Poems as Maps II: Place is a complexity

Place is a complexity, poets know. And if you are ready, they will tell you.

Poets, certainly, are not the only ones who have a relationship to place that is not easily or conventionally describable.

This is the second installment of the series Poems as Maps. Like this one, the first recognized the oppositional power of poetry to set out ideas in ways that reward a reader’s close attention.

Poems trouble syntax and grammar by breaking into lines and by making the space between words apparent as hesitations and corrections and uncertainties. Repetitions that arise — of vowels, initial consonants, closing consonants — are poetry’s means of proposing correlations and arguing for distinctions. A patterned reiteration of a single word or a phrase can be a poet’s way of singing a new thing (idea) into being.

Poets, certainly, are not the only ones who have a relationship to place that is not conventionally or easily describable.

Highlighting poetry’s push to present an understanding beyond the convention of paraphrase was part of curator/essayist/poet Taiyon J. Coleman’s inaugural Poems as Maps project in summer 2017. In her introduction to the series, Coleman offered up and argued for “poems that can be read as maps, whose lines trace and transgress boundaries of identity and experience.” She strove to situate herself and Places readers in relation to the world she knew that August, in the wake of Philando Castile’s death by shooting and of the criminal exoneration of the police officer who pulled the trigger.

Coleman described the poems in that folio as “relief maps that accentuate uneven terrain.” That is an apt description of the poems here too.

I asked twelve poets for unpublished works that they saw as centered on place — on a there important to them. More than one told me that the place they wanted to focus on was not the place where I should send them a package through the post. I understood that. I know that many lives are structured by elsewheres.

There is a phrase in Yiddish, farshvotener velt, that can be translated as pride in or lamentation for a lost world.

There is a word in German, Fernweh, that can be understood as longing for a place you’ve never been.

There is a word in Portuguese, nefelibata, that describes living in your imagination.

I was told there is a phrase in Turkish.

I was told there is a phrase in Amharic.

Neither I nor any of these poets want to streamline or crystallize a single understanding of their place(s). The aim, rather, is constellatory, to assemble an array of bright voices in the landscape and let each reader find and follow a route to understanding.

Before I began work on this essay or invited the poets to map their places, I was schooled in complications of place and belonging by other poets, by my family, by strangers.

In one of her “Harlem Nocturn/e/s,” Tonya M. Foster sings in three lines:

                                As always, there is

                 this hill we climb —     (y)our thicket

of (st)roll and (st)utter. 1

Heid E. Erdrich voices it this way:

This is a complexity     the BIA     the DNR     no one can explain to me

right-of-way

territory     reduced by lines on a highway     ceded lands

they took     I take

photos     so I can relate     to place ²

How easily can we toggle between positional relationships when encountering Foster’s “(y)our”?

Erdrich sequences two transitive verb tenses (“they took   I take”) so listeners and readers can experience history as she does. Part of the beauty and courage of the poem is Erdrich’s belief that we will find the meaning in the first verb’s elided object. What is a complexity?

Perhaps my own curiosity about place, about home, rises from my upbringing in urban and rural America; of years split seasonally between the northern midwest and the river-touched south.

I do not know what it is to be from a single spot, to have a notion of place that is not steeped in elsewheres. My idea of home is stretched by distant locations with greater and deeper histories, by attachments more expansive than my one/own life. Seen from the long view, my heritage is diasporic. Etymologies, for me, are cartographic.

The twelve poets featured in this folio reside in seven places.

Fred Schmalz makes a home in Chicago, not for the first time. He had a childhood elsewhere and then settled in a place he’d lived before. He puts his history this way: “I went away. Moved back. Went away again. Moved back again. Each time carrying the imprint of the city, the tug of the lake, the journey home.” Maybe it’s significant that his mother was born in Chicago, as were three earlier generations; that there’s a family history dating to the Great Fire of 1871. The sense of community wired into the “us/we … us” in his poem makes that connection audible.

Aditi Machado lives in Cincinnati. Other places have also been her home. Her time in Ohio isn’t extended by family history, but a local almanac and her attention to local botanical kingdoms provide two of the lexicons with which Machado, in her poem, layers the romance of knowing with the sharpness of seeing how belonging “is accrued laterally.” Time is “funnily sequenced” for all of us, isn’t it?

These two poets are single representatives of their places. The other poets are twinned in their cities or regions: two in Juneau, Alaska. Two in southern California. Two in the Cambridge area of Massachusetts. Two in south Texas. Two in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Here, where I’ve gathered two poets to map their place, I hope you can sense a more fractal or cubist perspective on that there.

My idea of home is stretched by attachments more expansive than my one/own life. Etymologies, for me, are cartographic.

Moheb Soliman puts attention on one island, and its history of industrialization and remediation. This poem is discursive, and though the Pearl Hall in question was a man — a doctor, elected Minneapolis Public Health Officer in 1901 — the place as the work presents it seems, feels, feminized. The site that the poem describes as “a sweet little piece of as/ is land” gains value from Hall’s long-ago attention and from Soliman’s contemporary attention. Readers are prompted to consider the state of the island, then and now, by the space between “is” and “land.” The poem signals the history of the area and its riparian development with vocabulary structured along an axis of morality.

Chris Martin opens his poem with a direct narrative statement, an announcing of identity (“I am 46 years old”), then orchestrates sounds so that readers are ushered into lyric flux. The mid-poem “Where” leads into an openness, begins the chant by which to reconfigure the place that is the tree/river/grass/thought/self.

When Naomi Shihab Nye tells us, “There weren’t/ as many people, guns, or human nuts back then” and that “Texas had room for/ everybody back then …” we are allowed to ponder a past permutation of place that might not have been recorded or that might have been erased from our memories by more recent events and position statements. Nye counterpoints the polemic implications of her statements by having the poem’s speaker declare particularities of appreciation for “the old raggedy streets, lost edges of time, and oddities …” This place is political and personal, the two fusing in utterance, in “pronounc[ing] Blanco Road correctly.”

Roger Reeves’s place is full of animation, human and nonhuman. The diction is religious and terrestrial; Reeves has drawn a huge circle. This poem helps us see the world shimmer across distinctions. How solid, how feeble, how transparent, how occluded are our beliefs in separation? Is it only a “bridge of dust trembling between us”?

Early in his poem, Joshua Bennett syncopates ideas via hyphens. Duality is considered through form and theme. Deictics of time are important. Time as well as place, Bennett shows, are portals for transformation, and the consideration of trees is a meditation on love, “a love … as old as the invisible generations of oaks and evergreens keeping us alive.”

Neither I nor any of these poets want to crystallize a single understanding of their place(s). The aim is constellatory, to assemble an array of bright voices in the landscape.

“Penned in by highways, strip malls, mixed-use development,” a river and the people around it, young and old, might examine their scars. Tanya Larkin does that, as well as considering other constraints and distortions tied to an almost overwhelming human self-regard. Her approach to place is Heraclitean. The river thinks.

In the place that is a we in Na Mee’s poem, readers are guided into representative scenes where two people have “agreed to just try our best. […] we do it together.” The situations are domestic and the details realistic. The undercurrent is metaphor: “There is no absence here, no upstream to swim.” The plangent understanding is that hope in parenting — like place in parenting — shape the us we will become. Our hopes determine us.

Metaphor and realism run through Ernestine Hayes’s poem too. “Meltwater uncovered ancient riverbeds” is a dramatic opening, seeming to promise readers a story in a setting. The rhythms and the consonant orchestration of r- sounds at the ends of words carry the tone of oral histories. Yet pace and brevity also align with the metamorphic and the oracular.

In Jos Charles’s poem, we see/hear a narrative of return for “the wickedest daughter/of the wickedest generation of the wic/kedest empire the world had seen.” We enter an ongoing conflict — “Paradise vs. paradise” — without a flashback to tell us how the promised land was split. There’s no storybook tidiness to filter our understanding, but there is a meaningful double negative, a caveat: “It will/ not be non-violent.”

Prageeta Sharma’s questions map a mind unsettled by allegedly comforting certainties. “What is universal now but a hierarchy?” “Is it the universal that keeps people out?” These are not simply general or abstracted worries. Sharma pins them to Southern California.

Of these twelve poets, only one, Ernestine Hayes, was born and raised in their current home. Yet, however long their time in their locale, each writer has a grownding in their place.

“Grownd” is poet Hannah Emerson’s word, her neologism. Chris Martin, in his capacity as editor of Milkweed Editions’ Multiverse series, in which Emerson’s first book appears, offers a note: “This word is born from her observation that to authentically reach — in the direction of thoughts, dreams, or connection — one must authentically root.” ³