Writing poetry in/to place

This chapter performs a poetic "topoanalysis" where I work through seven scenes from my own biography of place. In his elegant book, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard (1964) described topoanalysis as the systematic study of the "sites of our intimate lives" (p. 8). He weaves the work of poets and novelists through his own recollections of homes and houses. In writing into my memories, I seek not to assemble "exact recollections" but to honour the "mellowness and imprecision" that Bachelard talks about, as though "something fluid had collected our memories and we ourselves were dissolved in this fluid of the past" (p. 57). Thus this chapter daydreams into the scenes and sites of memories that are now “quite” dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another" (Rilke, cited by Bachelard, 1964, p. 57). Though each poem begins with a marker of space and time-a place, a year, a title-please hold these contours lightly. In Bachelard’s topoanalysis, our lost houses (and our lost selves) "forever continue to Live on in us" (p. 56).