Geopoetics: On organising, mourning, and the incalculable

Abstract

In this commentary, I trace some of the earthy, mineral, and more-than-human properties of Magrane’s climate poems in order to emphasise the urgency of the geopoetics project. In particular, I consider Magrane’s use of constraint, de/composition, and juxtaposition as geopoetic techniques. In addition to challenging abstractions of climate change and enlivening critical and creative approaches for geography and the geohumanities, I propose that geopoetics may cultivate humility and participate in gestures of mourning. In closing, I suggest further questions for the grammar of geopoetics and geography in the midst of the current intersecting ecological, medical, economic and social crises.

Geophilosophies: towards another sense of the earth

“…Responding to the Anthropocene as a symptom of Western humanist anthropocentrism and climate catastrophe, as well as the sense that today biopolitics would be something ill-equipped to understand contemporary capitalist governance (Povinelli 2016;Yusoff 2018), the question of the geo-emerges in this work as a shared concern with unsettling dominant abstractions of time and individuation. As with recent interventions in geopoetics (Engelmann 2021), such theorisations of the geo-suggest attending to indiscernible durations of time and space can help transform, or even destroy, anthropocentric modes of thought, or what Yusoff (2017, p. 122) describes as a process of "reigniting a stratigraphic imagination in social theory".…”