The Shelters of Imagination: Logos, Franklin Street, St Peters, Marion and The Dreamhouse

‘The Shelters of Imagination’ is a series of five poems, ‘Logos’, ‘Franklin Street’, ‘St Peters’, ‘Marion’, and ‘The Dreamhouse’, which explore the relationship between a writer’s place and the phenomenological aspects of literary composition. Each poem examines how a place from which I have written has impacted, driven, or impinged on the poetic imagination. These poems destabilise the boundary between where the material world the writer inhabits ends, and the fringe of poetic imagination begin. These poems are heavily informed by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964) where he examines the relationship between place and the phenomenology of poetic imagination. Along with creative engagement with Bachelard’s writings, auto-ethnographic reflections from my recent relocation from Sydney to Adelaide are woven through these poems as they move from the sterile cityscape, to a garden-lined eco-flat shaped like a chapel in St Peters, towards the rural sites of an artist residency space in the Adelaide Hills, and then conclude with a meditation on the imagined space.