Kenneth White - 'geopoetics,' a theory that attempts to get back into the root of culture and start again afresh. In White's hands, the essay is no mere literary plaything or impressionistic rambling, it is a vehicle of fast cogent thinking

Kenneth White, The Wanderer and His Charts. Polygon An Imprint of Birlinn Limited, 2004.

Following on from On Scottish Ground, this book moves further into White's mental cartography. A first part, 'The Intellectual Nomad,' lays out the practice of intellectual nomadism, based on White's explorations and researches from culture to culture across the world. A second part, 'Place and Space,' gathers together essays written in the environment of a mountain and frontier country (the Pyrenees), and in a coastal area (North Brittany); it concerns what White calls 'geopoetics,' a theory that attempts to get back into the root of culture and start again afresh. In the third part, 'A Cultural Project,' White turns his attention specifically to Scotland with propositions for radical cultural renewal. In White's hands, the essay is no mere literary plaything or impressionistic rambling, it is a vehicle of fast cogent thinking."--BOOK JACKET

Kenneth White, Open World: The Collected Poems 1960-2000. Birlinn Ltd, 2003.

His vision is a remarkably consistent one and the same elements recur again and again—rocks, sea, mist, gulls and the natural world. The sheer range of influences reflect the extraordinary range and depth of his reading—Rimbaud, Nietzche, and Whitman amongst many others—and it is a measure of the strength of his work that such a personal voice emerges. The book is arranged chronologically and many of the poems are appearing in English for the first time. Notated and introduced by the author, this collection for the first time presents his poetry as a coherent and cross-referenced whole.

Kenneth White, The Winds of Vancouver. Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. University of Aberdeen, 2013.

 extract

Kenneth White's writings are explorations across a vast range of intellectual teritories, and also, in what he calls his "waybooks", chart his actual travels across varied geographic territories. The Winds of Vancouver records a journey from Briotish Columbia to Alaska, retracing the itineraries of explorers, naturalists and environmentalists, many of them, such as John Muir, nomadic Scots like White himself. The narrative records a series of encounters, both historical and contemporary, between the modern and the prilmordial, as White goes in search of what is beyond the limits of the known world.     

Kenneth White, Across the Territories, Polygon, 2004.

extracts

 

An initial mapping of this book might say that it goes from Orkney to Polynesia via Scandinavia and the Baltic regions, the Iberian peninsula and North America. It it’s impossible to sum up the diverse pathways and the multiple dimensions of White’s method in that highly original type of travel-writing he calls the waybook. The thing is to get out on the road with him. Along with, for example, three Quebeckers from the St Lawrence river-country through the forest and along the coast of Maine, or with an eleventh-century Jewish poet across Andalusia. Other chapters take the reader to the haunts of migrating cranes in Sweden, the misty margins of Portugal, across the plains of Poland, into the Atlas mountains, or along the coast of Norway into the Lofotens. The book ends on the atoll of Rangiroa in the Tuamotu archipelago, on a shore of dark jagged coral, wild birds cries and empty sea. The effect of travelling with White on his odyssey is an acutely increased sensation of life, a vastly enlarged experience of the world.

     

Kenneth White, House of Tides, Polygon, 2000.

extracts

     

White’s latest work is an extraordinary hybrid of intimate autobiography, social commentary, live literary theory, geopoetic field work, oceanic poem, quiet cultural manifesto, all rolled into one. He tells about life and work in his “Atlantic”, about neighbours, visitors, correspondents. About travelling to other parts of Brittany, towns and islands, where he meets up with the ghost of Celtic monks and Arctic fishermen, as well as those of bygone writers with whom he feels affinities. […] There is a deceptive artlessness here, an effortless voice that conceals a deep, unified purpose. This is dynamic, meditative writing that takes prose to the highest level.

 

Kenneth White, Pilgrim of the Void, Mainstream Publishing, 1992.

 extracts

 

This book begins in the floating world of Hong Kong, between West and East, moves from there into the South China Sea, to Macao and Taiwan, and thereafter Thailand, before going still further, to Japan, with a journey from Tokyo up through the northern provinces to Hokkaido.
     It is, then, a book of travels. But if White has all his senses open as he moves from place to place, from territory to territory, travelling with him does not stop at the geographical level. It is, in a very strong sense, autobiographical, that is, it concerns a life process, involving mind as well as body. So that this “pilgrimage of the void” becomes, but with no heaviness, a kind of initiation into a way of life. Which is why White prefers to speak of “way-book” rather than of simple “travel-book”. And White’s way is written in the prose of a poet who is out to unite intensity with clarity.

 

 

Kenneth White, The Blue Road, Mainstream Publishing, 1990.

 extracts

 

Author’s Preface:
     I got the call from Labrador, the land that God gave Cain, as Captain Cartier called it, when I was eleven years old. It was all because of a book and the images it contained : of Indians, Eskimos, mountains, fish and white wolves howling at the moon.
     So, you get images fixed in your mind when you’re eleven years old (you can think yourself lucky it was that kind of image you got), and you follow them up thirty years later, having accomplished in the meantime several more or less erratic, more or less fertile excursions into the fields of life and knowledge.
     That’s how I got onto this blue road.
     But what’s a “blue road” ? I hear somebody asking.
     I’m not too sure about that myself. There’s the blue of the big sky, of course, there’s the blue of the ice. But all those notions, along with a few others I can think of, while they talk to my senses and my imagination, still don’t exhaust the depth of that “blue”.
     So it’s something mystic then ?
     I wouldn’t want to get involved in palaver about that word at this juncture (there’s something a whole lot fresher calling us out), but if I let my mind dwell for a moment on this kind of vocabulary, I recall that in some of the old traditions they talk of the itinerant mystic, and they say that if a man caught up in “Western exile” wants to find his “Orient”, he has to go through a passage North.
     Maybe the  blue road is that passage North, among the blues of silent Labrador.
     Maybe the idea is to go as far as possible – to the end of yourself – till you get into a territory where time turns into space, where things appear in all their nakedness and the wind blows anonymously.
     Maybe.
     Anyway, I wanted to get out there, up there, and see.

 

Kenneth White, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, Mainstream Publishing, 1989.

extracts 

The beginning of Kenneth White’s career as an “intellectual nomad”, Travels in the Drifting Dawn starts off in the London of the early sixties, when White – along with William Burroughs, Alex Trocchi and others – participated in Project Sigma of which White became non-secret agent in Glasgow. Follows then a series of colourful scenes and wide-flung wanderings that go from Ireland to North Africa, and from Amsterdam to Barcelona.

 

 

Kenneth White, Letters from Gourgounel, London, Jonathan Cape, 1966.

extracts

After five years at university (with a break of isolation in between, at Munich) I left Scotland where I knew I would live more and more by reaction only, and went to Paris. But after two years in that city, I found reaction again setting in, and removed a few miles out of it to the relative quietude of Meudon, where I lived in a house surrounded by a garden of pear trees, apple trees, plum trees, peach trees, cherry trees, and began to feel and live and express the kind of life I wanted.
     In the same year that I removed out of Paris (a chambre de bonne on the seventh floor, Avenue de Saxe) to Meudon (a room in that villa), I went on a spring trip to the South. I had heard that houses could be bought cheap in the Ardèche, and I had got together some extra cash by doing translations and several other odd jobs. I left from the Gare de Lyon and arrived one April morning in Montélimar. There I hired a bicycle for one franc fifty a day (a new tyre thrown in) and set out for this Ardèche I had already heard and read so much about. Michelet, for example, in his book The People, writes “…in the month of May 1844, travelling from Nîmes to Le Puy, I crossed the Ardèche, that harsh country where man has created everything. Nature had made it so awful…” It sounded like one of those “desert places” the old hermits were always looking for, a kind of Thebaid. That was what I wanted.

Tony McManus, The Radical Field: Kenneth White and Geopoetics. Sandstone Press, 2007.

That the work of Kenneth White is a landmark not only in Scottish literature but in the field of world writing and thought, is something that many people have known for a long time. But if the influence of White's work has been spreading, and will continue to do so, relatively few people even yet have a sense of its complete range. The aim of the late Tony McManus, writer, musician and educationalist, who went deeply into White's work in French and English over many years, is to do just that. We have very few books that register a real breakthrough. This is one of them.