Field writing is a way of making a relation with one’s immediate surroundings: call that the field, the world, the phenomenal, the present, the real. Field poetics urge you to put aside goals and frameworks, and to let the world in. This exploration of the Portage Bay shoreline will plunge you into a field writing exercise that explores your own poetics of relation to local waters. You can expect ripples, splashes, close encounters with jetsam . . . culminating in a polyvocal recitation of our findings.
Who works with field writing? Scientists, poets, anthropologists, spies, cartographers, navigators, philosophers, and others—to capture observations, to generate theory in relation to place, and to document processes as they occur. Workshop facilitators Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Hazard have used field writing to generate hypotheses for ecological studies, to write poems, to reflect on histories of conquest and ongoing Indigenous life ways as resistance to colonial violence, and to make theory about queer and trans embodiment in more-than-human dimensions.
In this workshop, we will ground field composition in two methods: first, the transect* as a way ecologists can sample diversity or poets can sample memory and perception, and second, diffraction** as a way philosophers can sense and explore how things come to matter in relation.
By the end, we will engineer individual and collaborative poems, and put them into dialog with texts ranging from Indigenous poetics and queer feminist theory to European explorers’ logs and floodplain engineering documents.
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine’s research focuses on ecology and politics of rivers and their multi-species inhabitants. Trained in ecology, geomorphology, social science, and feminist science and technology studies, he facilitates collaborative research in partnership with Native nations, agencies, and citizen scientists. His forthcoming book is Underflow: Transfiguring riverine relations, imagining queer-trans ecologies.
July Hazard is a poet and theorist who teaches in UW's Comparative History of Ideas Department and the Program on the Environment. July's current research investigates the altered shorelines of the Black and Duwamish rivers, the assembly of poetic voice under the guidance of animals, and the forest relations of trans and queer youth in rural Appalachia.
* A transect is a tool used in ecology and hydrology to aid in collecting a systematic sample of a population (of plant species, bird nests, resting sea lions, or river depths, for example). One lays a tape measure in a straight line across the land or water. When counting entities along a transect, you only count ones that are actually touching the tape measure. It’s a way of focusing vision, of reducing the bias that humans naturally feel towards larger or more interesting organisms. Usually the scientist collects data along several parallel transects and compares between them, or sums the data to characterize the larger population.
** Diffraction is the spreading of waves upon passing through a gap or over an edge. Think of a rainbow issuing from a prism. On the water’s surface, the waves bend around the corners of the obstacle and into its lee. If there are multiple diffracted waves spreading, their patterns begin to interfere.