Eric Magrane is a geographer and poet interested in culture and the environment. His work draws on creative practice, social and geographic theory, and human perceptions of nature.
Routledge Research in Culture, Space, and Identity Book Series, 2020
Published in Routledge's Research in Culture, Space, and Identity Book Series.
ISBN: 97803671453... more 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.
Edited by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos /
Illustrated by Paul Mirocha /
University of Ari... more Edited by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos / Illustrated by Paul Mirocha / University of Arizona Press, 2016 ////////
From the University of Arizona Press:
Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that melds art and science. It captures the stunning biodiversity of the world's most verdant desert through words and images. More than fifty poets and writers—including Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ken Lamberton, Eric Magrane, Jane Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Alberto Ríos, Ofelia Zepeda, and many others—have composed responses to key species of this striking desert. Each creative contribution is joined by an illustration by award-winning artist Paul Mirocha and scientific information about the creature or plant authored by the book's editors.
From the saguaro to the mountain lion, from the black-tailed jackrabbit to the mesquite, the species represented here have evoked compelling and creative responses from each contributor. Just as writers such as Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy have memorialized the desert, this collection is sure to become a new classic, offering up the next generation of voices of this special and beautiful place, the Sonoran Desert.
Despite an historical connection between the arts and sciences, in the past century, the two disc... more 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.
The Rocky Mountain West: A Compendium of Geographic Perspectives, 2020
The extended Rocky Mountain West has recently been home to a number of community-based geohumanit... more The extended Rocky Mountain West has recently been home to a number of community-based geohumanities projects that creatively represent the region and its biodiversity in literary forms. The book A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park (Wolverine Farm Publishing, 2013) included sixty-one contributions in which writers addressed Rocky Mountain species. This project built upon the 2012 “Poetic Inventory of Saguaro National Park” (spiralorb.net/poeticinventory), which itself led to a hybrid field guide-literary anthology called The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press, 2016). Currently, more than fifty writers have contributed to a “Literary Inventory of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument,” highlighting species in this newly (2014) established New Mexico national monument. This contribution to Denver and the Rocky Mountain West includes a short essay that briefly describes these three public geohumanities projects and includes examples of three contributions: John Calderazzo’s “Turkey Vulture,” Laura Pritchett’s “Bear Grace,” and Spencer R. Herrera’s “El Puma and his Tocayos.” The short essay examines these contributions and contextualizes literary field guides and poetic inventories as community geohumanities projects that engage with sense of place and multi-species empathy.
This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what ... more This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics. The first section addresses recent literary work that engages with climate change and the Anthropocene and outlines the geopoetic field as it is currently emerging as a subfield of the geohumanities. Next, I turn to examining climate narratives and frames; following the lead of many human geographers and environmental humanities scholars, I approach climate change as a social and cultural issue. I then discuss the methodology of this particular climate geopoetics project, commenting on and contextualizing some of my writing and thinking process for the climate poems that are woven throughout the article. By centering this article around three poems, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics, the curious nature of the Anthropocene/Anthroposcene as a concept that both centers and de-centers the human, and the tensions on textual form that geopoetic practices create. It is my hope that this project may offer a fresh and unconventional approach to examining the multiple ways that climate change is framed, engaged, and contested.
International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research (IJAGR), 2019
In recent years, geography has taken up a renewed engagement with humanities approaches to place,... more In recent years, geography has taken up a renewed engagement with humanities approaches to place, space, and environment. These approaches offer new possibilities for relevant, publicly engaged research and teaching; applying the geohumanities expands the techniques that geographers can employ to do engaged work in the face of great social and environmental challenges. This article describes two examples of applied geohumanities projects: a community course on climate change and poetry and a creative approach to a citizen science bioblitz. Building on these examples, four questions for future work in applied geohumanities are posed.
Narratives of climate change place it alternately as an environmental justice issue, a national a... more Narratives of climate change place it alternately as an environmental justice issue, a national and global security issue, an apocalyptic threat to life on earth, an opportunity for social change, and more. In this article, I aim to bring critical geographic work on climate narratives into conversation with contemporary poetry, through close readings of specific poems. I argue that the work of contemporary poets, and in particular the work of Indigenous ecopoetics, is rich in poetic texts that offer imaginative practices for recalibrating climate change narratives. I look particularly to works by Craig Santos Perez, Kathy Jetn̄ il-Kijiner, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan. I approach the poems as both a critical geographer and as a poet, thinking through and with their form and content in relation to climate narratives, and in relation to a description of Indigenous ecopoetics by Perez. I meet these poems as stored energy, as actors themselves in a human and more-than-human collective. A close reading of the craft of creative texts—particularly to the level of the line in poetry—highlights the inextricable connection between form and content in how a poem acts and means in the world. As a non-Indigenous reader of texts by Indigenous poets, my goal is not to perform a 'master' reading or analysis of these texts, but rather to learn from the poems and in doing so attempt to decolonize my own thought, a process that is a constant practice.
Writing the Desert is a short presentation of geopoetic practice that includes images of language... more Writing the Desert is a short presentation of geopoetic practice that includes images of language reflected on desert earth as ephemeral earth-writing. It is included as a "Box" in the book Creativity (Harriet Hawkins, Key Ideas in Geography Series).
This piece blends prose, poetry, and drawings in a geopoetic approach to bycatch in the Gulf of C... more 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
This literary essay reflects on poetry installations at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a biore... more This literary essay reflects on poetry installations at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a bioregional zoo, botanical garden, and natural history museum that receives 400,000 visitors a year, where I am the inaugural poet in residence. Through description of some of the various forms of installations---including a poem composted out of water policy documents and installed in a window, poems inside of masks, and a poem painted in blacklight paint to interact with scorpions--- the essay reflects on how creative interpretations at natural history sites can communicate environmental issues in effective and innovative forms.
(F)light: a borderlands song cycle is a creative response to migration. We wrote and composed the... more (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.
The form of the ars poetica is one in which the poet makes a statement on the art of poetry. Cons... more The form of the ars poetica is one in which the poet makes a statement on the art of poetry. Consider this a kind of ars-geo-poetica, a groundsetting for and statement on geopoetics that intends to both situate and to break open the field. This is an invitation for geopoetic texts and practices that draw on the work of poets as well as geographers, for an enchanted, earthy, and transaesthetic approach that moves to juxtapose contemporary poetics, particularly in the realm of ecopoetics, with critical human geography. Looking to geographers, poets, literary scholars, and poems themselves, this article aims to help situate and historicize geopoetics, provide a brief inventory of the current field, and carve out sites for future work.
This is a collaborative portfolio of art and writing from Tumamoc Hill including work by Paul Mir... more 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.
This is a short essay introducing the Poetic Field Research Project at Biosphere 2, which brought... more This is a short essay introducing the Poetic Field Research Project at Biosphere 2, which brought six poets to Biosphere 2 to write poems addressing the site. The full series of poems are linked to here: http://www.terrain.org/2014/currents/biosphere-2-poetry-anthropocene-eric-magrane/
you are here: the journal of creative geography, 2014
One morning in January 2014, we visited Biosphere 2 together, a site where we have both conducted... more One morning in January 2014, we visited Biosphere 2 together, a site where we have both conducted research. This piece is composted from fragments of our conversation, note-taking, and collaborative writing that morning as we investigated the rainforest, paddled on the ocean, and experimented with sound in the lung.
Book review of ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne (Univer... more Book review of ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne (University of Iowa Press 2018)
Marine turtles and the Mapun clan
in Malaysia, organic farmers in the
U.S. Midwest, and conservat... more 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?
Curating the Cosmos
By Elizabeth Straughan, Philip J. Nicholson (University of Glasgow) and Eric ... more Curating the Cosmos By Elizabeth Straughan, Philip J. Nicholson (University of Glasgow) and Eric Magrane (University of Arizona)
This online collection of artworks was brought together in response to, and in conjunction with, a paper session titled Curating the Cosmos organised by Professor Deborah Dixon as part of the 2013 annual conference of the Association of American Geographers held in Los Angeles. The title of the session and subsequently the title of this online exhibit relates to the work of 19th century geographer Alexander von Humboldt. In his volume 'Kosmos', Humbolt outlined a natural scientific philosophy underpinned by aesthetics, a philosophy which he put into practice through the development of instruments that would enable him to make sense of earth processes through the registration of sensations such as heat and movement. These sensations were then visualized via a series of diagrams such as isobars, so that they imparted to an audience something of the unity he believed underlay the Earth's diversity, a unity exemplified by the inter-relationships between organisms and their environments. In doing so, Humbolt reinvigorated exploratory art and inspired a host of artistic works (Dixon 2013).
Routledge Research in Culture, Space, and Identity Book Series, 2020
Published in Routledge's Research in Culture, Space, and Identity Book Series.
ISBN: 97803671453... more 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.
Edited by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos /
Illustrated by Paul Mirocha /
University of Ari... more Edited by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos / Illustrated by Paul Mirocha / University of Arizona Press, 2016 ////////
From the University of Arizona Press:
Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that melds art and science. It captures the stunning biodiversity of the world's most verdant desert through words and images. More than fifty poets and writers—including Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ken Lamberton, Eric Magrane, Jane Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Alberto Ríos, Ofelia Zepeda, and many others—have composed responses to key species of this striking desert. Each creative contribution is joined by an illustration by award-winning artist Paul Mirocha and scientific information about the creature or plant authored by the book's editors.
From the saguaro to the mountain lion, from the black-tailed jackrabbit to the mesquite, the species represented here have evoked compelling and creative responses from each contributor. Just as writers such as Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy have memorialized the desert, this collection is sure to become a new classic, offering up the next generation of voices of this special and beautiful place, the Sonoran Desert.
Despite an historical connection between the arts and sciences, in the past century, the two disc... more 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.
The Rocky Mountain West: A Compendium of Geographic Perspectives, 2020
The extended Rocky Mountain West has recently been home to a number of community-based geohumanit... more The extended Rocky Mountain West has recently been home to a number of community-based geohumanities projects that creatively represent the region and its biodiversity in literary forms. The book A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park (Wolverine Farm Publishing, 2013) included sixty-one contributions in which writers addressed Rocky Mountain species. This project built upon the 2012 “Poetic Inventory of Saguaro National Park” (spiralorb.net/poeticinventory), which itself led to a hybrid field guide-literary anthology called The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press, 2016). Currently, more than fifty writers have contributed to a “Literary Inventory of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument,” highlighting species in this newly (2014) established New Mexico national monument. This contribution to Denver and the Rocky Mountain West includes a short essay that briefly describes these three public geohumanities projects and includes examples of three contributions: John Calderazzo’s “Turkey Vulture,” Laura Pritchett’s “Bear Grace,” and Spencer R. Herrera’s “El Puma and his Tocayos.” The short essay examines these contributions and contextualizes literary field guides and poetic inventories as community geohumanities projects that engage with sense of place and multi-species empathy.
This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what ... more This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics. The first section addresses recent literary work that engages with climate change and the Anthropocene and outlines the geopoetic field as it is currently emerging as a subfield of the geohumanities. Next, I turn to examining climate narratives and frames; following the lead of many human geographers and environmental humanities scholars, I approach climate change as a social and cultural issue. I then discuss the methodology of this particular climate geopoetics project, commenting on and contextualizing some of my writing and thinking process for the climate poems that are woven throughout the article. By centering this article around three poems, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics, the curious nature of the Anthropocene/Anthroposcene as a concept that both centers and de-centers the human, and the tensions on textual form that geopoetic practices create. It is my hope that this project may offer a fresh and unconventional approach to examining the multiple ways that climate change is framed, engaged, and contested.
International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research (IJAGR), 2019
In recent years, geography has taken up a renewed engagement with humanities approaches to place,... more In recent years, geography has taken up a renewed engagement with humanities approaches to place, space, and environment. These approaches offer new possibilities for relevant, publicly engaged research and teaching; applying the geohumanities expands the techniques that geographers can employ to do engaged work in the face of great social and environmental challenges. This article describes two examples of applied geohumanities projects: a community course on climate change and poetry and a creative approach to a citizen science bioblitz. Building on these examples, four questions for future work in applied geohumanities are posed.
Narratives of climate change place it alternately as an environmental justice issue, a national a... more Narratives of climate change place it alternately as an environmental justice issue, a national and global security issue, an apocalyptic threat to life on earth, an opportunity for social change, and more. In this article, I aim to bring critical geographic work on climate narratives into conversation with contemporary poetry, through close readings of specific poems. I argue that the work of contemporary poets, and in particular the work of Indigenous ecopoetics, is rich in poetic texts that offer imaginative practices for recalibrating climate change narratives. I look particularly to works by Craig Santos Perez, Kathy Jetn̄ il-Kijiner, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan. I approach the poems as both a critical geographer and as a poet, thinking through and with their form and content in relation to climate narratives, and in relation to a description of Indigenous ecopoetics by Perez. I meet these poems as stored energy, as actors themselves in a human and more-than-human collective. A close reading of the craft of creative texts—particularly to the level of the line in poetry—highlights the inextricable connection between form and content in how a poem acts and means in the world. As a non-Indigenous reader of texts by Indigenous poets, my goal is not to perform a 'master' reading or analysis of these texts, but rather to learn from the poems and in doing so attempt to decolonize my own thought, a process that is a constant practice.
Writing the Desert is a short presentation of geopoetic practice that includes images of language... more Writing the Desert is a short presentation of geopoetic practice that includes images of language reflected on desert earth as ephemeral earth-writing. It is included as a "Box" in the book Creativity (Harriet Hawkins, Key Ideas in Geography Series).
This piece blends prose, poetry, and drawings in a geopoetic approach to bycatch in the Gulf of C... more 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
This literary essay reflects on poetry installations at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a biore... more This literary essay reflects on poetry installations at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a bioregional zoo, botanical garden, and natural history museum that receives 400,000 visitors a year, where I am the inaugural poet in residence. Through description of some of the various forms of installations---including a poem composted out of water policy documents and installed in a window, poems inside of masks, and a poem painted in blacklight paint to interact with scorpions--- the essay reflects on how creative interpretations at natural history sites can communicate environmental issues in effective and innovative forms.
(F)light: a borderlands song cycle is a creative response to migration. We wrote and composed the... more (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.
The form of the ars poetica is one in which the poet makes a statement on the art of poetry. Cons... more The form of the ars poetica is one in which the poet makes a statement on the art of poetry. Consider this a kind of ars-geo-poetica, a groundsetting for and statement on geopoetics that intends to both situate and to break open the field. This is an invitation for geopoetic texts and practices that draw on the work of poets as well as geographers, for an enchanted, earthy, and transaesthetic approach that moves to juxtapose contemporary poetics, particularly in the realm of ecopoetics, with critical human geography. Looking to geographers, poets, literary scholars, and poems themselves, this article aims to help situate and historicize geopoetics, provide a brief inventory of the current field, and carve out sites for future work.
This is a collaborative portfolio of art and writing from Tumamoc Hill including work by Paul Mir... more 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.
This is a short essay introducing the Poetic Field Research Project at Biosphere 2, which brought... more This is a short essay introducing the Poetic Field Research Project at Biosphere 2, which brought six poets to Biosphere 2 to write poems addressing the site. The full series of poems are linked to here: http://www.terrain.org/2014/currents/biosphere-2-poetry-anthropocene-eric-magrane/
you are here: the journal of creative geography, 2014
One morning in January 2014, we visited Biosphere 2 together, a site where we have both conducted... more One morning in January 2014, we visited Biosphere 2 together, a site where we have both conducted research. This piece is composted from fragments of our conversation, note-taking, and collaborative writing that morning as we investigated the rainforest, paddled on the ocean, and experimented with sound in the lung.
Book review of ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne (Univer... more Book review of ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne (University of Iowa Press 2018)
Marine turtles and the Mapun clan
in Malaysia, organic farmers in the
U.S. Midwest, and conservat... more 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?
Curating the Cosmos
By Elizabeth Straughan, Philip J. Nicholson (University of Glasgow) and Eric ... more Curating the Cosmos By Elizabeth Straughan, Philip J. Nicholson (University of Glasgow) and Eric Magrane (University of Arizona)
This online collection of artworks was brought together in response to, and in conjunction with, a paper session titled Curating the Cosmos organised by Professor Deborah Dixon as part of the 2013 annual conference of the Association of American Geographers held in Los Angeles. The title of the session and subsequently the title of this online exhibit relates to the work of 19th century geographer Alexander von Humboldt. In his volume 'Kosmos', Humbolt outlined a natural scientific philosophy underpinned by aesthetics, a philosophy which he put into practice through the development of instruments that would enable him to make sense of earth processes through the registration of sensations such as heat and movement. These sensations were then visualized via a series of diagrams such as isobars, so that they imparted to an audience something of the unity he believed underlay the Earth's diversity, a unity exemplified by the inter-relationships between organisms and their environments. In doing so, Humbolt reinvigorated exploratory art and inspired a host of artistic works (Dixon 2013).
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Books by Eric Magrane
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.
Illustrated by Paul Mirocha /
University of Arizona Press, 2016 ////////
From the University of Arizona Press:
Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that melds art and science. It captures the stunning biodiversity of the world's most verdant desert through words and images. More than fifty poets and writers—including Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ken Lamberton, Eric Magrane, Jane Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Alberto Ríos, Ofelia Zepeda, and many others—have composed responses to key species of this striking desert. Each creative contribution is joined by an illustration by award-winning artist Paul Mirocha and scientific information about the creature or plant authored by the book's editors.
From the saguaro to the mountain lion, from the black-tailed jackrabbit to the mesquite, the species represented here have evoked compelling and creative responses from each contributor. Just as writers such as Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy have memorialized the desert, this collection is sure to become a new classic, offering up the next generation of voices of this special and beautiful place, the Sonoran Desert.
Papers by Eric Magrane
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.
Book Reviews by Eric Magrane
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?
Websites by Eric Magrane
By Elizabeth Straughan, Philip J. Nicholson (University of Glasgow) and Eric Magrane (University of Arizona)
This online collection of artworks was brought together in response to, and in conjunction with, a paper session titled Curating the Cosmos organised by Professor Deborah Dixon as part of the 2013 annual conference of the Association of American Geographers held in Los Angeles. The title of the session and subsequently the title of this online exhibit relates to the work of 19th century geographer Alexander von Humboldt. In his volume 'Kosmos', Humbolt outlined a natural scientific philosophy underpinned by aesthetics, a philosophy which he put into practice through the development of instruments that would enable him to make sense of earth processes through the registration of sensations such as heat and movement. These sensations were then visualized via a series of diagrams such as isobars, so that they imparted to an audience something of the unity he believed underlay the Earth's diversity, a unity exemplified by the inter-relationships between organisms and their environments. In doing so, Humbolt reinvigorated exploratory art and inspired a host of artistic works (Dixon 2013).
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.
Illustrated by Paul Mirocha /
University of Arizona Press, 2016 ////////
From the University of Arizona Press:
Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that melds art and science. It captures the stunning biodiversity of the world's most verdant desert through words and images. More than fifty poets and writers—including Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ken Lamberton, Eric Magrane, Jane Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Alberto Ríos, Ofelia Zepeda, and many others—have composed responses to key species of this striking desert. Each creative contribution is joined by an illustration by award-winning artist Paul Mirocha and scientific information about the creature or plant authored by the book's editors.
From the saguaro to the mountain lion, from the black-tailed jackrabbit to the mesquite, the species represented here have evoked compelling and creative responses from each contributor. Just as writers such as Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy have memorialized the desert, this collection is sure to become a new classic, offering up the next generation of voices of this special and beautiful place, the Sonoran Desert.
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.
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?
By Elizabeth Straughan, Philip J. Nicholson (University of Glasgow) and Eric Magrane (University of Arizona)
This online collection of artworks was brought together in response to, and in conjunction with, a paper session titled Curating the Cosmos organised by Professor Deborah Dixon as part of the 2013 annual conference of the Association of American Geographers held in Los Angeles. The title of the session and subsequently the title of this online exhibit relates to the work of 19th century geographer Alexander von Humboldt. In his volume 'Kosmos', Humbolt outlined a natural scientific philosophy underpinned by aesthetics, a philosophy which he put into practice through the development of instruments that would enable him to make sense of earth processes through the registration of sensations such as heat and movement. These sensations were then visualized via a series of diagrams such as isobars, so that they imparted to an audience something of the unity he believed underlay the Earth's diversity, a unity exemplified by the inter-relationships between organisms and their environments. In doing so, Humbolt reinvigorated exploratory art and inspired a host of artistic works (Dixon 2013).