Putting Poems in Their Place(s)

Another blogger I read regularly wrote a post about poetry and a sense of place, and after reading the post, I thought about poets who have seemed (to me) to be especially good at evoking a sense of place.

I thought of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, a travelogue that includes poetry--haiku. There are crisp, vivid images of the countryside through which he walks, but the book also includes images of the common-folk he meets along the way. Of course, especially after the Romantic era, we may be inclined reflexively to think of "nature" when we think of "place" and poetry, but upon further inspection, even "nature poets" usually include human beings and their behavior in their poems. For instance, Robinson Jeffers was, arguably, not just a poet of place but a philosopher of place; his poems often express a moral outlook that aggressively prefers nature to people. But, paradoxically, he still needs to mention people, even as he often finds they don't measure up to nature--that hawks, for instance, seem to have more integrity and dignity than most people.

In the Jeffers-vein of poetry situated in California lies the poetry of William Everson (Brother Antoninus) and Gary Snyder. Snyder's The Back Country includes poems of place from around the globe, but Turtle Island is set chiefly in Northern California, as are many of Everson's later poems. Bill Hotchkiss's poetry is set almost exclusively in the Sierra Nevada, with some poems from the southern Cascades. When it comes to Alaska and poetry of place, John Haines is the go-to poet, methinks, but a former student of mine, Jessy Bowman, has some great Alaska poems, too, as does Art Petersen.

But what of urban places? Well, ironically, Mr. Lake Country, William Wordsworth, has that terrific sonnet about London, as viewed from Westminster Bridge. Ferlinghetti has that memorable, funny poem written from the point of view of a dog wandering through North Beach in San Francisco. Philip Levine has some great gritty Detroit poems, and Rita Dove evokes Akron from a variety of perspectives. I guess Sandburg wrote what we think of as "the" Chicago poem, but I'd bet there are a lot of Chicago poets and readers of Chicago poetry who wish that poem hadn't been written.

We tend to think of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in terms of Modernist fragmentation, myth, and elaborate allusiveness, but in some ways it's best read as a picture of "the city"--a depressing picture, certainly, but what did we expect from Eliot? I remember attending a reading/talk by Stephen Spender, at which he said that he believed Eliot (in that long poem) wanted to write "a series of satiric sketches about urban life." That seemed like such a sensible, accurate description of the poem--and a great counter-weight to the overblown criticism written about Eliot's work. . . .

. . . .I love Langston Hughes's vision of Harlem in the 20th century--in Montage of a Dream Deferred. It isn't a vision of a place so much as it is a vision of people in a place--and in myriad situations dictated by history, ethnicity, economics, personality, gender, and sexuality.

Oddly enough, when I think of such places as L.A., Paris and other cities in Europe, and places in the American South, and when I then think of writers whose work is situated in such places, I tend to think of novelists and/or short-story writers--and sometimes of detective writers--rather than poets. I'll need to give more thought to who are the poets of L.A. and Paris, Berlin and the Rhineland, and the urban and rural South. If you have some suggestions, let me know.