The map obsession continues
I’m still on my "space and place" kick, and probably will be for quite a while: it has all the signs of becoming a productive research obsession. Among the latest manifestations:
- Someone recently drew my attention to Ecotone, a new literary journal out of the University of North Carolina. It deals with the concept of place, broadly defined, and publishes a mixture of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, and (to my great delight) maps. Check out Aimee Bender’s "Three Maps" in issue 2.1. If something creative comes out of this research obsession, I now know where I’ll send it.
- I’m hopefully going to be learning a bit more about GIS before long (I already picked up some very basic facility with GIS during my time at UVA). Data is (are?) so much more interesting when you visualize it/them geographically. But I’m also thinking about the ways maps might prove useful in the humanities as well as the social sciences.
- My current train reading is Alice Oswald‘s poem Dart, an extended meditation on the river Dart (whence both Dartmoor and Dartmouth derive their names) in Devon. It grew out of a project in which she interviewed lots and lots of people who live and work along the river. You can find excerpts, a description of her research, and her sketch map of the Dart (with the locations of the poem’s speakers) at The Poetry Society. I may have more to say about this poem before long.
- A couple of months ago I dreamed I was reading a book of poems, each of which was illustrated with a different close-up of a street map of London with a particular set of streets outlined in red. In the dream I understood that each poem somehow either referenced or replicated the section of London in its corresponding map. I also had an impression that the poems were by Marilyn Hacker, though as far as I know, she doesn’t write about London (though she does write about Paris and New York).
Do you know Jill Stoner’s Poems For Architects? It’s drafting, rather than mapping, but she does some neat work creating translucent overlays for villanelles and other formal works.
Ooh, I didn’t! I’ll have to take a look at it.