Worlds Built Out of Words: Literary Environments
University of Bristol, 28th April 2010
Conference report
This half-day conference, hosted by the Department of English at the University of Bristol, aimed to gather together research related to representations of, and reactions to, environment across literary periods and from varying perspectives.
To open the conference, Penny Fielding (University of Edinburgh) gave a plenary address, ‘Rivers, Poetry, and the Routes to Romanticism’, that aimed to provide an account of the enduring appeal of rivers in topographical poetry, and to sketch a history of the changing meanings of this particular landscape feature, especially at the advent of Romanticism in the late eighteenth-century. In a wide ranging survey spanning early-modern to contemporary poetry, Fielding’s lecture encompassed both the physical and metaphorical potentials that the river embodies. The most prevalent trope through this history has been that of the river as a metaphor for thought itself, often providing the grounds for a poetic challenge to established categories of thinking. Derek Mahon’s ‘Heraclitus on Rivers’ provided an example of the persistence of the river as a figure by which the complexities of space and time (geography and history) can be thought through; whilst Norman Nicholson’s ‘Beck’, in which phenomenological sense and scientific knowledge of rivers meet, illustrated a modern shift towards mixed modality in river poetry. Both of these poems, in devoting attention to the water of the river itself, throw into relief the older tradition of river poetry’s concentration on the river’s banks.
Fielding emphasised the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in her account of the figurative meanings of rivers. For Heidegger, rivers are in temporality and caught up in human life (they are both here and elsewhere simultaneously). They are relational to us, we engage with them (physically and in thought) in many different ways, yet they are always vanishing to somewhere else and therefore foreign to us. Alice Oswald’s ‘Dart’ demonstrated the poetic dissemination of these ideas: the poem imbricates the river in the lives of people living in its vicinity; it is a part of life, flowing in and out of the sensory environment of the poem’s many characters. The river, a feature of landscape that is both here and elsewhere, has also allowed for the poetic exploration of tensions between the local and the national. This theme, drawn from Heidegger, also fed into Fielding’s genealogy of the river in poetry.
The river poem lineage here tracked changesbetween early modern and Romantic uses on either side of an eighteenth-century interregnum in which the prospect displaced the otherwise enduring appeal of the river as the topographical feature most favoured by poets. The dominant form of the river poem during the renaissance and into the seventeenth-century, Fielding suggested, was one that celebrated harmony across the aristocratic estate and the nation as a whole. Drayton’s Poly-Olbion was found to contain some of these renaissance usesin its presentation of the river as a structural device supporting settled hierarchy.In contradistinction, the 1770s saw the re-emergence of the river poem in short lyric pieces. This part of Fielding’s argument drew on Edward Casey’s theorisation of place as determined entirely by its relations to a given spatial nexus, to suggest that the early-Romantic period signified a shift towards new ways of thinking about space and place that we can read in the new directions taken in river poetryof that time. Faced with the experience of industrialisation as a national process, representations of the river became the basis for the reclamation of the local. Rivers reclaim the specificity of place from a process of homogenisation, and restore the uniqueness of the locale. The popularity of the lyric form in Romantic poetry meant that a related shift in river poetry occurred whereby in place of the focus on the genius loci of the place itself handed down through the topographical and loco-descriptive traditions, the poet now became central to the evocation of personal memory and experience that characterise the uniqueness of place.
In these developments in the genre of river poetry, Fielding concluded, we can read a significant shift from pre-Romantic to Romantic understandings of our relationship to environment. Finally, it was also suggested that the seeds of a post-Romantic version of this relationship were also present, in embryonic form, at this time: Anna Seward’s ‘Colebrook Dale’ moves away from the notion of a ‘pure’ river, and towards a modern awareness of the waterway violated by industrialisation. Questions taken at the end of the session addressed problems associated with the objectifying of nature that the Romantic conception of our relationship to place installed: current phenomenological accounts of place stress our place in, rather than looking at, environment.
Several of the key themes of Penny Fielding’s plenary address were further developed in subsequent panel discussions. The papers presented at the conference seemed to follow Fielding in gravitating towards engagements with rural as opposed to urban place, in some instances investigating ideas of ‘wilderness’; and, in many but by no means all cases, to a focus on poetic representations of place. Twentieth-century poets received a concentration of attention with papers focusing on Robert Frost, Louis MacNeice and Ted Hughes in particular; whilst other speakers dwelt on the Romantic period. In this latter group, John Edwards (University of Bristol) gave a paper on climate and ‘climatic determinism’ in Byron’s poetry that intersected interestingly with some of points of interest surrounding sensory experience of place that arose from Fielding’s plenary lecture.
Poetry was not, however, an exclusive focus, and the question of genre itself was raised in a paper examining recent directions in the representation of nature by Jos Smith (University of Exeter). Smith found that ‘literary non-fiction’ has been one of the prevalent generic forms of what has been called the ‘new nature writing’. The paper looked to identify a turn towards ‘the chthonic’ in 21st century landscape writing (from writers such as Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, and Andrew McNeillie), finding there a gesture towards intimacy with environment that has origins preceding the separation of nature and culture. For Smith, Macfarlane’s notion that certain thoughts are produced by (and therefore inhabit) certain landscapes belies this separation. This group of writers, though they have as yet received limited critical attention, appear to be a focal point in new research attempting to identify contemporary trends in the writing of place as they emerge.
In the afternoon’s second session, a panel on ‘Natural Spaces’ opened up a timely debate surrounding the issue of speaking for nature that had emerged earlier in the day in response to Fielding’s lecture. Rowan Middleton (University of Gloucestershire) presented a paper arguing for the ability of poets to speak for nature (and for nature to speak through poets). Whilst Middleton’s research took its cues from ecocriticism, Andy Munzer (University of York), speaking on the same panel, took a more philosophical approach that charted the representation of the natural world in the poetry of Raymond Carver. Rather than speaking for nature, Carver’s poetry was found to ‘minimise transcendent distance’ in the techniques it employs to speak about natural objects. Whilst all linguistic action (naming) is in some sense transcendent, Carver’s poetry employs focal points in the environment, especially rivers, to recall the immanent thing-in-itself. The river, always flowing and in flux, is, for Carver, an exemplary thing-in-itself. The two papers, in very different ways, proposed responses to the difficulty of accommodating sensory experience and the immediacy of environment in representational forms that is at the heart of current debates.
The conference concluded with a poetry reading and question-and-answer session with Alice Oswald, who opened by describing her poetry as an attempt to close the gap between the self and the natural world. Oswald prefaced her first reading, from the opening section of Dart, with some remarks about its composition. She noted that she had not wanted to write about the river in a traditionally poetic way; but that, as a gardener, she felt a respect for practical ways of engaging with place. Turning to the narrative form of the poem, she described it as an ‘interview with a river’ but retained some of the uncertainty regarding who speaks each section: it is ‘a mish-mash of voices’ in which ‘you’ll have to work out who’s speaking. But don’t worry, it’s all the river.’
After reading some recent shorter poems (including ‘The Ballad of Peter Putt’ and ‘Looking for Cowslips’), Oswald turned to A Sleepwalk on the Severn, noting the poem’s suitability considering the conference’s location. She described how, since the success of Dart, she is regularly asked to write long narrative poems about rivers. Accepting such a request from the ‘Festival of the Severn’, she was reluctant to repeat the procedures of the earlier poem. Sleepwalk, she explained, wasn’t written as a spatial poem following the river’s course as Dart had been, but rather, focused on time and on the phases of the tide on the river. As such, this new poem was ‘a biography of the moon’.
In response to questions from the audience, Oswald spoke about the place of her own voice in her poetry. A few years ago, she recalled, she would try to keep her own voice out of her poetry and write objectively. She described a strong interest in the idea of documentary poetry at this time. More recently, however, Oswald has allowed her own voice to enter into her writing to a greater degree in an attempt to ‘illicit a more emotional response to things’. Asked about her techniques for gathering material for poems such as Dart, she described how she would conduct interviews with local residents, but would then allow them to be ‘misremembered’, rather than strictly transcribed, in the writing process. As a result, and in response to key points raised by Fielding, Oswald’s poetry might be said to combine experience and imagination in the process of representing environment.
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