Appalachian Archipelagos: "writing from measureless location” in C.S. Giscombe’s Geopoetics

This essay begins with a speculative gesture: what if we read Appalachia not as a bounded, landlocked region, but as an archipelago—where coherence lies not in contiguity, but in multiplicity and geopoetic drift? Drawing on the poetry of C.S. Giscombe, which spans the Caribbean to Appalachia and unsettles geographic conventions by inhabiting “measureless location” – not as a metaphor but as a method, materially grounded yet elusively meaningful – and guided by R.A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh and its theory and practice of para-semiosis and poiesis-in-black, this essay follows Giscombe’s pragmatic and prismatic geopoetics as it upends dominant frameworks of lyric subjectivity and narrativized identity in tension with planetary theory. This essay first situates his most recent book, Negro Mountain, within his larger body of work as well as broader debates in geopoetics, environmental humanities, and Black study, while attending to the poetic, historical, and political implications of thinking Appalachia-as-archipelago. By examining Negro Mountain’s intertwined registers of geography, dream, and diaspora, while remaining skeptical of their academic commodification, this essay argues for the enduring value of poetry/poetics as epistemic intervention and insurgent knowledge—troubling not only dominant lyric poetry norms, but epistemic forms in the humanities and social sciences such as the monograph, map, and archive, in turn challenging dominant modes of knowledge production that reduce cultural knowledge to data or territory. In its disruption of individuated enclosure, geopoetics as poiesis-in-black tries to inhabit and theorize the planetary from beside and below, in addition to above and across. The essay and Giscombe’s poetry, invites a rethinking of place, voice, and value—rendering Appalachia not as a place to be named, but as topoi-in-motion, a poetics for living-in-common otherwise.