, and more scientific over the
years. That’s good. But, in the process, I think we run the risk
of losing the more artistic and literary side of the discipline—the aspect of
geography that really connects with us at an emotional level, where we realize
that everything cannot be reduced to pixels in an image, rasters and vectors in
a geographic information system, or expressed as mere phenomena to be
measured. This is where geography and
poetry can connect in ways that help us express more deeply the nature of a
particular place.
My first published
poem was about Jessup, located south of Baltimore, straddling the Anne Arundel
and Howard County boundary, and home to prisons, industrial parks, warehouses, a
truck stop, cheap motels, and other uses as well as an interesting mix of
people. It’s a microcosm of the kinds of
changes that have occurred in urban and suburban landscapes over the past 50
years—businesses and industries that have moved out of the city, uses that are
relegated to older, less desirable parts of the suburbs, and older communities
that have been subsumed by more recent development. It stands in stark contrast to our usual
perceptions of the suburbs. My original
intention was to write an essay for an urban geography newsletter, but an objective
and detached style of writing just didn’t seem to work when trying to describe
Jessup. I wanted to present images of
Jessup and, while conveying the geographic processes that have shaped the place,
not get bogged down in facts and data.
Nor did I necessarily want to present all facets of Jessup. I wanted to focus on the characteristics that
come immediately to mind and that inform our perceptions of and reactions to
the place. The poem apparently worked;
it was published in You Are Here: the Journal of Creative Geography in
2006. (It was republished on the
sociology/photojournal blog “Social Shutter” in November 2012; see http://socialshutter.blogspot.com/2012/11/jessup.html.)
While most of my
poems are not as place-specific as “Jessup,” a sense of place informs many of them. One of my favorite locations to write is sitting
on the pier at my in-laws’ cottage on the Potomac River in the Northern Neck of
Virginia. For me, it’s hard to ignore the setting: the river, eagles and egrets flying past,
watermen checking crabpots. My poem
“Thoughts While Sitting Along the Lower Potomac” draws upon the personality of
that landscape in comparison to the seat of political power upriver in
Washington and uses the juxtaposition of these two places to also express
thoughts rooted in Taoist philosophy.
We’re here today to
explore the connection between geography and poetry. Two seemingly different disciplines, but each
embodying our desire to observe, describe, depict, and express. When the two come together, they have the
power to take us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our connections to
the world around us. This forum is
rooted in the combination of geography and poetry to enrich our sense of place.
What better place to do this than the Baltimore area, and who better than the
four Baltimore poets with us today to help us make those connections.
