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| Stuart McLean & Jenny Schmid |
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SEA POEM
"Sea" was originally written for a week-long residential seminar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fé, New Mexico that I co-organized with Anand Pandian of Johns Hopkins University. The topic of the seminar was "Literary Anthropology" and its aim was to consider the practice of writing as a means of exploring and carrying forward anthropological encounters. As we put is in our proposal for the seminar: "To take anthropology as an endeavor of encounter is to emphasize its creative and emergent dimensions: less a confrontation with what is already known and given, and more a process of open-ended transformation of selves, others, and worlds." The poem "Sea" draws upon materials encountered in my ongoing research in Orkney, including historical sources (the death of earl Sigurd at the Battle of Clontarf as recounted in the Orkneyinga Saga, the death of Lord Kitchener in World War 1), collaged fragments of other texts (such as the poetry of George Mackay Brown) and comparative material (the figure of Sedna in Inuit art and mythology, to whom i was introduced by Tom Muir). In contrast to a more conventionally conceived academic texts, the poem seeks to conjure a metamorphic space of virtual co-existence in which pasts and present, history and mythology etc. can engage and mutually transform one another. i don't know whether in succeeds in doing that but it's certainly an experiment I'd like to try again! |
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Stuart McLean
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology/Institute for Global Studies
University of Minnesota |
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| Visual by Jenny Schmid |
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Jenny Schmid
Department of Art
University of Minnesota |
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