Look closely at a typical map, and you will notice that it is covered in language—the names of countries, types of rivers, cardinal directions. Language helps shape geography and vice versa. For thousands of years, places and place names have served as inspiration for poets writing odes to their hometowns or telling the histories of where they come from. At the same time, poets have directly influenced the spaces around them, such as by popularizing the usage of particular place names or by challenging existing ideas of boundaries and belonging.
In this workshop, students learned about the intertwined history between place naming and poetry. The goal of this workshop is to provide students with tools for understanding, challenging, and subverting geographic language, and in doing so, for imagining new geographies. Here, I will provide a shortened overview of several exercises you might use to explore the spaces around you.
The Language on a Map
To begin the workshop, I typically ask students to look more closely at a map and consider the language on it. Some resources for finding less common maps include the David Rumsey Map Collection, the Library of Congress Map Collection, and Old Maps Online.
We look at this artwork titled “Fata Morgana” by Damon Zucconi, which shows Google Maps with everything removed except the text labels, and discuss the role language plays on a map. How are words on a map defined? What is the language on a map communicating? Who does the language on a map belong to? What does language offer a map and what does it take away?
We also often read the poem “Maps” by Yesenia Montilla, which brings up ideas including the borders and separation imposed by maps and the way maps are constructed from aesthetic features such as lines and colors, imposed over a physical landscape.
The Space of a Poem
During the workshop, I often share, or ask students to share, a poem that examines place and we discuss it together. Some questions we consider include: What geographic terms or place names does the author use to refer to a place? What are the implications of using this place name, and are there alternate names that are included or excluded? How does place function within this poem, and how does it compare to how place functions on a geographic map? How do elements of space such as distance, size, access, boundaries appear or disappear in this poem? How does the space of the poem allow for or preclude belonging? Sometimes, I ask students to draw a map of the space in the poem and compare it to a more typical map of the space.
Some poems we’ve discussed in the past include “Good Morning” by Langston Hughes, “Place Name: Oracabessa” by Kei Miller, “The Border: A Double Sonnet” by Alberto Ríos, “The Map” by Elizabeth Bishop, “Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula” by Franny Choi, “Rootless” by Jenny Xie, “the middle east is missing” by Marwa Helal, “There Is a Street Named After Martin Luther King Jr. In Every City” by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, and “Columbus” by Maggie Smith. Typically, the person who suggested the poem also presents some research about the author and the context in which the poem was written.
Making a Poem from a Map
Building on the ideas they discussed above, students are encouraged to write their own poem using the following prompt:
Write a poem using a map as a starting point. For example, you might consider adding to the text on a map, erasing text from the map, redrawing the map, or describing the map. Consider the implications of how you incorporate space into your poem, and how this affects our relationship to a space and sense of belonging.
An initial version of this workshop was originally created with the Audit the Streets Project at MIT run by Catherine D’Ignazio, which studies names in the American heritage landscape.
Hua Xi (she/they) is a poet and an artist. Their poetry has appeared in the New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. They have won the Boston Review Poetry Contest and received a 2022 Gwenn A. Nusbaum/WWBA “Poets to Come” Scholarship by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. They sometimes teach poetry workshops with the Spatial Poetry Project.