Prologue

I go to a geographer for a specious definition of irony (to my mind, not his — he was very serious):

ERATOSTHENES is guilty of another fault in so frequently referring to the works of men beneath his notice, sometimes for the purpose of refuting them; at others, when he agrees with them, in order to cite them as authorities. I allude to Damastes, and such as him, who even when they speak the truth, are utterly unworthy of being appealed to as authorities, or vouchers for the credibility of a statement. For such purposes the writings of trustworthy men should only be employed, who have accurately described much; and though perhaps they may have omitted many points altogether, and barely touched on others, are yet never guilty of wilfully falsifying their statements.

Strabo, Geography, Chapter 3

The text proper

There is no intrinsic geography only a geography of imposition[1]. Systems that rely on reading through modelling inevitably impose that modelling on the subject, in this case the Earth itself. We aim to synthesise in order to understand and at best bring justice, but synthesising is control over knowledge and space, and that disconnects life from life. De-synthesise. De-synthesise and let knowledge fragment so it concentrates in its places of making. Let in then “mycorrhise” so a symbiosis of local knowledges creates shared spaces of awareness that erase no original knowledges but gather the ubiquitous that augments the greater good. This communalising view of human interaction with “nature”, of human knowledge-aspiration with non-human matter, is the core to a poetics of place that can never be anthologised because such gatherings inevitably apply a mapping that will be destructive to one or many, to parts and wholes.

Longfellow’s project of internationalism and diversity was inflected through both an American sense of hegemony and primacy of “belonging”, of a systemised English-language New World poetics of shape and syntax, in which modernity and an industry of travel and geography, of discovery and self-awareness, was enhanced by the traveller’s experience of gathering. This subset of colonialism, a colonialism of scene and “journal entry”, is at the core of the geography of poetry which can only be another colonial aspiration. To visit might not to be to settle, but visiting relies on nodes of settlement that enforce cultural “opening” and even availability that is often not desired, or, if it is, is exploited. I live on unceded stolen Ballardong Noongar boodja that is not subscribed via colonial geographising. I am the anomaly of presence that self-defines as a form of landmarking: to me, distressingly, an ultimately a erasing act of placing, placement and emplacement, which I attempt to reject, reconfigure and yield to entirely different and implicit systems of temporal-spatialism.

Apropos of these issues, no place needs to define its own presence against place it doesn’t know, so it is placeless. A place that doesn’t need to define itself as place is every place it needs to know. Contrasts and juxtapositions are internal because boundaries don’t exist because it doesn’t define itself through exclusion or difference, it just is. A mountain range might provide a natural “division”, but this doesn’t have to be considered a division, it just is. To cross is a conversation of leaving and returning, not of extracting from other places. Or, when it becomes a case of extracting, place geographisises and becomes potentially colonial. This is not an issue of migration, this is an issue of intent to systemise and claim many spaces as place within a travelogue of gathering experience. We all polysituate in one way or another, or in many ways, but we don’t have to accrue, to collect, to curate out presence and our movements. A record becomes a series of claims, the poem becomes a storehouse of our conquests we deny are conquests. Encounter with places that are unwritten respect the place we have been in. We experience without claim. We learn without profiting from that learning.

I find it appalling when life is measured against life. So, the death of someone young is considered much worse than the death of someone old. There’s the whiff of “productivity” about this rather than a sadness of experience never had. Life is life. And place as a concept made economically “real” is treated in the same way. The “loss” of a barren waste is rarely noted but at least some people (not as many as we’d like to think) register the loss of a “pristine” place to devastation. Mining companies in their grotesque rapacity, rely on playing this dynamic. Arguments — economic and “human need” — for the pristine to be pillaged have to be played out within a concept of utility vs preservation, “necessity” vs conservation, but by transforming the lush into the barren the argument is shifted in favour of using the “barren” because it’s (“sadly”) already that. So much bushland is turned into “developments” and then forgotten beyond road names that indicate what it once was. Into place comes the temporal, but rather than hiding the damage to place, it works geographically with place to render it what it was always intended to be: in service of capitalist-colonial-industrial-military rapacity. Place is all of those as a concept before we begin. The anthology gathers voices to ensure compliance. A contemporary anthology of place will be more “representative” and carry diverse voices, but diverse becomes a camouflage for dominant oppressive enculturations of capital, of the new colonialism over ecologies that purports to be decolonising. Economics of gain are never anti-colonial. Ecological damage where so few species remain despite diverse ecosystems is always colonial.

“Inclusiveness”, which should be liberating and just, too often becomes a gesture that oppresses under the barrenness of the gesture. If we were genuinely inclusive, we wouldn’t need to have the debate, which we do because the ultimate controls over land and wealth are still heterosexual, white, middle-class and male… and, obviously, capitalist. An anthology doesn’t need to be, what needs to be are voices in their spaces being allowed to speak and relate to the places they are connected to, or come out of: long-term, displaced, temporary.

So, let’s no longer call it place and let’s think outside of time. The refugee being ignored or ostracised, or drowning in one of the oceans of the world set up as divisions of place and space, knows as much and maybe even more about the space they’re in when they are on the verge of death than anyone has or could. They are not leaving a place to colonise another place, to gather and extract, but rather to immerse in the knowledge of that “new” space and to become part of it. It’s not gathering, reaping, harvesting, geographising, it’s learning, participating and becoming. It is not a voyage of exploration, but of surviving. A poem can make spaces for this — they are not lacunae but rather nodes of symbioses, of growing.

I do not need to name all the names of poets doing this in “Australia”, because Australia doesn’t exist. Many spaces in what they call “places” in Australia define their own relationship to each other and poems come out of it. Traditional lands, traditional languages… not as fixed as anthropology would have, far more interactive and fluid… with “boundaries” but not borders, with associations of country with people, but in ways outside of geography. And the many newcomers coming in different ways with different intents. Conversations to be had but needing to find ways to have them. But thinking outside of geography and thinking around notions of country, of totemic realities that need to be understood if proffered, and need to be respected.

Henry Kendall (most of the poems in Longfellow’s “Australia” section are from him) was a poet who wrote the forest and exploited the forest, which is the settler poetics. There is an abundance of settler poetics around today, but it disguises itself, distracts from it self-defining economic causes and desires. You see, I believe in a total handback of country but also never acknowledge the country was “taken” because it was not takeable. The surveys are geography and they lie, as do the mines and roads which are real damage and not illusory. Irony is the destroyers, the extractors, who deal with markets and quantities, would have us believe the damage is illusory and beneficial. That we grow from the illusion of damage: that it gives far more than it takes (and its taking, they’d have us think, is an illusion). Concepts such as “the uncanny”[2] for their activities, actually suit them well as part of the camouflage. The implementation of diverse work forces (gender, ethnicity, sexual-orientation etc), is doable (even if many in power resent such shifts), but it’s a geographising to them that suits profits. It’s grim. There’s no room for poetry there though mining magnate Gina Rinehart does write “poetry”. The scare quotes are a bigotry come out of the belief in the redemptive nature of poetry? I remove them. She writes poetry which is the grim reality poets have to face about their declarations of independence, community, art and justice. Poetry is not inherently just.

Do I recognise anything of where I live and of myself in John Boyle O’Reilly’s “Western Australia”? Of course not. And why should I? He wasn’t in Western Australia long — convict, political prisoner, escapee… some conceptual overlap maybe, and he’s describing the “place” as he was exposed to it, but it’s a very big unit of “place” in its colonial geographics, so this “strange land” that is a “virgin”, apparently, reveals one political oppression but doesn’t illuminate a mass of others. There’s nowhere to go with it beyond a concept of anthologising a false diversity.

What I am saying is that “diverse” in the hands of capital is never diverse, and art is commodity in the hands of industry and its audience, whatever our intentions. And I say this as someone who has tried to anthologise against colonial capital, not to be its apologist, and yet… I reinforce “place” by defining or even refusing to define “place”. The anthology poem/s make “the land” something: “beautiful”, or often conversely “harsh”, and very often “mysterious” (and a localising pre-Freud version of the uncanny in Marcus Clarke’s rendering of Adam Lindsay Gordon and more in his “weird melancholy” take on the characteristic of the Australian “bush”) … but these are always externalising views, always talking to an outside that even if now “inside” still qualifies by contrast with a “civilising” centre or an ineffable centring of “knowledge”. Studies in “Western Culture” inevitably make such claims directly or obtusely. The empire cannot let go and it demands the terms of writing and curating.

Longfellow’s selection of primarily Kendall fits with issues of availability of texts, but most interest is his inclusion of an extract[3] of James Montgomery’s poem “Pelican Island” (from The Pelican island and Other Poems, 1827 and published in Philadelphia, giving Longfellow access to a text), though it is presented in the anthology as the complete poem, it seems. Full of romantic clarity, this religious essentially humanist poet who opposed tyranny, is drawn into the act of representation with his “lively” description of a “place” I can find no evidence of his ever having actually visited. In fact, according to a rare books sales site:

The Preface states; “the subject of “The Pelican Island” was suggested by a passage in Captain Flinders’s Voyage to Terra Australis. Describing one of those numerous gulfs which indent the coast of New Holland, and are thickly spotted with small islands, he says:- “Upon two of these we found many young Pelicans unable to fly… from the number of skeletons and bones there scattered, it should seem that for ages these had been selected for the closing scene of their existence…” Captain Flinders called it Kangaroo Island.

Further, I came across an article in the Kangaroo Island newspaper about the Montgomery book being reprinted and it notes:

The book was inspired by Kangaroo Island even though the author had never set foot here. Instead, he had read Matthew Flinders” narrative of his exploratory journey and was very taken with his description of the islets in Pelican Lagoon. This formed the starting idea for a long poem.

The geography of internet surfing epitomises the problem of geography as a concept in itself: all is reduced to parts of a whole wherein the parts are defined by domains, servers, locations and other markers of virtual connection to “place” that has been made “all place” (with variations depending on the policing of access to certain pages, sources of URLs etc).

If he didn’t, maybe this act of examining other written sources and data-mining them, and illustrating via imagination, is more “honest” than denoting as “place” becoming a reprocessing of that ur-colonialist explorer Flinder’s textuality of possession through gaze and documentation. Flinders, like all explorers, constructs necessity and purpose out of a fantastical self-aggrandising heroics that serves imperial economics in the name of knowledge. The anti-slavery Montgomery need not be afflicted by the politics of intrusion and dispossession by writing from afar! To visit and paint in situ can be an engagement with location, but it can also be a reducing of location to commodity.

Montgomery’s poem is essentially a pro-nature fantasy rewriting the politics of seeing and encounter, and of explorer imposition. Its discoveries are made benign and full of apparent “local colour” while being biological and almost pre-environmental. Or one might argue in claiming that the twin determinates of a geography are the colonialisms of science (especially enlightenment science) and of mapping from afar based on imported/shipped/transferred information. Geography oscillates between observation and interpretation. Montgomery’s poem sells as experience an act of interpretation and this is the essence of the geographisising nature of global anthologising. It’s not possible to make a world poetry without fetishising place into commodity and ultimately target of exploitation.

Ironically, in order to paste some of the poem into this doc without having to type it up from the Longfellow anthology which doesn’t “copy”, I found the text on a website called Poetry Atlas: mapping the world in poetry which include a map and a pin of location for the poem (which seems wrong judging that Flinders “named” Kangaroo Island which is located off South Australia and not Tasmania, but what’s place and geography and animal life when it comes to the travelogue of poetry… or the imagined travelogue of poetry!):

Here ran the stormy-petrels on the waves,  
As though they were the shadows of themselves  
Reflected from a loftier flight through space.          
The stern and gloomy raven haunted here,  
A hermit of the atmosphere, on land  
Among vociferating crowds a stranger,  
Whose hoarse, low, ominous croak disclaimed communion  
With those upon the offal of whose meals          
He gorged alone, or tore their own rank corses.  
The heavy penguin, neither fish nor fowl,  
With scaly feathers and with finny wings,  
Plumped stone-like from the rock into the gulf,  
Rebounding upward swift as from a sling.          
Through yielding water as through limpid air,  
The cormorant, Death’s living arrow, flew,  
Nor ever missed a stroke, or dealt a second,  
So true the infallible destroyer’s aim.

What’s telling about this, the anthropomorphism aside, is that his “acuteness” could so readily have come from “seeing” (or “textually” encountering/vicariously “experiencing”), say, pelicans (strangely absent from the Longfellow extraction but present as place-name marker) and even other “creatures” in Britain as either illustration, specimens (via collections) or figurative derivations of the locally familiar (say “ravens” or cormorants which were native to coastlines but are now nesting inland due to climate change). So much “observation” that seems place-specific comes from the universal act of seeing constructs in the local-specific — analogies become reality out of one’s own “sense of place” imposed on other place”. Place is always underwritten by such impositions. Longfellow took what he could get to make a broader point about illustration, knowledge, potential to travel both imaginatively and maybe in person — a colonial act, of course, and a narrow white male scope (that sadly resides in so many global takes on literature), but in its strangeness also an undoing of the very places he sought to represent, even “define” through their being different from other places. In the full, delusional if also ecologically generative poem, we find a totemic humanist-environmentalism wrestling with colonial referents and textuality (whether consciously or not: of context). If, for example, Longfellow had included the following extract as well as or instead how would it have affected the attempt to construct geographical empathy through poetic-linguistic consistency of mode, expression, “observation”, prosody and “Western sensibility” even via a writer so at odds with the status quo?

Her ruffled pinions smoothly she composed;
And, while beneath the comfort of her wings.
Her crowded progeny quite fill’d the nest,
The halcyon sleeps not sounder, when the wind
Is breathless, and the sea without a curl,
— Nor dreams the halcyon of serener days,
Or nights more beautiful with silent stars,
Than, in that hour, the mother Pelican,
When the warm tumults of affection sunk
Into calm sleep, and dreams of what they were,
— Dreams more delicious than reality.
— He sentinel beside her stood, and watch’d,
With jealous eye, the raven in the clouds,
And the rank sea-mews wheeling round the cliffs.
Woe to the reptile then that ventured nigh ;
The snap of his tremendous bill was like
Death’s scythe, down cutting every thing it struck.
The heedless lizard, in his gambols peep’d
Upon the guarded nest, from out the flowers.
But paid the instant forfeit of his life ;
Nor could the serpent’s subtlety elude
Capture, when gliding by, nor in defence
Might his malignant fangs and venom save him.

(Fourth Canto, The Pelican Island and Other Poems, James Montgomery, Philadelphia, 1827) 

An incredible sameness runs through the geographised view of the world. But counterintuitively, though there are two species of pelican in Europe, neither habituates Scotland (Montgomery’s home space) or England (where he lived for the bulk of his life). Maybe he saw skeletons in a collection and this fed into it? The same but not the same — difference is diminished. This is conjecture, but poems are made out of such elisions and carry political and ethical consequences in their morphemes because of this.

Epilogue

A couple of years ago I published a “version” of the Argonautica myth entitled The Argonautica Inlandica (Vagabond Press, 2023) which was intended to act as anti-exploration and quest version of the Argonautica … as much inland as at sea, and concerned with environmental repair, refusal of capitalist rapacity, human rights, animal rights, and a move away from “place” into presence. Anticolonial, yes, but also aware, I hope, of its own unwanted (by me) colonialist enactments of privilege in being able to use knowledge to serve a narrative in this way. It connected with Longfellow in undoing Longfellowian geography, maybe in apposition to his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy …

Outlandish Argonautica

Copyright, 1879
By Henry W. Longfellow.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
                        Cambridge

And so: “the land of yellow air”.

Night howls configure coastal debris,
a collector’s shanty risible as “a sky of wind”.

Not a few of us have sailor ancestors
who hopped ship and hopped back on

again. End result is the shepherd’s hut. Servants
in those places weren’t often poets. Raising sails

on salt lakes makes callouses. Out of Boston.
Out of Scotland. Out of Ireland. Hyped on

starlight. There are plenty of other
things to say about “desert dells”.

Or, subverting geographies, try returning
country. Tides sweep mangroves.

Anthologies of petroleum tenure,
ballast stone from wreck of barque.

[1] While Emily Dickinson “observes” in poem “489” (“We pray — to Heaven”): “Unto the Dead/ There’s no Geography’, we might ask: if there can be a geography can it reside with the living without causing oppression?

[2] For example, the disjunctions between settler mysticising of “the bush” and the complexity of Indigenous perceptions around ancestral-spiritual and material relationship to Country. An example would be Marcus Clarke’s reference to a “weird melancholy” in his preface to uber-colonial poet Adam Lindsay Gordon’s 1867 collection Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. Also see Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2010; Chapter 9, pp 97-128)

[3] The complete poem runs over a hundred printed pages and is in nine cantos!

Image: French reconstruction a map of the known world according to Erathostenes