Devotion: a poetic inquiry into affective infrastructure

Abstract

This poem and commentary explore how small, habitual gestures – such as a child waving at a rusted pipe on the walk to school – can constitute a form of affective infrastructure. Through a combination of poetry and critical commentary, it traces how everyday acts of noticing, repetition and relational attention shape our emotional experience of urban space. Drawing on recent work in emotional and affective geographies, the piece argues that such gestures are not trivial but infrastructural: they stabilise attachments, generate meaning and cultivate a form of urban care. The poem operates not as an illustration of theory but as a mode of inquiry in its own right, foregrounding embodied, situated knowledge that resists abstraction. The commentary situates this poetic practice within broader debates around creative methods, affect and the micrologics of the city, making the case for devotion – both as theme and as method – as a form of geographic understanding.

This piece engages with the notion of affective infrastructure, treating repeated gestures of noticing, greeting and caring as practices that mediate urban experience and endure through routine. ¹ The use of poetry works to refuse the split between emotion and cognition while working across it, emphasising embodied, relational ways of knowing consistent with geographic engagements with embodiment and affect. ² Both poem and commentary position emotional engagements as inherently geographical – habits of attention and feeling that shape urban space through repeated, affective encounters. ³ Together, these framings underpin the methodological use of poetry as inquiry and communication, foregrounding affect as integral to geographical understanding. The poem does not illustrate theory; it precedes and animates it.

Poem

There’s a pipe on the walk to school

that looks,

from the right angle,

like a face.

My son points it out

every time—

same grin,

same startled eyebrows

welded into rust.

We stop.

We greet it.

Sometimes he waves.

Once,

I caught myself smiling first.

And there it was—

affection,

gathering quietly

around a thing

not designed to be loved.

The slope of the bolt

like a tired eye.

The flaking paint

like something

that had once tried.

Jesus

in a crumpet,

a water stain,

a pork scratching

held up to the sun.

Find faces.

Call them miracles.

Love things

because we need to.

Because something in us

begs to be given away.

And sometimes

what we give it to

just stays—

weathered,

unmoved,

utterly indifferent—

and still,

we love it.

Entry point: attention, feeling, relation

This piece emerged on the walk to school with my son. It began not with a concept or a research question but with a gesture: his hand pointing toward a rusted pipe that looked, to him, like a face. He waved. We stopped. I noticed. And then, I felt something.

What began as a private ritual became a practice of shared attention – habitual, affective, persistent. I wrote the poem later, not to make sense of the experience, but to convey it – to see whether feeling might travel through a medium that can hold thinking and sensing together. ⁴ Only later did I begin to see how this moment – like so many moments with children – might offer something to geography: that the practices of pausing, greeting and caring might be read not as solely sentimental, but as spatial, social and infrastructural.

Poetic method and situated knowledge

The piece arrives in two parts: a poem and a companion commentary. Together they join a growing conversation about creative and multimodal inquiry in geography, where poetry is not an illustration of research but a practice that makes place sensible – available to sense. ⁵ In this lineage, geographers argue that poetry can hold attention, ethics and method in the same gesture – through creative re/turns to geography, geopoetics and the geohumanities, and decolonial, care-centred research that uses poetry as method to unsettle dominant (positivist, colonial) ways of knowing, and to foreground relational, situated, embodied knowledge. ⁶ In that spirit, the poem here is not an ornament to theory; it is the mode by which an encounter becomes legible.

Poetry here is a form of inquiry. It begins with affective attention, a situated noticing – a way of holding open the moment long enough for something to be felt, remembered and shared. Poetic work in geography uses language to evoke an affective response, making space for forms of knowing that exceed formal logic or typology. ⁷ Research on poetic inquiry also shows how such practice can deepen engagements with landscape and heritage beyond conventional analytic frames. ⁸ Poetry, in this sense, is not the endpoint of a research process, but the mode through which an encounter (with my son, the pipe, the street) becomes meaningful and differently legible. It trades in resonance rather than generalisation, inviting recognition rather than agreement.

The language of the poem mirrors its method. Short lines slow the pace, echoing the pause at the pipe. The imagery accumulates gently – rust, paint, Jesus in a crumpet – evoking how affective meaning clings to objects through rhythm and return. Repetition operates not only thematically but formally, allowing emotion to sediment through sound and cadence. This stylistic minimalism is itself a spatial gesture: a way of holding still, of making space for quiet attention.

The embodied, affective nature of this noticing explicitly challenges conventional dualisms separating mind from body, emotion from cognition. ⁹ It insists on relational knowledge: understanding emerges not through detached analysis but through situated, affective engagement. Poetry here becomes a method precisely because it honours the inseparability of noticing, feeling and knowing.

Poetic inquiry is not only epistemological but ethical. It is a form of care: for the moment, for the relation, for the reader. It asks us to stay with what might otherwise pass unnoticed, to honour the emotional residues of the ordinary. Poetry holds open space not just for knowing, but for tending. Perhaps, in reading, you’ll recall your own repetitions – moments when affection gathered around something unremarkable. This piece is an invitation to notice, to dwell, to feel.

Children, noticing and improvisational care

If the poem has a protagonist beyond the pipe, it is my son. His attention – unfiltered by convention – set the entire chain in motion. Children have not yet been trained out of noticing. Their engagements with the urban environment are improvisational and care-oriented: they create infrastructures of relation through the ways they move, pause, attend and adapt to the built environment. Their actions reveal the emotional and material micrologics of the city, not as passive users but as affective practitioners. ¹⁰ In doing so, children reroute intended infrastructural logics: a pipe becomes a face, a kerb, a balance beam. These are not just acts of imagination but subtle forms of spatial reconfiguration – improvised care practices that momentarily repurpose the city’s surfaces. This makes them excellent explorers and guides for those of us who may be, or at least feel, more fully socialised. This improvisatory quality again resonates with the notion of poetry as method in geography, which treats attentive, situated practice as a way of knowing and a way of caring. ¹¹

Affective infrastructure

The poem’s central preoccupation can be understood through the concept of affective infrastructure – the subtle, repeated acts of attention and orientation that shape how we inhabit urban space. ¹² This includes small rituals – waving at a pipe, greeting a tree – that compose our affective landscapes. Such rituals stabilise us, offering continuity and making space for feeling.

Anderson’s account of affective atmospheres invites us to notice how shared, ambient feelings emerge from bodies, spaces and materialities in co-presence. ¹³ While this framing helps grasp collective urban moods, it is less attuned to the micro-rhythms of repeated interpersonal rituals. Affective infrastructures, by contrast, draw attention to how feeling is sustained through mundane routines, anchoring attachments over time. The two concepts are not opposed, but the focus here is on how feeling is maintained through repetition and small ritual, which is why infrastructure better names what the poem enacts.

The pipe my son points out is not merely an object of momentary attention. It participates in a broader affective infrastructure that mediates our experience of the city, shaping attachments and relational possibilities. In repeatedly greeting it, we embed an ordinary object within an affective network – establishing a subtle pattern that stabilises our emotional and relational landscape.

I do not know when the pipe was installed, or whether it still carries anything at all. It may be a remnant – disconnected from its original function. Yet that unknowability makes it open: open to projection, to ritual, to relational improvisation. Its ordinariness resists monumentalisation; its inconspicuousness makes it capacious as an affective anchor. Here, the infrastructural unknown is not a barrier to meaning, but a condition for its emergence.

Emotions are fundamentally geographical, shaped through cultural and historical encounters with places. ¹⁴ My son’s habitual greeting of the pipe demonstrates this geographical dimension: repeated attentiveness reshapes an urban object into something emotionally resonant. Such relational engagements challenge approaches that overlook affective experience.

A practice of devotion

This piece did not begin with theory. It began with noticing a thing and then noticing a feeling. That matters – not just as origin story, but as mode of knowledge. I wrote the poem first to communicate that feeling, not to analyse it. Only later did I ask what it might offer geography. That wondering led to reading, writing and reflection; it did not replace the feeling, it added to it. I present both: the poem and the commentary. One evokes; one explains. Both, I hope, are ways of knowing.

And perhaps others have their own pipes, trees or wall-edges – ordinary surfaces where attention gathers. These moments are not epiphanies, but practices. In such practices – tender, minor, sustained – another way of knowing, and another way of being in the world, may be quietly rehearsed. The child’s wave, the adult’s noticing, the poem’s repetition: together they form a small infrastructure of care.

Of course, not all affective rituals are granted space to take root. What gets preserved, repeated or attended to is shaped by broader structures of care and exclusion. In some neighbourhoods, a pipe like this might be removed, its ‘face’ erased by upkeep or surveillance. Affective infrastructures are not neutral; they form within material, social and political ecologies that afford or restrict the right to linger, to feel, to relate. In this sense, even tenderness is spatially regulated.

You may have your own rituals – your own moments of silent attention. Perhaps this piece does nothing more than help you notice them differently. If so, it has done enough. Recalibrating how we attend to the ordinary is, after all, an act of care.