ABSTRACT
As the history of cartography demonstrates, maps not only help to navigate from one place to another but also determine one’s position with regard to larger geographical wholes, defining the relationship between individuals and their surroundings. In this sense, maps play an important, world-building function by acknowledging and developing a geophilosophical link between people and the environment they inhabit. Cartographical imagination can be thus argued to play a crucial role in shaping this relationship by negotiating the basic coordinates necessary to conceptually situate oneself in the world. As such, cartographical imagination appears to be indispensable for reflecting on the place of humanity in the planetary context of the Anthropocene when this has become a particularly urgent task in the face of global ecological crises. It is argued in this chapter that poetry offers a toolkit that is particularly well suited for developing such new graticules, i.e. networks of categories and concepts on which we may fall back while reconsidering human exceptionalism and agency as well as mobilizing creative powers necessary to think and act.
Although maps and cartography, along with broader geographical concerns, have been addressed in poetry throughout the ages, this chapter focuses on selected experimental efforts undertaken by poets since modernism, leading up to various contemporary practices, including concrete and post-digital poetry. Accordingly, this chapter offers a survey of poems by English-language authors such as Laura Riding Jackson, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, John Ashbery, Eavan Boland, Kei Miller, Emily Hasler, Alice Oswald, J.R. Carpenter, Natasha Ramoutar, Esther G. Belin and others. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which poetry has responded to various historical exigencies by reinventing itself and offering new modes of engaging reality through cartographic themes and concerns. It is especially in the light of ecopoetics – an approach that emphasizes imaginative “becoming-earth,” as Rosi Braidotti calls it – that poetry can be regarded as a literary form especially capable of adapting our consciousness to the new times by utilizing what Catherine Malabou has called “plasticity”: the ability to both take form and give form. These two aspects are specifically elaborated as poetry’s potential to react to global changes and, in turn, responsibly shape the relationship between humanity and Earth.
