Seismic, or Topogorgical, Poetry

Abstract

The Northern Tableland plateau of New South Wales, Australia, is geologically and botanically diverse. Intensively cleared of its original vegetation since European settlement in the late-eighteenth century, the Tableland comprises a network of gorges, around which a conservation system has developed in recent decades. Protected from human impacts by virtue of the ruggedness and inaccessibility of the terrain, endemic plants populate the rim and interior reaches of these chasms. With a focus on the Tableland region, this chapter proposes a collaborative, multispecies, and postcolonial geopoetics of Australian gorgelands. In particular, it outlines three methods of geopoetics: gorge-walking, concrete-visual composition, and sonnetic composting. These approaches move between poetic practice, geographical consciousness, and botanical discourse within a phyto-geopoetics of place. Beginning with the journals of nineteenth-century explorer-surveyor John Oxley as his party traveled through the Tableland, this chapter theorizes topogorgical poetry as a mode of geopoetic practice that unsettles the topographical tradition prevailing in landscape writing. The topogorgical mode heralds a shift from the scenic to the seismic—from the visual orientation of pleasing prospects to the corporeal intergradations of convulsive country. The chapter situates my Tableland phyto-geopoetics in relation to radical landscape poetry, experimental art, and field-based creative practices.