American Regional Poetics

Brathwaite—Barbados as the Locus of Invention

W. Scott — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:58:01 +0000

Several of the opening poems in Middle Passages meditate upon the notion of discovery and the history of the Caribbean as a once-colonized place. It seems that through these meditations Brathwaite is wrestling with ideas of a local identity as it is related, not only to the history of the Caribbean, but also to African history, and the Anglo European history that affected his homeland. This collection was written in 1992, well after the publication of his important The Arrivants trilogy which deals with several similar themes.

Brathwaite’s poetry emphasizes the importance of language and the connection of language to a geographic location that has gone through a period of colonization. Language, culture, and geographical history form the pulse of Brathwaite’s writing. He attempts to break away from Anglo-European language patterns and work in a form that he calls “nation language” – a term that fuses the ideas of place and poetry together. This notion stresses the strong connection between language and identity. “Nation language” comes from the entire experience of place, formed by the relationships among geography, culture, and the human history that has unfolded in that space.

One of the poems of the collection that experiments most with the notion of language and identity, history and the present is “The Letter Sycorax,” in which Brathwaite re-creates the voice of Shakespeare’s Caliban. Through this speaking persona, Brathwaite attempts to create a colloquial voice that reflects Barbadian speech patterns. The figure of Caliban becomes a symbol of the history of the region, yet is writing his letter to his mother “pun a computer,” which is just one of the several images in the poem that merges past and present.

In reading through the Brathwaite collection, I find his work hard to place among the categories that I have attempted to lay down for the rest of the poets. If place is an experience of past and present, then Brathwaite qualifies for this category. If place is something that can be reinvented, mythologized, whose history can be rethought through use of poetic space, then Brathwaite qualifies here, especially with “The Letter Sycorax” and an earlier “discovery” poem title “Colombe.” What separates Brathwaite from these other poets is the primacy placed upon language, and although educated with the same Anglo-centric language system as these other poets, Brathwaite seeks to break down the system through his poetry, creating new forms and rhythms reflective of his homeland. To this end, it can be said that his language and his poetic form “comes from” (as in creative invention) a specific geographic location.

More Variations on Place-Poetics

W. Scott — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:50:07 +0000

A fourth category to be added to the above-mentioned variations on practicing place-poetics would be the ecopoets—those who, through their poetry, attempt to actively connect with a reading audience to raise their consciousness concerning environmental issues. Through practicing a localized poetics that focuses on current ecological concerns for their particular bioregion, their poetry seeks to raise the consciousness of their readers toward degrees of activism. With these poets, the writing is not an experiment in language as it is for Olson and Williams and Ed Dorn, nor is it an exploration of effect of places on the human condition, or a solipsistic meditation of the poet’s “place” in the world, but rather a poetry that de-centers the poet, placing the environment and the poet, and language all on the same level of importance. This is a poetry that is less anthropocentric and more ecocentric. Leonard Scigaj defines ecopoets as those who “treat nature not as a convenient background for human concerns but acknowledge that it sustains human, as well as nonhuman, life in ecosystems that have been deeply bruised by human exploitation and pollution.”

Though this approach may seem vastly different from the three previously mentioned, it is connected in that the poem exists from an interaction among the poet (the perceiver) and the natural world (the object). Although more overtly politicized than the poetry of Wright, Hugo, and others, the process of creative invention still resides in the phenomenological relationship between self and experience. However, I would say that the work of Wright, Hugo, Roethke, and Hague is more of an introspective bent, whereas the poetry of an ecopoet seeks to call his reader to action. Gary Snyder falls into this category, and, to a degree, William Stafford. Wendell Berry and A.R. Ammons, (not on the list) are among some of the more prominent eco-political poets.

To spin these distinctions another way, there seems to be distinct variation in where the poet “is” in the work of these poets. The personal “I” as the speaker of the poem if often times the center of the poem’s world, as in the “place-experience poets,” who seek a connection with the reader through the inward and the psychological experience of place. Place becomes the location of personal history, of meaningful events. This poetry is, to a degree, self-indulgent and anthropocentric. For the ecopoets, often the speaker of the poem is simply there to reveal a truth about current environmental conditions, or wrongs enacted upon the landscape. The “I” is de-centered, and the landscape/environment becomes the central concern of the poem.

William Stafford—Kansas Poems

W. Scott — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:03:29 +0000

Denise Low asserts in her introduction to Stafford’s Kansas Poems that Stafford is practicing a poetics that goes well beyond simple landscape descriptions, that the poet is writing about more than a geography, “ but something more profound, something made more complex by human imagination.” I think this principle holds true for all poets for whom geography and spatiality has agency. It is this interplay between the human imagination and the spaces it inhabits that results in the poetics of place. Like Wright and Hague, Stafford’s Kansas poems are constantly looking back to the past, to a childhood, like Wright and Hague as well, marked by a lower-middle class upbringing through a family that migrated to various Kansas towns because of its father’s continuous search for employment.

Stafford’s poems meditate on time as much as they do on the places where events happened in the past. He writes of a childhood experience during which a neighborhood girl had died: “Back then we thought the minutes came / one at a time; but in the sound / that came by chance all minutes leaped / at once and bore me down, remembering.” There pervades in the poems this sense of the importance of a recognition of the past in the present, or as indicated here, a kind of confluence of past and present. Not only is the poet’s relationship to his own personal history evident in the poems, so to is an understanding of the larger history played out on the landscape that now makes up his known and lived in space: “Under the sidewalk lay an Indian village–/ we knew our state held a buried scream: / one world that moved and then / another world. We walked on both / when we walked our town.” These lines reflect a sense of the layers of histories that pass over a given place, and this merging of the past an present results in the stimulating of the poetic imagination. Stafford offers the following prose comments on the idea of the local as poetic impulse: “All events and experiences are local, somewhere. And all human enhancements of events and experiences—all the arts—are regional in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life.”

Considering Stafford’s above claim, it is the task of these poets, then, to take the local or the regional, and turn that experience into something relevant for readers who may not share the same local affiliations with the places about which the poets are writing. One way in which these poets do this, I contend, is by an avoidance of the kind of sentimental pastoralism and narrow provinciality that generates such a negative response from writers and critics to the term “regionalism.” Turning their localized experience into a broadly applicable one to which several types of readers may relate is what makes these poems and poets relevant to the larger picture of 20th century American poetry.

Fragmentary Thoughts on Paterson and Variations of Practicing a Place-based Poetics

W. Scott — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:03:45 +0000

Williams in Paterson, and later Olson through Maximus, create a poetic voice that goes well beyond a neo-Romantic sensibility toward place. They are, indeed, creating a place through their poetics from a pre-existing history, attempting to reconstruct or rewrite the history of these places through the vision of their speakers who stand at once as individual and communal voices of American History.
      Book I of Patterson explores the beginnings of language, and the connection between human thought and place. In his own statement about the poem in 1951, Williams states the poem is about the “resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city.” The city is typically masculine, as several descriptions suggest the interplay of female and male symbolic imagery within the natural landscape (female) and the urban cityscape (male)—“Innumerable women, each like a flower”—and “masculinizes” the city—“only one man—like a city.”
        Williams often connects the flow and falling of the water to language itself: “The water pouring still/ from the edge of the rocks, filling / his ears with its sound, hard to interpret.” The movement of the river is further equated with thought in a suggestion that thought, language, and imagination are connected to the natural landscape: “Jostled as are the waters approaching / the brink, his thoughts / interlace, / repel and cut under
        The final image of Book I suggests the origin of all thought begins and ends with the origin of the river. In an allusion to Plato’s allegory of the cave, the beginning of thought is “hidden from sun and sight.” The closing further suggests the birth of the imagination through language that is interconnected with nature—“And standing, shrouded there, in that din, / Earth, the chatterer of all/ speech…” Book I ends with a beginning—the birth of language, imagination, perception, and thought.
        A recurring key idea in the first Book seems to be the refrain, “No ideas but in things” suggesting that reality and thought are constructed in a phenomenological sense through the perception and processing of objects in the external world. Linking to this notion is the opening of Book II—“Outside/ Outside myself/ there is a world, / he rumbled, subject to my incursions/ –a world.” Within this world are the “things” from which the speaker’s ideas take shape, and to this point in the poem, those “things” are the surrounding landscape of the falls and Garret Mountain, and as the speaker proceeds to observe in Book II, the recreational activity that takes place there among the local population of Paterson.

There are, so far in my readings of this group of poets, three differing ways in which writers practice a localized poetics:

         1) As Hugo remarks concerning landscape, the poem begins in the landscape with the writer reacting to his being in a particular place at a specific time. The poem becomes the vehicle to re-create the subjective experience of location, as in his “The Milltown Union Bar.” This is akin to John Haines neo-Pastoral approach to his poems that resulted from his migration to the Alaskan wilderness.
         2) In contrast to the immediacy of place-experience recorded in Hugo and Haines by the frequent use of present tense verbs, James Wright’s and Richard Hague’s poems originate from past memories of places that were locations of intense personal experiences, both positive and negative. These places firmly represent moments in the poets’ personal histories that profoundly affected their sense of self, and as a consequence, that sense of self is now bound to the location of that experience.
        3) In the case of Olson and Williams, they seem to be practicing a much more ambitious, experimental, post-modern poetics that attempts to create or rewrite an historical narrative of a specific location, which will then in turn speak toward their vision of America—Cary Nelson notes in Our Last First Poets, “Even when contemporary American Poetry emphasizes the local, it typically tries, synecdochically, to speak for the nation as a whole.”

Richard Hugo and Some Thoughts on Landscape

W. Scott — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:59:37 +0000

In a 1970 article on William Stafford, fellow poet Richard Hugo writes the following concerning the idea of landscape poets: “By landscape poet I mean a poet who uses places and experiences in those places as starting points for poems. For such a poet, as several critics have noted, there are two landscapes, one external and one internal. The external one is simply “used”–indeed, usually sacrificed–to get to the internal landscape where the poem is. The difference in the two scapes is probably arbitrary and in reality nonexistent. However, some immediate problems are evident. What to leave out of the real picture? What to add? How to lie about the world in your way in order to get at truths about yourself?” Here Hugo is writing about William Stafford, but his statements apply, I imagine, to just about any poem whose focus seems to be the relationship between a landscape and a poet’s imagination. I am intrigued here also by the use of the word “landscape” itself. At first thought, most of us attach a rural or pastoral meaning to the word “landscape,” but several sources define the word as being “land that can be comprehended in a single view.” So we can have cityscape, seascape, etc. “Scape” added to a root word, comes to mean what can be seen. Can the word “landscape,” then, come to mean whatever we can see from our vantage point at the moment? Can the landscape of a poem be any setting?
The interior landscapes of structures seem to function just as importantly as natural landscapes in the creative process. I think here of Hugo’s own “The Only Bar in Dixon” or “The Milltown Union Bar.” Being inside these places is the starting point for Hugo, as the poems emphasize the subjective experience of place. The line “You could love here,” opens “The Milltown Union Bar” and “Home. Home. I knew it entering,” opens “The Only Bar in Dixon.” Both openings attach a subjective meaning to each place—one through the conditional suggestion that this is a place where the emotion of love might easily happen, the other through the idea that something about entering the bar in Dixon for the first time provides the speaker with the secure sensation of being at home. Implicated through Hugo’s statement on landscape above is the notion that poets of landscapes experience the external world as a way of seeing their internal one. The subjective experience of place is important as a starting point for the poem, and if the internal landscape is never revealed through the poem, then the poem will simply be a poem about a field or a farm or the countryside. The important idea to explore here, I suppose, is where do the poems about landscapes, or initiated by landscapes, lead the poet in his searching for himself? We can view several of these place-based poets as poets who are questing through two landscapes at once—the internal and external. The external provides a way into the internal—this is “where the poem is” according to Hugo’s statement above. The place, then, becomes a vehicle toward the poet’s understanding of his place within a place.

Olson–Maximus Part I

W. Scott — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:10:34 +0000

Section one of Olson’s Maximus Poems establishes as strong nexus among geography, history, and personal identity with place. The merging of the present and the past dominates several of the pieces and creates the sensation of Gloucester’s history as being ever-present. Olson reaches far back to the original establishment of the New England town, and tracks the growth of its economic significance to the establishment of the New World through the fishing industry. There exists a blending here, then, of landscape and industrial capitalism. Olson explores the development of the town around its economic growth and through several of the historical figures that factored into that growth such as John Smith and William Bradford. Reaching this far back into the past, the speaker Maximus attempts to negotiate his own personal relationship to the place itself, while commenting on the changes the town has undergone over the hundreds of years of its history. “…when all is become billboards…/…when sound itself is neoned in?” In the opening poem quoted here the idea of change as a result of human’s occupation of the landscape is evident. So much of the first section comments upon the economic forces that have served to shape the history and the present of Gloucester. Going back to the beginnings of the settlement of the land, “Some Good News” reads as follows:
how small the news was
a permanent change had come
by 14 men setting down
on Cape Ann, on the westerly side
of the harbor
This image recalls the genesis of what is now the present state of the Cape Ann region of Massachusetts. Later in the poem, John Smith is named “the starter of / quantity and / precision.” These beginning narratives threaded throughout the first section of the poem provide the overall section with a sense of the confluence of present and past. Yet, within that confluence of time past and present is the constant notion of change as a result of economic and capitalistic forces—“the newness / the first men knew was almost / from the start dirtied / by the second comers.”

Michael Davidson points to Ed Dorn’s assessment of Maximus in that Dorn was aware of the “dangers of treating ‘place’ as a sentimental localism.” The place itself in the poem becomes a symbolic representation of the discovery, colonization, development, and industrialization of America, as these effects of man’s inhabiting and using the land are not specific to just Gloucester, but to the entire nation.

Places take on meaning only when subjectively experienced by the poet within that place. The first section of Maximus reflects this subjectivity through the experience of the speaker’s relationship to the distant past, his personal past, and his present relationship with place. Letter 7 suggests this connection of past and present, as the speaker imagines a carpenter who left Plymouth to go to Gloucester being “the first to see the tansy / take root…” The eyes of the carpenter had seen the same sights as the speaker now sees. “That carpenter is much on my mind: / I think he was the first Maximus.”

Snyder Continued & Richard Hague

W. Scott — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:05:34 +0000

For Gary Snyder, poetry becomes the vehicle for exploring the relationship between humans and their environment. Often, Snyder’s Turtle Island laments the present while revering the past, praising the ways of simpler more primitive civilization. An example of Snyder’s use of the ancient past as a means to explore the present ecological situation is the opening poem of the collection “Anasazi,” so named for a pre-Pueblo people of northwest New Mexico. Through apostrophe, Snyder addresses the ancient Anasazi as a way of meditating upon how this civilization inhabited the same spaces as we do now, the difference being that they lived “with” and “in” the earth. “…tucked up in clefts in the cliffs / growing strict fields of corn and beans sinking deeper and deeper in earth…” Later in the collection, Snyder alludes to the Mohawk tribe in “Prayer for the Great Family.” A simple poem that praises the natural elements, each stanza ends with the refrain “in our minds so be it.” The form of the poem takes on a shape possibly inspired by an ethnographic transcription of a traditional Mohawk prayer.

Richard Hauge is a self-proclaimed poet of place, writing a poetry that constantly attempts to define what it means to be in a place, or what it means to have experienced a place. An important aspect of Hague’s poetry, specifically the collection Alive in Hard Country is that memory and experience have bound him to his native hometown of Steubenville, Ohio. Several of the poems in the collection ponder the relationship among the past generations of those who have inhabited the place, and Hague’s own understanding of how this past has affected his own sense of self. Hague’s collection provides a blending of city and country imagery, yet the industrial landscape of the Ohio River is a constant presence in several of the poems. Not simply a backdrop, the industrial river valley landscapes are a subjectified experience rendered by the speaker. Although Hague is not as overt in critiquing society as Snyder, his poems often subtly comment on the difficulty of mill life along the Ohio.

Recurring themes include father/son relationships—several of Hague’s poems seem to grapple with the dynamics of his relationship with his father and his father’s rootedness to place. Hague writes, “somehow far up this sun-flashing river he rests in his flesh that is me, / even as I somehow labor toward him, though hunkered on stones / in stillness, in native and name-haunted shade.” Elsewhere, Hague seemingly attempts to reconcile past and present as they relate to his experience of having live “through” (in the sense of surviving) the places which his poems describe. In these poems, landscapes are not simply backdrops and locales, but places of lived experience populated by communities, family, industrial laborers.

Snyder and Baca Thoughts

W. Scott — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:21:11 +0000

“Words and places…are reciprocally influential.” Elkins writes this in Another Place, a book that focuses mainly on the poetry of Western America. However, that statement is not limited, of course, to just poets West of the Mississippi River. Elkins goes on to quote John Elder’s Imagining the Earth—“A human voice becomes the voice of a place.”

In looking so far at Gary Snyder, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Dave Etter, I’ve noted three very different ways in which these voices negotiate the idea of place in their poetry–politically, internally, and through the voice of a persona. Snyder’s Turtle Island forcefully takes up the ecological issues facing the West and the areas of California that he is writing about, as his poetics reflects a blend of free verse and native languages and images, resulting in a poetry that suggests a mixing of the contemporary landscape and the pre-westward expansion landscape of the American West. Also, calling for a recognition of humans as part of and not separate from the environment—“The cloud across the sky. The windy pines. / the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow / this is our body.” Other poems in the collection of overtly political in tone and suggest the need for activism, such as in the poem “Night Herons” which directly comments on the affect of industry on the natural environment—“How could the / night herons ever come back? / to this noisy place on the bay.”

While Snyder’s poems in Turtle Island combine mythic and political activist ideas about place, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Black Mesa Poems reflect a more internal relationship between poet and region. Much more intensely meditative toward the affect of place on the poet’s sense of self, the voice in these poems is one that is constantly searching for an understanding of individual identity in relation to the surrounding environment. In “Roots” Baca writes “I come back to myself / near this tree, and think of my roots / in this land—” For Baca, the region represents his personal and familial history, and the poems in the volume move in progression toward a more thorough understanding of the poet’s sense of himself, his past and present. The poems themselves represent the notion of the passage of time, as the seasonal settings of the poems loosely follow the passage from spring to summer to fall to winter. As such, weather imagery dominates much of the descriptive language in the poems. As important as recurring imagery of seasonal conditions and changes are the recurring metaphors equating the poet’s sense of self with memory, the distant past and region. Baca writes in “Black Mesa,” “I re-imagine myself here, / and pant the same breath / squeezed from these rocks 1000 years ago.” Baca’s collection reads as a narrative quest toward self—a rooted quest, firmly fixed in his native Black Mesa region of New Mexico.

Post on Etter forthcoming.