Title: Musing the Garden:
A
Poetics of Place and Emplacement
By Scott Smiley
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Department of Geography and Anthropology
Dissertation
directed by Professor Miles Richardson
Abstract:
A walk through a garden is an immersion into
a wealth of sensory and relational experiences of place. Plant
varieties, color, texture, flowers, forms, pathways, light, benches,
ornaments, and other experiential qualities of place work upon
ones consciousness to draw one into intimate contact with the
place. Emplacement is this intimate, immersed engagement with
a place, a process and state of being that erodes the boundaries
we so often erect between self and environment.
Traditional systematic forms of inquiry, based upon the Cartesian
idea of an essential separation between object and subject, are
not applicable to the study of emplacement because the detachment
of such an inquiry destroys the existential sense of engagement
central to emplacement. Knowledge related to emplacement is poetic
rather than Cartesian, an intimate kind of knowing that is more
apprehending than comprehending.
Existential phenomenology as a methodological approach discloses
poetics of place and emplacement in selected American public
gardens, addressing not only epistemology, but also poetic ontology,
expression, and conceptualization. Poetic knowing is accompanied
by an awareness of poetic being, poetic language, and the formation
of concepts such as genius loci that avoid the consequences
of object-subject reductions.
Gardens are particularly poetic, since they
are places we enter into intentionally and aesthetically. The
pedestrian rate and a scale provide a poetic quality much different
from the more prosaic world of busy lifestyles. Public gardens
therefore serve as a workshop for the understanding and awareness
of poetics and emplacement. According to their styles and to
their natural and artistic content, gardens provide an abundance
of poetic perceptions and impressions, such as a sense of spaciousness
or intimacy, focused or dissipated attention, historical or cultural
references, internal and external context, comprehensibility
of orientation, qualities of movement through the garden, tactile
experiences, or sensory and bodily involvement. These poetic
qualities serve to create an experiential sense of place both
unique and shared in the encounter with the garden.
copyright 1999 Scott Smiley
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