The 'Specific evidentness' of contemporary radical landscape poetry: Innovative form and spatial presence in The Ground Aslant

This article attempts to account for the spatialization of language in a selection of radical landscape poems from Harriet Tarlo's 2011 anthology, The Ground Aslant. Following Merleau-Ponty, I suggest that the poems share a 'specific evidentness' with objects and phenomena in the environment, which unsettles ontological hierarchies in which artworks, including poems, 'represent' the world. On the other hand, I understand confidence in the ontological reality of that world to relate in important ways to the possibility of artistic representation, as Alva Noë and Martin Seel propose. Radical landscape poems offer a way out of the tension between the artwork as representation of something, and as object with phenomenal presence, in that they are both 'seen' and 'seen through', according to Lyotard's formulation in Discourse, Figure.