I’m writing this from a Polish-American restaurant on 1st Avenue and 12th in Manhattan. Someone is singing in the kitchen. I overhear other diners ordering borscht, two eggs over easy, coffee black and “is the cabbage hot?” This place is called “Neptune.” The beer is named “Warka.” While this isn’t my neighborhood, nor is NYC the place where I live, I feel completely at home here—a place comprised of so many other places. Perhaps because I’ve lived as a transplant so much of my adult life or because my first great love of poetry was the work of William Carlos Williams, place and writing poems has always been interconnected for me. For the past nine months, I have been curating a series with poets writing about “place.” What do they consider their places? How do they define place for themselves? Many of the poets have written about their current or early homes (the Delta, the Antelope Valley, Wyoming, Omaha, Memphis, Southern Illinois, Upstate New York, Southside of Chicago). Some have written on places they have lived (New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest) or places they return to (mountains, bridges). A few have said that place, as specific geography, doesn’t matter much to their craft—that the essential is the imagination and that place, in the words of Claire Hero, is “just a body to dream inside.” All of their essays have and continue to provoke my own thinking on the connection between place and poetry. What is it about places—and this American place—that preoccupies me and so many other poets? What is it about place that connects to poetry and the writing of poetry? Poets and places: Charles Wright’s back yard, Thomas McGrath’s “2714 Marsh Street [where he is] writing, rolling east with the earth, drifting toward Scorpio, thinking;” Charles Olson’s Gloucester, Emily Dickinson’s liminal spaces, Frank Stanford’s Arkansas, Carolyn Forche’s El Salvador, David Jones’s WWI battlefields, Frank O’Hara’s lunchtime NYC, W. C. Williams’s Paterson and all, Dennis Cooley’s Saskatchewan, Michael Anania’s Omaha and Chicago, Jack Gilbert’s Greece and Pittsburgh, John Matthias’s Camino de Santiago Compostela, Susan Briante’s Dallas suburbs, Joshua Harmon’s Poughkeepsie, Michael Robbins’s pop culture and literary allusive landscapes, Mary Biddinger’s Catholic Midwest, Anne Killough’s national metaphors, Jennifer L. Knox’s badass California. These are just a few of the poets and their places that began my interest and with whom I consider in my own poetic rovings. This week we will be thinking about names and their relationship to place and how individual poems function as places themselves—the line, the stanza, the allusive travel. There will be conversations with the Scottish poet, John Glenday, who will talk on the connection to his home geography, names and his sense of America and American poetry; and with the poet, Claire Hero, whose ideas of place are “animal.” Thank you for joining me in what I hope will be a solidly thoughtful and wandering week of poems and place. --Lea Graham, Poughkeepsie, NY
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I love the poems you post!
Posted by: Archibald Cox | December 09, 2020 at 08:37 AM