The Center for Geospatial Poetry
Welcome to the home of A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology edited by Katharine Whitcomb, Robert Hickey, and Marco Thompson. The project features, via Google Earth, poems by Washington poets ABOUT a particular location in the state. A visitor can call up a Google Earth map of Washington and see a map with pins indicating the locations of poems all over the state. Each pin can be zoomed in on and opened to a photograph and a full text, attributed poem with information about the poet.
This is a very special map of Washington poetry. Approximately 30 notable poets from around the state have participated so far.
You can access A Sense of Place here. It will open directly into Google Earth. If you have not yet installed Google Earth onto your computer, follow this link to download and install the software, Note, the authors suggest you uncheck the box which will install Google Chrome (unless you would like a harmless internet browser installed on your computer).
Our next step is to produce and market an e-book of this anthology perhaps with additional Washington poems and poets, including not only the poetry and the photographs, but also audio files of each poet reading their work.
We are calling for submissions from Washington State poets!
My colleague at Central Washington University in the Geography Department, Dr. Robert Hickey, and I are working with Mark Thompson, a Resource Management grad student, on the 2nd Edition of a Google Earth poetry anthology for Washington state, A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology.
The 1st edition features poems by award-winning poets Kathleen Flenniken, Oliver de la Paz, Kevin Craft, Joseph Powell, Elizabeth Austen, Derek Sheffield, Bill Yake, Allen Braden, Susan Rich, Katharine Whitcomb, and many others.
This is a very special "map" of Washington poetry. We would like to expand the number of poems/poets to 80 from all over the state. I would be very interested and grateful if you had a poem you had written about places in Washington that you would care to contribute. The poems would be completely attributed and identified.
A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology will be featured in a publication celebration at Central Washington University, with a group reading featured in the Lion Rock Visiting Writer’s Series on May 7, 2012. Possible group readings are in the planning stages for Open Books in Seattle, at the 2012 Burning Word festival and at Get Lit! 2012.
We plan to produce and market the 2nd Edition as an e-book edition of this anthology. The e-book edition will also include a recording of the poet reading his/her poem. I will keep you updated as the publicity develops.
Submission Guidelines:
1. Send 1 or 2 poems as Word documents to my attention at the following email address: asenseofplace.wa@gmail.com
2. Please include the following information with your submission: the place name of the location and subject of the poem (for instance, White Swan, WA or The Museum of Flight, Seattle, WA ), any attribution you need to credit your poem (published in the New Yorker), your website address or a two-sentence bio statement, and if it would be helpful, map coordinates for your poem’s location.
3. If at all possible, include a photograph of the place referenced in your poem. Please attach a .jpg or .tif of an original photograph (one for which you own the copyright). We cannot use photos from the internet, but you may obtain permission to use a photo you find on the web.
4. The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2012.
If you've never played around with Google Earth, please visit my website and give it a look. I hope you will participate in this project and give yourself a unique publication credit.
