Kenneth White
Kenneth White (1936–2023) was a Scottish poet, writer, and philosopher who spent much of his life in France, where he developed the concept of geopoetics — a radical approach to culture that seeks to reconnect mind, language, and landscape through direct, attentive encounter with the living world. Born in Glasgow and raised in Fairlie, Ayrshire, White studied languages and literature before embarking on decades of intellectual and geographical wandering across Europe, Asia, and North America, all the while forging a distinctive body of work that moved beyond the boundaries between poetry, philosophy, travel writing, and cultural critique. In 1989, he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics in Paris, and his vision of an “open world” — grounded in elemental experience, rigorous thinking, and a poetics of place — has influenced writers, artists, geologists, and thinkers worldwide. White’s legacy is one of profound originality: a life devoted to clarifying perception, deepening the dialogue between self and Earth, and opening pathways toward a more vivid, spacious way of being in the world.
Geopoetics
“Geopoetics is a movement and a practice — a way of thinking, creating and living in direct relation with the Earth. Rooted in the work of poet and philosopher Kenneth White, it invites us to cross borders of art, science and culture to recover a more vivid, grounded sense of being in the world. To engage in geopoetics is to walk, to listen, to create — through word, image, sound, movement or form — in conversation with wind, stone and wave. It is a path of attention and imagination, cultivating what White called an Open World: a spacious awareness where creativity and knowledge, mind and landscape, return once again to a radical field”
Scottish Centre for Geopoetics
The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics was established in Edinburgh on Burns Night in 1995 by Tony McManus and others and is affiliated to the International Institute of Geopoetics founded by Kenneth White in 1989. It is a network of individuals who share a common interest in developing an understanding of geopoetics as the creative expression of the Earth and applying it in their lives. Whilst centred in Scotland, it has members across England, Wales, Ireland, USA, France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Canada and Australia.