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This paper will discuss the American poet Robert Creeley’s treatment of the concept of landscape in relation to his collaborative activity. Writing after observing his collaborators’ works Creeley deals with many artistic landscapes: on the one hand we will explore the very notion of “artistic landscape”; on the other hand we will analyze Creeley’s verbal response to the visual representations produced by his collaborators.

Robert Creeley and Alex Katz’s collaboration, Edges (1999), will be closely studied. In this particular case Creeley deals with both a natural landscape and someone else’s (Katz’s) representation of this same landscape. Inclusion and exclusion, present and past, abstraction and concreteness therefore alternate in his poem. Moreover, Creeley’s role as spectator will enable us to emphasize the distinction between seeing a landscape and seeing a representation of landscape. We will show how the difference dwells in the very notion of spectatorship.

As Britain expanded its overseas spheres of influence in the course of the seventeenth century, the complex dynamics of territorial expansion and global mobility became a central topic of cultural negotiation. Imaginatively circumnavigating the world, numerous poems, plays and travelogues evoke powerful ideological tropes to give specific historical meaning to the complex experience of global mobility and territorial expansion. Frequently, this “expansionist fantasy” (Brown 2001: 74) revolves around the figure of the sea, which becomes a paradigm of imperial capitalism and territorial desire. Yet the sea figures not merely as a symbol of imperial progress and maritime capitalism; rather it is imagined as an agent of change itself, an agent that sets up global trading networks, connects waterways and impels the English along an inevitable and predestined course. The present article traces some of the literary and rhetorical strategies by which the sea is made an agent of expansion (sans violence) and is thus translated into spatial practice. It is argued that the trope of the sea makes manifest a set of claims about political and commercial power, legitimising imperialism as an inevitable, vigorous and yet highly precarious development. By effortlessly forging transatlantic links between metropolitan Britain and territorial peripheries, the trope of the sea depicts imperialism as a natural extension of space and a progressive development in history.

I will examine the region around Alice Springs as it appears in the writings of Frank Gillen (in his letters to Baldwin Spencer), and in his joint writing with Spencer (the ethnological texts). In the texts we catch glimpses of three modes of landscape: that of the invaders, farmers and pastoralists, that of their scientific comrades, the biologists, geographers and ethnologists, and that of those whose land they have appropriated — the Arrernte. Three ways of dreaming a landscape, three ways of living one.

For the pastoralists, the landscape is seen in terms of property and profitability: the one goes with the other, and it is their capacity to make a profit from the land that gives them their right to occupy and own it. Consequently, the landscape is also a well-policed area, in which the unprofitable is tracked and hunted down. For the scientists, the landscape is a patrimony, a shaft which permits them to delve into the beginnings of our time and follow the course that takes us to the present. The ethnologists discover that their project necessarily entails a consideration of the third landscape, that of the Arrernte themselves.