The Place Where You Aren't

Writers and displacement

Now and then, someone organises a scholarly conference on the importance to writers of a sense of place (generally in some place unreachable by public transport). But the other reason I never end up going is that, with a few exceptions, or apparent exceptions, the writers who fascinate me do not have a sense of place so much as a sense of displacement.

Though I think this may always have been so, I became conscious of it while teaching on the University of Glamorgan's Masters in Writing degree when I was successively tutor to three poets, all émigrées to the UK from the USA – Tamar Yoseloff, Karen Annesen and Barbara Marsh. What struck me about all of them was that they observed the place where they now lived differently; they noticed and highlighted things that for a native-born poet might not have stood out, and over and over, their sense of the place where they were was informed by their equally keen sense of that other place where they had once been, but now were not.

A perfectly adjusted organism would be silent

- E M Forster: A Passage to India

( Read more... )