Eric Magrane

Published in Routledge's Research in Culture, Space, and Identity Book Series.
ISBN: 9780367145385

Book description:
This breakthrough book examines dynamic intersections of poetics and geography. Gathering the essays of an international cohort whose work converges at the crossroads of poetics and the material world, Geopoetics in Practice offers insights into poetry, place, ecology, and writing the world through a critical-creative geographic lens.

This collection approaches geopoetics as a practice by bringing together contemporary geographers, poets, and artists who contribute their research, methodologies, and creative writing. The 24 chapters, divided into the sections “Documenting,” “Reading,” and “Intervening,” poetically engage discourses about space, power, difference, and landscape, as well as about human, non-human, and more-than-human relationships with Earth. Key explorations of this edited volume include how poets engage with geographical phenomena through poetry and how geographers use creativity to explore space, place, and environment.

This book makes a major contribution to the geohumanities and creative geographies by presenting geopoetics as a practice that compels its agents to take action. It will appeal to academics and students in the fields of creative writing, literature, geography, and the environmental and spatial humanities, as well as to readers from outside of the academy interested in where poetry and place overlap.

Despite an historical connection between the arts and sciences, in the past century, the two disciplines have been greatly siloed. However, there is a renewed interest in collaboration across the arts and sciences to support conservation practice by understanding and communicating complex environmental, social, and cultural challenges in novel ways. 6&6 was created as a transdisciplinary art–science initiative to promote a deeper appreciation of the Sonoran Desert. Six artists and six scientists were paired to create work that explored conservation issues in the Sonoran Desert and the Gulf of California. In-depth interviews were conducted with the artists and scientists throughout the 4-year initiative to understand the impact of 6&6 on their personal and professional behaviors and outlook. The findings from this case study reveal the role that intensive, place-based, and transdisciplinary art–science programs can play in shaping narratives to better communicate the patterns and processes of nature and human–environment interactions.

This piece blends prose, poetry, and drawings in a geopoetic approach to bycatch in the Gulf of California shrimp trawling fishery. We briefly communicate some of the ecological effects of the trawling industry and reflect on our collaboration as an art–science practice that draws on our multiple disciplinary backgrounds, one as a geographer-poet and the other as a marine ecologist– visual artist. We present two poems and drawings addressed to specific individuals of bycatch – a Pacific snake-eel and a Shamefaced crab. We focus on specific individual marine bodies as an act of witness to the more-than-human bodies so often the casualties of this fishing practice. The poetic trope of direct address to an individual eel and crab allows us to work from specific embodied encounters as a site of cultural geographic and geopoetic practice. We aim to convey what it feels like to be on a trawler and to allude to geographic concerns implicitly in the poetry and text. We present this to readers as a piece of creative writing and invite them to bring their own interpretations to the text. In Mexico's Gulf of California, from mid-September through mid-March, shrimp trawlers traverse the water. Each night, hundreds of boats drag their 100-ft long nets across the seafloor in search of shrimp. Along with shrimp, they pull up over 200 other species. In fact, the vast majority of life

(F)light: a borderlands song cycle is a creative response to migration. We wrote and composed the cycle of nine songs in relation to two particular borders: those between Arizona, United States and Sonora, Mexico; and Maine, United States and New Brunswick, Canada. The songs address borders, geopolitics, mobility, emotion, and narrative. We briefly contextualize our collaboration on (F)light and then share three songs from the project, as scores and as sound files performed by Women in Harmony, a women's chorus in Portland, Maine.

This is a collaborative portfolio of art and writing from Tumamoc Hill including work by Paul Mirocha, Eric Magrane, Barbara Terkanian, Monique Soria, D.L. Coleman, Meredith Milstead, and Kathleen Koopman.
The introduction, titled "A Context for Arts on Tumamoc," by Mirocha and Magrane, begins:
Early on a recent May morning, artist Meredith Milstead set up her easel outside of the historic Desert Lab buildings on Tumamoc Hill and proceeded to paint the scene before her over a twelve-hour period, completing one painting per hour. A study of color and time, the act of making these paintings echoes the historical research on Tumamoc. Much of what is known about deserts comes from Tumamoc Hill, either through research at the site itself or through the impressive list of those—a who's who of desert ecologists—who have worked at the Hill over the years. It's not a stretch to claim that the modern field of ecology owes much of its beginning to the Carnegie Desert Botanical Laboratory established on Tumamoc Hill in 1903. Long-term study plots set up by these early ecologists comprise the longest-running vegetation-monitoring program in the world. That some of the current activity on the Hill is in the form of art or poetry is a reflection of the growing awareness that scientific and artistic ways of knowing are not in opposition but can be, rather, complementary to each other. In a time when climate change has us facing increasing temperatures, drought, and wildfire here in much of the Southwest, and when increased acknowledgment that the disciplinary silos that have built up over the last couple of centuries are not up to facing such big questions alone, it is fitting that Tumamoc Hill is one of the sites that has embraced the role that artists and writers may play in the present, an epoch that many have begun to call the Anthropocene.

Marine turtles and the Mapun clan
in Malaysia, organic farmers in the
U.S. Midwest, and conservationists
and policymakers in the Sonoran desert
borderlands of the U.S. Southwest
and Mexico’s Northwest are examples
of “communities that narrate themselves into existence”
or “narrative-networks,” according to a recent book by
geographer Mrill Ingram and two policy scholars, Raul
Lejano and Helen Ingram. In The Power of Narrative in
Environmental Networks, the authors ask this questions:
What are networks and what is their “magic” (p. xii) or
power to configure and refigure our understanding of the
“natural” environment? How do the stories we tell about
ourselves and our places lead to the development of networks?
What is the force of narrative and how does it
shape our relationship to the environment in network
with one another and with the more-than-human? How
does the dialectic between networks and narratives work?