TY - JOUR
T1 - The 'Specific evidentness' of contemporary radical landscape poetry
T2 - Innovative form and spatial presence in The Ground Aslant
AU - Widger, Eleanore
N1 - no funding info
PY - 2016/10/15
Y1 - 2016/10/15
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - radical landscape poetry
KW - walking
KW - aesthetic perception
KW - phenomenology
KW - ecology
KW - ecofeminism
KW - enactivism
KW - situated knowledge
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85016437119&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/english/efw032
DO - 10.1093/english/efw032
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85016437119
VL - 65
SP - 363
EP - 386
JO - English: Journal of the English Association
JF - English: Journal of the English Association
SN - 0013-8215
IS - 251
ER -