The Radical Writing Podcast Episode 3 - The Page as Landscape: Harriet Tarlo’s Ground Aslant with Dr Amil Mohanan and Associate Professor Kate Grandjouan

Kemp, Sam, Grandjouan, Kate and Mohanan, Amil (2024) The Radical Writing Podcast Episode 3 - The Page as Landscape: Harriet Tarlo’s Ground Aslant with Dr Amil Mohanan and Associate Professor Kate Grandjouan. [Audio]

Abstract

How do you write a landscape? Associate Professor of Art History Kate Grandjouan and cultural geographer and data scientist Dr Amil Mohanan join me to discuss place, poetry, and inconclusive endings. The Ground Aslant, an anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry is edited by Harriet Tarlo and was published by Shearsman in 2011. It features poetry by some of the U.K.’s most prominent landscape poets such as Peter Riley, Zoe Skoulding and Frances Presley, as well as Tarlo herself. This is the only text in the Radical Writing Podcast series to have ‘radical’ in the name, and Tarlo explains that the genre reaches for a broad but definite aim of radicality in terms of form, language and subject. Play, in both how the poem appears on the page and in what it explores, is key to approaching the work, and the genre is purposely difficult to pin down. The poetry moves beyond the rose-tinted pastoral, but recognises its enduring presence in the fields and lanes of Britain, and touches on the politics of ecopoetry, without being subsumed into it. As Tarlo writes, the territory of these poems lie ‘betwixt and between’, both in terms of their engagement with, and positioning between, the pastoral and ecopoetic genres, and in the innovative linguistic games they play with sound, sense, and form, and, ultimately, language’s slippery relationship with place.

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