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It is no surprise then, that my academic career as a cultural geographer and my work as a poet have revolved around the understanding of place and mobility and the relation between them. So, one of the strangest things for me about our current predicament is the negative value that is being placed on mobility, whether it is the commute to work or the flight to another country. There are no contrails of planes in the sky. Not living on a main road, I rarely hear a car.<\/p>\n
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The other, perhaps more obvious, theme that runs through Plastiglomerate<\/em> is environmental ruination. Even before COVID-19 we were being urged to travel less. Travel is one of the main sources of green-house gas emissions globally, and in advanced economies it has recently become the leading source. The activism of Greta Thunberg has led to the advent of \u201cflygskam\u201d or \u201cflight shame\u201d \u2013 shame that has been felt intensively enough that the flight company SAS has had to reduce the number of flights thanks to lack of demand (before COVID-19).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Like many people, I expect, I simultaneously want to reduce emissions and continue to fly. There is no reasonable way for people from Tokyo, for instance, to experience Edinburgh, for instance, without flying. The world will be immeasurably poorer if such journeys cease to take place.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Beyond that, there continues to be the link between the journey and literature.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Journeys are at the heart of literary culture as I understand it. Early poems were often epic journeys (think of the Odyssey <\/em>or Norse sagas or the Canterbury Tales<\/em>). The earliest novels in Europe were picaresque wanderings and confinements (think of Robinson Crusoe<\/em> or Don Quixote<\/em>). Wandering and wondering are connected. Flight shame and other movements are correct but also limited by the meaning-making function of travel in human life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even before we had heard of COVID-19 we were in the middle of an emergency \u2013 just a longer and slower one of global heating, species extinction, plastic and other pollution. All kinds of names have been coined for it, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, Plasticene \u2013 to name but a few. Actually, the pressing and seemingly more immediate emergency of COVID-19 is part of that longer-term emergency \u2013 caused by our inability to work well with what is often called \u201cnature\u201d. We struggle with time scales. COVID-19 presses in on us as something immediate. People are dying, people we know or people we pass on the streets. We might die. We can trace a seemingly simple path from a virus to our mortality. Of course, people (and other living things) were already dying, in floods, fires, droughts, other distant diseases, of starvation or poisoning \u2013 but they are over there<\/em> and the line of blame so much more complicated.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do we represent something like global heating \u2013 something that exists at a scale we cannot comprehend? One way is by reference to what is increasingly called \u201cthe science\u201d \u2013 as though science was ever singular. \u201cThe science\u201d gives us numbers and we become fixated on them. \u201cThe science\u201d is wheeled out daily during the current crisis. Daily death tolls, graphs showing flattened curves, the \u201cr\u201d number, unemployment statistics, declines in GDP, people using public transport. We have all become literate in statistics. Numbers seems to be certain. Numbers have authority. Numbers make some things equal other things (every death is simply a death). \u201cCounting humans, alive or dead,\u201d Jacqueline Rose writes, \u201cmeans you have entered a world of abstraction, the first sign that things have taken a desperate turn.\u201d[1]<\/a> Perhaps poetry is one response to all the numbers. But what kind of poetry?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n One way of describing the contents of Plastiglomerate<\/em> and my two earlier collections is as \u201cecopoetry\u201d. In her wonderful book, well then there now, <\/em>Juliana Spahr writes \u201cShortly after I moved to Hawai\u2019i I I began to loudly and hubristically proclaim whenever I could that nature poetry was immoral\u201d. Nature poems, she insists, \u201coften show up in the New Yorker<\/em> or various other establishment journals\u201d and they get things wrong showing the \u201cbeautiful bird\u201d but not the \u201cbulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird\u2019s habitat\u201d. She invests in the term \u201cecopoetics \u2013 a poetics full of systematic analysis that questions the divisions between nature and culture \u2013 instead of a nature poetry.\u201d[2]<\/a> While I would stop short of suggesting that my poems might enact a \u201csystematic analysis\u201d I do think that ecopoetics allows a perspective that various versions of \u201cthe science\u201d do not allow. Poetry involves paying attention \u2013 noticing. We access the massive spatial scales and deep geological time by paying attention to the details \u2013 \u201cheaven in a wild flower\u201d – or a melted blue plastic (discarded toothbrush? cheap biro? picnic fork?) in a rock on the beach in Hawai\u2019i while on vacation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The \u2018noticing\u2019 power of poetry, for me, is linked to travel and displacement. I write while on the move more than I do at home because my brain is working differently, stimulated by the lack of familiarity. That is why airports and planes turn up so much in what I write even when I am writing about the transformation of the world that is being caused, in part, by travel. (It is still the case that industry and energy production are the biggest causes of green-house gas emissions worldwide and that air travel accounts for just 2% of all emissions, though that number was growing before COVID-19).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We can all make journeys that are more local and relearn the art of being curious and getting lost, even in our own neighbourhoods. But I am still torn. Yes, we should fly less. Yes, I should fly less. Yet, at the same time, a world where people stick to their own acre would, in my view, be immeasurably poorer, probably more parochial, often xenophobic. My various journeys have made me who I am (far more than any single place I have lived in). Journeys have also been central to much of the literature that I love and remains central to what I am moved to write.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Jacqueline Rose, \u201cPointing the Finger\u201d London Review of Books<\/em> 42\/9 7 May, 2020. A theme that runs through the poems in Plastiglomerate (and my earlier collections) is travel. I travel a lot: to academic conferences and to give talks, to conduct research, to visit a widely dispersed family, and for its own sake. I have grown up believing in the positive values of journeys \u2013 the exposure to difference, the possibilities of newness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,143],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19329"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19375,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329\/revisions\/19375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/4212\/35743226851_4f0da5d9df_b.jpg\")
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\n[2]<\/a> Juliana Spahr, well then there now <\/em>(Black Sparrow Press, 2011) pp 69-71.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"