>Any comments re "globalisation" (real and imagined) and its "effect" on
>regional poetries, the integrity of "local identification", and notions of
>place? (Quotation marks could go around any part of this!) The forthcoming
>Salt is entitled "International Regionalism" and picks up on this issue in
>a variety of ways. Given the geographical diversity of this list I'd
>welcome any input on the subject.
John: That's an interesting question in the Irish context, given the
focus on topography from the ancient Dindshenchas, through Spenser's
proposals for landscaping through cleansing (Faerie Queene & View of the
Present State of Ireland), to the current debased nostalgia for region
which features in much mainstream work - the terrain now slicker than
even Spenser might want.
But although that trajectory may be a little more exaggerated in Ireland
than in some quarters, I'm sure native Americans and Australians could
plot it just as fully across their world, and there are evident
resonances in what Ric and Peter report from the English 'regions'.
I'm interested in more recent inflections and tensions; ones that are
implicit in your linking of "local identification" to "the geographical
diversity of this list". The question of where 'identity' hides when the
local is reduced to the generic, and electronic networks supplant
traditional ones. It's not just the landscapes that are altering under
commercial pressures and new techniques such as data-mining, but the
beasts that hunt there and are hunted. Another way the easy "I" fails the
poem . . .
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Trevor Joyce
Apple Cork IS&T
Phone : +353-21-284405
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