The idea of deep or geological time has been troubling to conceptions of human importance since it was first mooted by Scottish geologist James Hutton in the late eighteenth century.

 

The psychological effects of this realisation were summed up by Hutton’s friend and mathematician John Playfair who, on looking at the strata of the angular unconformity at Siccar Point in 1788, commented that "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time". If we are to reconceive our place in the wider, more-than-human world, then an understanding of our place in deep time is vital. We are products of 3.5 billion years of evolution, one of almost countless species that have appeared and then disappeared. As Canadian poet Don McKay suggests, ‘[i]nhabiting deep time imaginatively we give up mastery and gain mutuality, at least for that brief - but let us hope, expandable – period of astonishment.’

 

In this seminar we will think about ways in which poets and non-fiction writers have attempted to place the human within deep time. The Romantic poet Charlotte Smith addressed the issue in her poem “Beachy Head”. In particular, I will offer a reading of the work of Canadian poet Don McKay who has written a number of poetry collections which address deep time. McKay calls what he is writing “geopoetry”. In his poetry, and a series of related essays, McKay examines how poetry can provide a “bridge over the infamous gulf separating scientific from poetic frames of mind.” We will also consider the Time Song: Searching for Doggerland by Julia Blackburn and Otherlands by Thomas Halliday.

 

Students will be invited to respond to the seminar in a number of ways; they may write a creative response to the idea of deep time, either a series of poems or a piece of creative fiction or non-fiction, or a more traditional essay. Hybrid forms area also encouraged, for example an essay which explores both theory and creative response.

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Bibliography

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Blackburn, Julia. Time Song (London, Jonathan Cape, 2019)
Dunkerley, Hugh. Hare Blaenau Ffestiniog, Cinnamon Press, 2010)
Dunkerley, Hugh. Kin (Blaenau Ffestiniog Cinnamon Press, 2019)
Dunkerley, Hugh. ‘Translating Wilderness: Ecopoetics and the Poetry of Don MacKay’ in
The Voice in Contemporary Poetry, ed, Norgate, S. (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2013)
Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics (Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
Halliday, Thomas. Otherlands (London, Allen Lane, 2002)
McKay, Don. All New Animal Acts (Kentville, Gaspereau Press, 2020)
McKay, Don. Paradoxides (Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2012)
McKay, Don. Strike/Slip (Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2006)

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