Situated Poetics and Land Stewardship: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Kamau Brathwaite

Abstract: This article theorizes a reading hermeneutic and environmental literary history for what I call "situated poetics": limit cases of literature that build more-than-representational relationships between language and materials to intervene in discourses of land use. In two odd scenes from different arenas of literary history, Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bajan poet Kamau Brathwaite go to great lengths to imagine a poetry that is at once literary technique, sculptural object, and living landscape. Installing poetry on their private landholdings to oppose government encroachments on their land and artistic projects, each poet diagnoses the status of property in the late twentieth century. At the same time, in this poetry that limns poetic and environmental making, each poet strains to create something resembling a "land trust" to protect local customary use patterns and cultures of human and interspecies relationships. In the surprising comparison between these poets emerges a theory of poetics as an environmental technology and as a trust of knowledge for reimagining the spatialization of cultural knowledge.