T
H E F I S H I
N G C A T P
R E S S
About
Geopoetics “Rediscover the Earth, open a world”
What marks this transition
period in cultural history, back of all the secondary discourse and all the
palaver, is a return to the fundamental, which is to say, the poetic. Every real
creation of the mind is, fundamentally, poetic.
The question now
is to discover where the most necessary, the most inspiring poetics are to be
found, and to apply them.
If, around 1978,
I began to talk of “geopoetics”, it was for two reasons. On the one hand, it
was becoming more and more obvious that the earth (the biosphere) was in danger
and that ways, both deep and efficient, would have to be worked out in order to
protect it. On the other hand, I had always been of the persuasion that the strongest
poetics come from contact with the earth, from a plunge into biospheric space,
from a determined attempt to read the lines of the planet.
The geopoetic
project is not one more contribution to the cultural variety show, nor it is a
literary school, nor it is concerned with poetry considered as an art of
intimacy. It is a major movement involving the very foundations of human life
on earth.
In the
fundamental geopoetic field come together poets and thinkers of all times and
of all countries. To quote only a few examples, in the West, one can think of
Heraclitus (“man is separated from what is closest to him”), Hölderlin (“man
lives poetically on the earth”), Heidegger (“topology of being”), or Wallace
Stevens (“the poems of heaven and hell have been written, it remains to write
the poem of the earth”). In the East, there is the taoist Chuang-tzu, the
haikuist Matsuo Basho, who was eminently geopoetic in his Road to the Deep
North¸ and beautiful world-meditations such as one can find in the Hwa Yen
Sutra.
But geopoetics is
not the exclusive domain of poets and thinkers. Henry Thoreau was as much an
ornithologist and a meteorologist (“inspector of storms”) as he was a poet, or
rather, we might say, he included the sciences in his poetics. The link between
geopoetics and geography is plain enough, but the link with biology is just as
necessary, and with ecology (including mind-ecology) well grounded and
well-developed. In fact, geopoetics provides not only a place, and this is
proving more and more necessary, where poetry, thought and science can come
together, in a climate of reciprocal inspiration, but a place where all kinds
of specific disciplines can converge, once they are ready to leave
over-restricted frameworks and enter into global (cosmological, cosmopoetic)
space.
A whole network
can be set in motion, marked by energy, attention, competence and intelligence.
Kenneth White
The Atlantic Studio
North Coast Brittany
April 1989
This
was the first, short, “haiku” presentation of geopoetics. For a full account,
see Kenneth White’s Mappings, his Le Plateau de l’Albatros and
the website (in seven languages) of the Institut International de
Géopoétique that he founded in 1989.
Biography
Born in Glasgow and raised on the west
coast of Scotland, Kenneth White studied languages, literature and philosophy
in Glasgow, Munich and Paris. He was first published in London in the mid-60s
but broke with the British scene in 1967, settling in Pau, at the foot of the
Pyrenees, where he lived in concentrated silence for a while before beginning
to publish again, this time in Paris.
His books won not only wide-spread
recognition in France, but also some of its most prestigious literary prizes:
the Prix Médicis Etranger for his book La Route bleue, the French
Academy’s Grand Prix du Rayonnement Français and the Prix Roger Caillois for
his work as a whole. In 1979 he brilliantly defended a doctoral thesis on the
theme of “intellectual nomadism” before an academic jury (which included Gilles
Deleuze) and held the Chair of 20th Century
Poetics at the Sorbonne from 1983 to 1996.
His books have been translated into a wide
range of languages since the 1970s, and have been largely available in English
since the 1980s. His Collected Poems 1960-2000 (Open World) were
published by Polygon (Edinburgh), while Edinburgh University Press has just
undertaken to publish the complete range of his Collected Works.
Kenneth White has likened his literary
activity to an arrow: “the essays, which give direction, are the feathers; the
prose-books (waybooks) are the shaft of the arrow; and the poems are the
head of the arrow.”
He lives with his wife Marie-Claude, a
translator and photographer, on the north coast of Brittany.
Appreciation
of Kenneth White
Erudite,
elemental, big and bold
SEAMUS HEANEY
What
other poet gives us such clarity, openness, purity of spirit, a north of the
soul, a pathless path?
GARY SNYDER
Octavio
Paz speaks of a silent vanguard, in solitary rebellion against not only the
entrenched establishments but the modernist cliques. It’s to this vanguard that
Kenneth White belongs
REVISTA DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE MÉXICO
An
intellectual nomad of genius
THE SCOTSMAN
Travelling
out on his own ways, Kenneth White is bound to appear more and more as the
foremost English-language poet of these times
LE
NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR, PARIS
A
quick selective bibliography of White’s work in English
Poetry
The Cold Wind of Dawn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966)
The Most Difficult Area (London: Cape Goliard, 1968)
The Bird Path: collected longer poems (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1989)
Handbook for the Diamond Country: collected shorter poems (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1990)
Open World: the collected poems 1960-2000 (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003)
Narrative
Letters from Gourgounel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966)
Travels in the Drifting Dawn (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1989)
The Blue Road
(Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1990)
Pilgrim of the Void
(Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1992)
House of Tides
(Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000)
Across the Territories (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004)
Essays
On Scottish Ground
(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998)
Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World (Glasgow: Alba Editions, 2003)
The Wanderer and his Charts (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004)
On the Atlantic Edge
(Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2006)
Interviews
Coast to Coast
(Glasgow: Open World and Mythic Horse Press, 1996)
Kenneth
White’s Collected Works are now in process at Edinburgh University
Press. Volumes 1 and 2 have just appeared (2021): Underground to
Otherground (narratives) containing Incandescent Limbo, Letters
from Gourgounel, Travels in the Drifting Dawn; and Mappings
(essays) containing On Scottish Ground, Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath
and The Wanderer and his Charts.