The world is in a wretched state. Whole areas and elements of the physical environment are disappearing before our eyes. Rather than settle into comfortable despair or mindless inanity, our desire is to open up a world with some depth of life. This means a rediscovery of the Earth, which includes ecology, but goes further, into questions of existence and culture.

For there to be anything like real culture, humanity needs, beyond its historically dictated differences, a common basis.

All that and more is implied in geopoetics, a theory-practise invented and developed by Kenneth White, conceptualised in his essays, illustrated in his nomadic waybooks, expressed in his outward-moving poetry.

The aim of the International Institute of Geopoetics is to present various inroads of knowledge into this field and bring together all those who see in it a horizon of possibility.

A wide range of texts and documents will be available on this site, enabling anyone interested to deepen his or her understanding of geopoetics and spread the idea.

This involved the creation, in different countries, different places, of a network of centres, workshops, etc. (the names can vary), with several aims in view : alleviate the weight of central administration, dynamize associative action, give the geopoetic idea local applications.

This « archipelisation » in no way meant, as some overhasty minds assumed, the progressive end of the Institute as such, nor its assumption of a status of absentee owner or deus absconditus. The intention, the conception, the vision, was of a more complex organisation, a subtle combination of resolution and suppleness.

For a group to constitute itself as a centre within the Institute, and to be recognized as such, certain conditions have to be respected. The group will make contact with the Institute, and present a work-project, the sktech of a programme. Based on, inspired by, the geopoetic idea, these projects and programmes can be situated within already established fields such as poetics, philosophy, the natural sciences, the visual arts, etc. – the possibilities are many. Once the project has been accepted (on occasion after discussion with the president), the group will be habilitated.

Whatever be their social denomination and administrative constitution (informal, or formal, as in accordance with the French association law of 1901 and its equivalent in other countries), the troups are affiliated to the International Institute of Geopoetics. This affiliation implies a moral bond, an intellectual adhesion, and a poetic (in the large sense of the word) orientation. Let it be made clear that affiliation does not imply subjection, but autonomous responsibility.

The formula « affiliated to the International Institute of Geopoetics founded in 1989 by Kenneth White » must be clearly present in the statutes as on all correspondence and publication of the group. This, to preserve in a clearly affirmed way the coherence of the whole organisation, and to avoid confusion, amalgamation, deformation. The term « geopoetics » exercises a strong attraction, and is often used indiscriminately. If this can hardly be avoided on the totally public scale (though every effort will be made to locate and rectify deformations), it’s important that members of the Institute maintain a constant reference to the central nucleus of meaning and intention, as expressed, succinctly, in the inaugural text, explicitly in the founding texts and extensively in the work of Kenneth White.

The organigram of the International Institute of Geopoetics is, therefore, as follows. The Institute is the encompassing organism. The groups form and operate within the field thus opened. The groups are habilitated by the Institute to dialogue with local instances and institutions. It’s the International Institute that maintains the dialogue with national and international institutions and instances.

On joining the International Institute of Geopoetics, the new member will be informed if there is a group near his or her address. If a person turns first to one of the centres or workshops, he or she should be directed to the Institute. This, again, to maintain the coherence of the complete organisation, and so that every individual will be informed about, and hence be always aware of, the whole scheme and scope of geopoetics.

Lastly, so as to avoid aberrations due, for example, to changes in the  directorship and orientation of any given group after the original habilitation, the Institute will expect a short annual report of activities from the groups. These reports will be consigned in the Institute’s bulletin of information. In cases, hopefully extremely rare, when significant deviance is ascertained, the Institute will be obliged to withdraw habilitation.

The International Institute of Geopoetics was founded in 1989 by the poet-writer-essayist Kenneth White (1936-2023), who presided over it up to the year 2013, when, in order to devote himself entirely to his own writing, that includes ongoing work in geopoetics, he handed over the presidency to Régis Poulet.

Here is the inaugural text of 1989.

What marks the end of this 20th century, back of all the secondary discourse and all the palaver, is a return to the fundamental, which is to say, the poetic. Every creation of the mind is, fundamentally, poetic.

The question now is to discover where the most necessary, the most fertile poetics are to be found, and to apply them.

If, around 1978, I began to talk of « geopoetics », it was for two reasons. On the one hand, it was becoming more and more obvious that the earth (the biosphere) was in danger and that ways, both deep and efficient, would have to be worked out in order to protect it. On the other hand, I had always been of the persuasion that the richest poetics come from contact with the earth, from a plunge into biospheric space, from an attempt to read the lines of the world.

Since then, the word has been picked up and used, in various contexts. The moment has come to concentrate those currents of energy into a unitary field.

That is why we have founded the Institute of Geopoetics.

The geopoetic project is not one more contribution to the cultural variety show, nor it is a literary school, nor it is concerned with poetry considered as an art of intimacy. It is a major movement involving the very foundations of human life on earth.

In the fundamental geopoetic field come together poets and thinkers of all times and of all countries. To quote only a few examples, in the West, one can think of Heraclitus (« man is separated from what is closest to him »), Hölderlin (« man lives poetically on the earth »), Heidegger (« topology of being »), or Wallace Stevens (« the poems of heaven and hell have been written, it remains to write the poem of the earth »). In the East, there is the taoist Tchung-tzu, the man of the ancient pool, Matsuo Basho, and beautiful world-meditations such as one can find in the Hwa Yen Sutra.

But geopoetics is not the exclusive domain of poets and thinkers. Henry Thoreau was as much an ornithologist and a meteorologist (« inspector of storms ») as he was a poet, or rather, we might say, he included the sciences in is poetics. The link between geopoetics and geography is plain enough, but the link with biology is just as necessary, and with ecology (including mind-ecology) well grounded and well-developed. In fact, geopoetics provides not only a place, and this is proving more and more necessary, where poetry, thought and science can come together, in a climate of reciprocal inspiration, but a place where all kinds of specific disciplines can converge, once they are ready to leave over-restricted frameworks and enter into global (cosmological, cosmopoetic) space. One question is paramount : how is it with life on earth, how is it with the world ?

A whole network can come into being, a network of energy, desire, competence and intelligence.

For the Institute of Geopoetics
April 28th 1989
Kenneth White