Soft estate
Chell, Edward (2012) Soft estate. In: In the company of ghosts: the poetics of the motorway. erbacce-press, Liverpool, UK, pp. 121-130. ISBN 9781907878428
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My book chapter 'Soft Estate' is a contribution to In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway, of which I am also a co-editor and author of the foreword. In the Company of Ghosts explores the poetics of a motorway system where romance and squalor, the personal and the political, private interests and public space collide. The poetics of the motorway are bound up with our sense of the decline of 'the modern' as it reflects back the fallibility of our plans and dreams. This book brings together artists, poets, writers and thinkers who have responded in diverse ways to the motorway and its environs. Interspersing poetry, analysis, commentary and fiction, it reflects the contradictory nature of a motorway system that gives us an unintended self-portrait of a carbon-driven society.
My chapter unpacks some of the subliminal ways in which 18th-century values of land ownership, enclosure and the subsequent aestheticizing of land both within and outside these confines still informs our high speed consumption of horizons and the contested nature of these borderlands seen through the car window at speed. The book invites readers to 'Stop, Look and Listen' to the unnoticed worlds in this territory.
The book was launched as part of the London Literature Festival at the Poetry Library on London's South Bank in July 2012 and followed by a related symposium at Beaconsfield involving Will Alsop, David Lawrence, performance poet Jennifer Cooke and myself, chaired by Naomi Siderfin and recorded with a live audience and placed online. To accompany the event, Beaconsfield produced a small edition of 30 road dust prints of Creeping Buttercup. Ranunculus repens. Road Dust M20. as part of their Flat Bed editions: http://beaconsfield.ltd.uk/imprint/artist-editions
The first website in the list of 'related URLs' is a link to the full text of this chapter on the author's website.
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