“Feminine geographies” – the concept and this panel more
specifically – groups a plurality of ways of inscribing and describing spaces. The investigative/poetic field works I’m going
to talk about today map “feminine” positionalities onto space, as much as these
manifest as critical, alternative gestures and articulations aligned oppositionally
to dominant forces/ideologies that operate culturally, such as city planning
undertaken primarily with auto-mobility, boy’s sports, and neoliberalist economic
development in mind. The danger of claiming a “feminine” positionality as such
is the appearance of constructing a
binaristic system when in fact myriad forces operate on and modify
environments, and thus influence practices and forms of habitation, for animals
and non-animals alike. Still, one has to wonder what the world or even the United States
would look like if women were in charge, and still, one approaches place from
an embodied position. Thus, my method of pedestrian counter-mapping is part of
this oppositional alignment, and it is also particular to my female-bodied
experience. I have, in many different circumstances over a long period of time,
situated myself as a lone figure investigating modified landscapes, driven by
the question: what happens when I put my body in this space? What events, juxtapositions,
effects emerge that might otherwise go unaccounted?
Today I’m going to share two different works that fall under
a larger, on-going project that I call “Geography Walking.” The ground covered
is two adjacent sites – a community garden and a dirt footpath by a river – and
both pieces arise from a countermapping practice that is both on-the-ground and
engages googlemaps satellite images. I argue that these images are in fact
maps, because, increasingly, they replace paper maps – and, also, significantly,
acts of walking, wandering, and getting lost. We use them to navigate; they are
a means by which we come to form our own mental maps of the spaces around us. The "taking back"
of space from digital imperialism is one of the radical aspects of my poetics of
place. When we navigate with Googlemaps or GPS, our feet are not on the
ground where we are: we are “grounded” in the digital realm. The female voice
absolves us of the need to ask directions from locals (which is usually the
purview of the woman passenger, anyway), and thus to encounter the economic,
political, racial, etc., differences that constitute a particular place. In
both of the pieces I’ll share today, I’m drawing on experiences of material
spaces and representing the differences that constitute these. I do think it
takes a subject that understands the implications of difference to do that.
It’s been helpful to me to work in relation to the broader
context of humanist geography. I see
mine as a humanimal-materialist geography that documents relations in the
mingling of human and non-human trajectories at a given site. I see my work as
broadening the aperture of humanist geography by emphasizing “social” linkages
between human and non-human presences. I’m borrowing this idea from Doreen Massey,
who critiques hegemonic mapping practices that evade the social dynamism of
lived spaces. She calls attention to “the potential geographies of our social
responsibility”; I love her mandate that “For the future to be open, space must
be open too.” I think feminine, experiential, experimental geography is a means
of opening space.
The first is “Always Underfoot,” a poetic investigation that
takes its title from Mary Austin, and, this quote, together with one from Thoreau, suggest an approach to regional environment as a temporal,
material surround, and also the “writing on the face of the earth.” Thoreau is
talking about farmers, but, as you’ll hear in a minute, this inscriptatory
gesture is one I grant to non-human agents as well. So the differences I’m
inscribing are biological (or even zoological), social, and temporal
(historical).
“Always Underfoot“
considers the forces that shape place: individual/communal (as in the community
garden), and natural (climate, geography, non-human inhabitants, etc.) /cultural-global
(transportation, industrial-scale farms, big box stores) in my regional
environment. It critiques maps as representations of actual spaces. It situates
place as an active site under stabilizing and destabilizing pressures, social, geologic,
and economic. It imagines a “collaborative geography.” It invents a historical
perspective that maps back through what I call “Imaginative Geography” (a
phrase that resonates with Edward Said’s post-Colonialism, but is not meant to
re-present it, merely). I’m going to the section called “Imaginative
Geographical Evidence,” the last in this six-section poem. Here’s the
Googlemaps image that spurred this section. [IMAGE]
VI. Imaginative Geographical Evidence
Talk a walk. Write a
poem piecing together geographical evidence. Take another walk. Keep writing a
poem. Write imaginative memory. Send out signals and write the shapes that
return. This is your walk. Keep writing the poem piecing together geographical
evidence and imaginative memory.
in mapped omissions
a landscape rewritten
in scars
like censorship
like a wing broken off, hanging
from a paved spine
a nearly non-visible waterway winds, cleaves wing and park,
wing and garden
the footbridge bridges
the unidentified barely-visible paths along the water where
we lives live
all feet furthermore writing
collaborative geographies
scattered stands of bitter cherry, mountain ash,
serviceberry, plum, hawthorn, alder, water birch, quaking aspen, pacific
willow, juniper, douglas fir, spruce, larch pine
apple blossoms are clustered on
short, spur-like branches
*
rough grassy stretch, a footpath etched deeply diagonally
transecting
the rough grass unruffled curve of railroad tracks
flowing roads
& paths land down
“Pullman River Walk” “F.J. Koppel’s Milky-Way Dairy”
footpaths cut through trees, fields
footpaths down to the riverbank
crossing the river
the almost perfectly regular white dashes of “Campus Vista”
mobile home park
relatively fat bands of trees
houses on the ridge
etched grid of garden plots
“Koppel
Community Garden
white squares of picnic shelter, shed
*
cows gazing in the town commons: bunchgrass, little
sunflower, silky lupin: this is 1871
physical realities under the slow solid heavy weight of
cows, the sound of grass ripping, jaws pulverizing, grinding solid weight
slowly moving, roving eroding morning and evening patterns: this is 1936
the narrow neck near the barn, the flaring shape of the
field between the riverbank and hillside, how many cows, how far out they
spread, hooves brushing grass, flies, small scatter of systems, urine soaking
in, the pattern of scatter, manure, the shifting patterns, flies and frogs in
the river, dirt, rocks, and grasses and water and plants and shrubs and trees.
The flood that breached the riverbanks, held back by a sandbag barrier: this is
1948
bitter cherry, hawthorn, alder, water birch, pacific willow,
soil memory / grass memory / push down through soil, soil remembering, pushed
aside, different roots seeking differently / remembering the exchange of
nitrogen / how it lay where it was / water, temperature, implements, additives
and seeds / and microbes and roots and
beetles and heaviness and dirties and soils: this is 1954
before ten-wide, twelve-wide, and single-wide home-making:
this is 1956
before SE Professional
Mall Boulevard : this is 1972
before a half-inch blanket of volcanic ash: this is 1979
before the grid of garden plots: this is 1987
*
previous growth patterns of trees / along waterways, up
hillsides
the textures of prairie
dirt beneath hooves and the heaviness of cows
becoming history
*
circumstance brings us to question abridging circumstance
that is, a workaday fact
physical underfoot realities
when simply walking our tiny human toxics, risks are small
feet set down in the ruminant patterns of cows
feet trailing along the dirt path by the river
tracing the trailing of feet upon feet, writing
in the shadows of patterns, the whiff of time run-off
that sends one back, wandering, dirt word in hand
returning it
[end of poem]
In this next piece, I wanted to intervene textually on the
digital Gogglemaps image, for a truly “collaborative geography,” perhaps. The
result is a “map-poem,” called “The Confluence.” Pictured here is the
confluence of Paradise Creek and the South Fork of the Palouse River in Pullman , Washington
As a work of counter-mapping, “The Confluence” draws on the
naturalized symbolic
vocabulary of mapping through two contrasting modes: it juxtaposes
visual data of the screenshot with embodied, on-the-ground, experiential data communicated
verbally and numerically as “coordinates.” This is an interactive map, so it
sort of defeats the purpose if I stand here and talk about it. So I’m going to give you a few minutes to
take it in – either on your own browser, on this screen, or with the printouts.
[collaborative reading of
coordinates / end of talk]
