A Definite Address

We all live in the universe – this we should not forget, but aside from that, we each have a simpler and more definite address: a country, a city, a street, a building, an apartment. The presence of so precise an address is the criterion by which original poetry is distinguished from the pretentious and the artificial.

A provocative place to start, perhaps; but a place to start nonetheless. That’s Russian Futurist poet Samuil Marshak, and it’s a quote that prefaced an anthology I recently edited, City State: New London Poetry. I find it hard to know what to say about place… it infects, and is the foundation for, so much of my work as a writer. There is one tradition of thinking – outdated, in my opinion – that discredits the importance of place in writing, privileging instead that which is ‘universal’… the writing of common, human experience that paradoxically transcends specific, grounded realities.

But I’m not convinced by this. Artists are limited beings, and that limit is where the interest lies. ‘The local is the only universal’, said the American Modernist William Carlos Williams (above, on the dog and bone), whose incredible long poem Paterson captures the character of his hometown in New Jersey, and is a must-read for anyone interested in place and poetry. The notion that a reader/listener would only be interested in experiences they can directly ‘relate to’ is an affront to their intelligence. I’m a pretty Londoncentric writer as this city is the place that infects me, but as a reader I’m interested in all sorts of different places and how artists configure them.

And this, I reckon, is a key point… how place is not a solid, knowable, thing – not a riddle to be solved – but a fluid construct that changes depending on your viewpoint. I know this is like 1960s literary theory 101, but I believe it. I liked seeing Jay Bernard’s Jay Town map on this site, because it seems to be quite consciously playing with those parameters of the real and the fictional place. Iain Sinclair is of course a great contemporary exponent of this, with his ‘documentary fiction’. There’s also a great blog I recommend to anyone with a spare half hour. It’s called Strange Maps and, well, does what it says on the tin.

For me, the concept of place has nothing to do with capturing objective ‘reality’ – it is to do with how we place ourselves. Place as a verb: an active force, an energy field.