ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the development of rout/e, a poetry press (“footpress”) through which poems are installed along, or slightly off, trails in Eastern Ontario, Canada. This chapter considers the various features and processes, physical and conceptual, that affect the poems and the habitats in which they are encountered; through rout/e, poems are exposed to multiple influences and interactions that typically alter them. Whereas a bookshelf or library keeps poems pristine or collected in a literary, conceptual landscape, poems on and in the land, accessible by trails, emphasize the page, and the language on it, as a changeable landscape; the poems are read within a multiplicity of other markings and sounds, many of which are unrecognized by the human eye and ear. Trails serve many functions; for example, they can make for easier explorations of varied habitats and terrains by enabling movement over a variety of distances and through disparate geographies. The language of a poem, and the spatialization of a page, requires conceptual navigation and a reader’s willingness to access meaning in particular ways. In the rout/e project, each poem and its habitat are documented over several years (or until the poem disappears); contributions to rout/e are posted online, non-chronologically, with images and brief narratives that describe the poem in place (or displaced).
