Dart Critics Flashcards
Intro to the poem?
Alice Oswald’s book-length poem Dart (2002) is plainly a geographical poem. It is structured by the flow of the river Dart from its source on a moor in Devon to its end in the English Channel
How does the author refer to it?
Oswald herself calls it a ‘map poem’
The poem’s transitions are ‘geographical, not rational’, in Oswald’s words
Oswald describes the voice of the poem?
Dart said in an interview ‘So the poem’s full of voices. It’s made of scraps of talk from people who live and work on the Dart. Not entirely by me at all.’
Dart’s geography as concurrent flows of water, history and feeling?
Aligns with British social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey’s call for geographers to map place as as ‘constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’
She quotes a study in the middle oft he poem?
Oswald quotes some sentences from Theodor Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos, an anthroposophic study of the shaping power of water flows on natural and human physiology. As given, the lines are simply descriptions of water’s physical properties
Schwenk’s original context?
In their original context, however, Schwenk’s phrases lead to a deeper claim, that the sliding surfaces of waves, whirlpools or eddies demonstrate ‘something like the inner nature of a living being’. (Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos)
What the river dart is not?
Peter Howarth - Oswald’s river Dart, then, is not some ideal local community where everyone knows their place in a self-contained ecological and communitarian web
Her writing style?
Robert Baker - ‘she is at once colloquial and literary’
Oswald’s poetry preference?
In her introduction to an anthology she edited, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the
Planet, she speaks of her preference for ‘restless poems’
The language she uses in the poem?
Oswald tells us in a prefatory note of the way she composed it
‘This poem is made from the language of people who love and work on the Dart’
‘All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings’
Her old work?
She worked for several years as a gardener
The poem accumulates?
Robert Baker - ‘it gathers voices as it goes’
How she put together the poem?
It is ‘found poetry’ - finding the poetry in everyday speech
She made a paraphrase of what people said but also included phrases which stuck in her mind
