A Poetics of Place: The Poetry of Ralph Gustafson

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Kirk-Rudeen, Shelley, 2006 “Zumwalt Prairie” in Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place accessed at http://www.hevanet.com/windfall/poetryofplace.html Paglia, Camille (1993). Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-017209-2. Kearney, Richard (2014). "Introduction". The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-310752-1. Owen Earnshaw: Welcoming the Lord: The Nativity as an archetype for the poetics of places of worship Colette Hughes/Nic Aodha: Of Wasteness and Desolation,[..]a Day of Trumpet and Alarm against the Fenced Cities and the High Towers (Zephaniah 1:6): David Jones's Christian Voyage in" The Anathemata, fragments of an attempted writing

Two place poems by 11 year olds in place in Island Park in Fargo, North Dakota. There is a National Writing Project in the United States that provides a template for school students to write place based poetry. I don’t know whether these poems are a product of this but they certainly illustrate the broad appeal of the poetry of place. Paul Hills (Courtauld Institute of Art): The Poetics of Place in the Paintings of Giovanni Bellini, with a Coda on David Jones Cresswell, Timothy 2015, Topo-poetics: Poetry and Place, Royal Holloway University of London, Doctoral Thesis in English-Creative Writing, at https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/files/25313757/Complete_poems.2015.final_signed.pdf Curran’s exhibited work gestures towards these entanglements between the vegetal landscape, the domestic interior, the decorative surface and the gendering of the spaces of production and presentation. Owen Sheers in his essay “Poetry and Place: some personal reflections” suggests that: “A poem like landscape, situates us by translating the abstract world of thought and feeling into a physical language.” His essay is illustrated with photos of Welsh mountains, so by “physical language” I think he means a language that responds to the carefully observed characteristics of a particular place yet makes imaginative connections with broader feelings and ideas.

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The assemblage sculptures on show in this exhibition draw on anthropological, architectural and theatrical set traditions. Ralph deploys a collection of treasures found in gutters, scrap yards, skips, junk shops and car boot sales. ‘Like’ and ‘unlike’ are juxtaposed, reinforcing their individual poignancy. Thus, the pathos and odd beauty of these castaway objects are both maximised and celebrated. The works have been carefully installed by the artist to ensure effective use of interstitial space, paying close attention to the relationships and negative spaces between each object. Consequently, Ralph’s work invites us to question the narrative of these objects and how they are perceived in a wider context. The exhibited body of work explores the concept of nostalgia through re-imagining and re-defining everyday objects. It developed in response to a set of handmade towels found at the artist’s ancestral family home, which has been handed down through generations, and subtly altered over time with lace trims, fabric patches and crocheted pieces. These additions not only prolonged the towels’ practical life but also recorded the owners’ touch, adding a delicate personal narrative to each object. discussed by Aristotle in the Poetics as the shift of the tragic protagonist’s fortune from good to bad, which is essential to the plot of a tragedy. It is often an ironic twist, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex when a messenger brings Oedipus news about his parents that he thinks… Read More

Joaquín Cruz Lamas: Indigenous Cosmology and Roman Catholicism in the Convent of San Gabriel Cholula Nora Kirkham: "Witnessing Presence: Pilgrimage and Ecstatic Dwelling in Denise Levertov's Mountain Poetry" Yva Jung studied Fine Art in Seoul and New York before receiving her practice-led PhD from Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2016. She has held artist residencies and exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the UK and internationally.Screen capture of the map of the Seattle Poetic Grid, showing locations of poems about places in the city. The Poetics of Space ( French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about architecture by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Elizabeth Rainsford-McMahon: The Crafting of ‘Still-Points’ in Thomas Merton’s Journalistic Writing Places have been remarkably dependable sources of inspiration for poets. Poetic accounts of places imagined or real are to be found throughout the history of Western civilization – Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s poems about farms and farming, Dante’s Inferno, Wordsworth poems of the English Lake District and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. At least two recent books of poems are simply titled Place (one by Allen Fisher, and the other by Jorie Graham).