Zeta landscape: poetry, place, pastoral

Carol Watts reflects on the practice of her ongoing site-specific poetry project, Zeta Landscape, and its relation to both the pastoral and the ‘strange laws’ of prime numbers. She interrogates the concept of place in loco-descriptive nature poetry, drawing on Michel Foucault’s discussion of pastoral power and the concept of milieu. Arguing that the traditions of pastoral poetry are imbricated with questions of governmentality and accumulation, she examines the ways in which poetry might mark a wandering beyond enclosure, that of a “multiplicity on the move”. Its ontological geographies are challenged in the work of Lisa Robertson, whose poetry is shown not only to expose pastoral as a field of subjectivation, but also reveals in its obsolescence the brokering of other sensoria and desires. Peter Larkin’s account of Robertson’s counter-utopian position is then tracked into the discussion of scarcity in his own work, and to the renewed commitment to the contingencies of place discovered there. The poetics of the Zeta Landscape project set out to walk this pastoral imaginary, the “matter of the sheep-fold”, via a Deleuzian understanding of Riemannian space.