1.
I
think of "place" in poetry as referring to two things: place as a
specific geographical location, and place as location in a metaphysical sense. I
am particularly interested in place as it is shown in the long, sometimes
multi-book, poem; place can also be important in single poems that are neither
long nor multi-book.
One
of the best examples of place is William Carlos Williams' Paterson (1963). Williams' poem works on different levels of
meaning, personal, historical, mythological, archetypal, and so on. One of the
keys to Paterson is in Williams' preface
in which he writes "that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking,
achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city
may embody..." The city Williams is writing about is an outer expression
of the poet's inner being, it is Williams himself, no ordinary or average
citizen.
Another
aspect of place is in Williams' belief in writing the way Americans speak, in the
American idiom. Allen Ginsberg, in his essay "Williams in a World of
Objects" (1983), writes that Williams was a friend of Charles Reznikoff;
he writes, "They composed their poems out of the elements of natural
speech, their own speech, as heard on the porch or in talk over the kitchen
table." The way people speak—idiomatic
English—also emphasizes place in poetry. Then Ginsberg continues, he writes,
He [Williams] deliberately stayed in
Rutherford, New Jersey, and wrote poetry about the local landscape, using local language. He wanted to be a
provincial from the point of view
of really being there where he was; really knowing his ground. He wanted to know his roots, know who the iceman and
fishman were; know the housewife; he wanted
to know his town—his whole body
in a sense. (340)
The
loss of place in American life is also discussed in Wendell Berrry's The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of
Rutherford (2011); Berry writes:
Without such rootedness in
locality, considerably adapted to local conditions, we get what we now have got: a country half
destroyed, toxic, eroded, and in every way abused; a deluded people tricked out in gauds without traditions
of any kind to give them character; a
politics of expediency dictated by the wealthy; a disintegrating economy founded upon fantasy, fraud, and ecological
ruin. Williams saw all of this, grieved over it,
and accused rightly... (176)
2.
Many critics don't rank John Glassco's chapbook length poem Montreal (1973) very highly; I think they are mistaken. Glassco's poem is a short history of Montreal, from pre-historic days to around 1967, it also represents Glassco as a man who rejects what his city has become. Urban development is destroying the city in which he grew up, not much is left of the Victorian architecture and ambiance of daily life which Glassco once experienced. This is seen in the demolition of historic family homes in the Golden Square Mile area of the city and it continues to this day with the gentrification of once poor neighbourhoods. Glassco writes, "Last night I heard again all your chanting voices / Fetched from my own dead childhood..." This is no conventional history or critique of modernity, this is history seen through the eyes, memory, and aesthetic sensibility of one of our prominent writers. This is a history grounded in Glassco's emotional response to modern-day Montreal, it is not a positive one. This is the city where Glassco lived and grew up, it is a subjective history that is based on objective historical fact filtered through his aesthetic sensibility.
Glassco refers to living in a rented room in the Crescent Street area of downtown Montreal. I remember meeting Marian Dale Scott in the fall of 1970 at a reception at McGill's Thomson House on McTavish Avenue, she recounted how her husband, the poet Frank Scott, and Scott's friend John Glassco, both elderly, would talk about the past as they walked along Crescent Street; I would like to think that at least part of the genesis of Glassco's poem was on these mid- to late-1960s walks with Frank Scott. If the poem was completed in 1968 then, reasonably speaking, this is possible. I remember thinking at the time that Marian Scott was a lovely grey-haired lady (I was about twenty years old); later that evening I spoke with Frank Scott about poets he used to know and life in Montreal as it used to be. I had recently been at Patrick Anderson's reading; Anderson was an old friend of Scott's from the 1940s, and Scott mentioned that Anderson wished to make the acquaintance of young Montreal poets, he wanted to hear about contemporary Montreal poetry.
Glassco's treatment of the Indigenous population in his poem is also interesting; to him they represent an age of innocence, of sexual freedom before the arrival of Europeans. But he also recalls the French colony that became Montreal as a time of innocence; he associates it with the past, with when he was a boy collecting stamps. This, then, is Glassco's place: it is nostalgia for the past, disgust with what the city has become under Mayor Jean Drapeau's regime, and an enduring sense of loss that he has become estranged from his home city. He is contemptuous of Expo 67, the highly successful Montreal World's Fair of 1967, promoted and brought to completion by Mayor Drapeau. In effect, Montreal is the place of Glassco's lost innocence and his nostalgia for the past. In his other writing Glassco is cosmopolitan but as a poet he is a nativist.
3.
Poetry, I believe, is the voice of the human soul, it is the voice of psyche; psyche is manifested in things, places, objects. This is how soul is recognized in someone's life, it is recognized by how it appears in things, not only by how they change and grow in their consciousness or awareness.
I agree with Williams that "poetry feeds the imagination and prose the emotions" but it is important to emphasize that place evokes both emotion and imagination; we have an emotional attachment to place and the emotions that are evoked there are important to us; place also moves us more deeply into imagination. Emotions connect to place, no matter how significant that place may be to other people. We have an emotional attachment to place.
Poetry returns us to place; poetry explores place, it extols the humanity of place over the anonymity of the contemporary and soulless built environment. Without place there is a levelling off and diminishment of what makes us human; there is the emergence, as we see in the world today, of a dehumanized society.
4.
I also believe that "the soul revels in specificity"; that is, the soul is not an abstract entity, the soul loves the material world and is manifested in specific things. The soul loves "things", not just "ideas". Soul is not disembodied; it is embodied, or manifested, in our time and place, by a specific person living in a specific place at a specific time.
Place, a geographical location, is one of the ways we discover psyche. Place is the source of tangible things, as well as images, metaphors, and archetypes. So, personally speaking, I believe that psyche is essential to poetry, and by extension place is essential because it is where we find our psychic center, that place we identify with and resonate to.
A few examples of poets and place:
Charles Olson’s Glouester; William Carlos William’s Paterson; Whitman's Manhattan; Yeats' Sligo; the Lake District for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. In Canadian poetry we might think of Ameliasburg, Ontario, for Al Purdy; Montreal for John Glassco, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, A.M. Klein, and Irving Layton; the Tantramar Marshes and Sackville, New Brunswick, for Douglas Lochhead; PEI for Milton Acorn. All are places that are identified with these poets, they are places that have been transformed by poetry into an archetypal geography that contains the human condition; they are psychic centers, places of numinosity and soul.
5.
The world is a place for creating one's identity, a place of intentionality and meaning. John Keats, in a famous letter to his brother and sister, George and Georgiana Keats, dated 28 April 1819, identified the purpose of the world, not as a "vale of tears" but a "vale of soul making"; soul-making refers to inner transformation, discovering one's purpose and meaning in life. Soul-making includes meeting one's Shadow, the rejected and dark aspect of our inner being, it is the journey to selfhood when entering the darkness that resides within each person. Keats emphasizes the importance of soul-making, that it is done in the "world", and that the world has this essential role in one's life. The "world" refers to place, refers to living in the world and being engaged in the transformative quality of place.
To continue this line of thinking, Frank Bidart has referred to Robert Lowell's "confessional" poetry as "soul-making"; Bidart writes that the commonly used "confessional" label, first used in a review of Lowell's work by M.L. Rosenthal, is inaccurate and derogatory. It has become derogatory partly because of the academic prejudice against the personal and emotional. Place in poetry is one of the access points, one of the portals, to the inner or spiritual dimension of life and the poet's effort at soul-making.
6.
My
own "place" in poetry, in life, is Montreal where my family have lived
since the early 1840s; but more specifically, place for me is my grandmother's
home at 2226 Girouard Avenue in Montreal where she lived from the mid-1920s to
the mid-1960s. This was my first home (my brother remembers our mother going to
the hospital for my birth at the Western Hospital that was located on Atwater Street
near Ste. Catherine Street).
I first
realized the psychic importance of Girouard Avenue in my dreams, it was a place
of significance for me long before I began writing about it; this place was the
home of my grandmother, and it was the place and home of other family members who
lived with my grandmother or had once lived with her on Girouard.
For
many years I thought it was individual family members, especially my
grandmother, that were the reason I returned so often to this place, in dreams,
poems, memory, even driving by her flat everyday on my way to work long after
she died and always looking up at the living room windows that faced the street,
always hoping I would see her looking out into the street. All of this is
important to me, and perhaps fanciful, but one day I realized that it was the
place itself that I was returning to, not only the people, for the place was the
container for the people and our life there. This place, my grandmother's flat
at 2226 Girouard Avenue, is my psychic center.
My
history at my grandmother`s Girouard Avenue flat is what I wrote about in my
book Girouard
Avenue (2009) but also in other essays and poems that are about
or refer to living on Girouard Avenue, for instance in my memoir Remembering
Girouard Avenue (2015). About ten years ago I returned and
visited the inside of the flat on Girouard when the building was for sale; incredibly,
not much had changed during the intervening 45 years since my grandmother had
lived there, except that the building was more run down than ever. The rooms
were empty or contained boxes of the current renter's possessions; after the
place was sold it was totally renovated and it now holds no interest for me, it
now exists only in the imagination.
7.
What
is left that is distinct in today's big cities? One thinks of historical sites,
art galleries and museums, literary gatherings, restaurants and theatre, gay
villages, China Town, botanical gardens, university districts, natural beauty,
large parks, all are places that make cities worth visiting. But mostly, in
every city, we find the usual sixty story office buildings, condos everywhere,
malls with the same stores in them as in every other city, people dressed in
the current fashions, some people are homeless, some people are having the same
conversations about sports or entertainment as people in other cities, people
are watching the same television shows and movies, they are listening to the
same inconsequential popular music, they have the same opinions as people
everywhere. No wonder we call these cities soulless places.
More
and more people live a transient existence, they are not homeless but they move from one city to another, one state or province to another, one
country to another. It doesn't really matter to these people where they live,
it can be in any of the soulless places they find themselves. These people no
longer identify with a specific city or place, they are people with no
substantial connection to anywhere in the world. They are, lamentably, citizens
of the global world, identifying with nowhere, engaged with nothing, and loyal
to no one.
8.
E.K.
Brown, although largely forgotten, is one of the foremost scholars and critics
of Canadian literature; indeed, he supported and helped define our national
literature when many critics were ambivalent about the value of Canadian literature,
some of these critics thought that Canadians were colonials and what was
written here was a poor second cousin to literature written in the United
Kingdom. Place is important to Brown, it creates who we are, our identity; we
have an emotional and intellectual connection to place. Brown is a
"nativist", not a "cosmopolitan", as these terms were defined
by A.J.M. Smith in his Introduction to The
Book of Canadian Poetry (1943). The nativists are concerned with what makes
Canada a distinct place, we have moved out of a colonial age and into
nationhood, and place is a natural concern for them. The cosmopolitan poets,
usually formalists and therefore adhering to a poetic tradition found in the UK
or Europe, are more conservative than the nativists, they have a traditional approach to poetry that does not necessarily adhere to the importance of place.
Here
is Brown writing in 1947 about his own early life:
The central and northern parts of
Toronto are where I am most at home. The narrowness of lower Yonge Street, the rows of its shabby and sometimes
seedy shops between College and
Bloor, the huddling curves of South Rosedale, the vista from Casa Loma, the shadeless streets of that suburb so
oddly named Forest Hill, they are all beautiful in my eyes. ("Now, Take Ontario", 1947)
And
then we turn to Laura Smyth Groening's excellent biography of Brown, E.K.
Brown, A Study in Conflict (1993), and we read of Brown's "ever-growing
fascination with Canadian Literature"; Groening writes,
The theory of national literatures
that he was developing, as we saw from his work in On Canadian Poetry [1943] and the articles leading up to that
book, was strongly rooted in ideas about
the essential relationship between writers and their grounding in a specific place... in the 1930s he believed that
universal quality was most securely present in the work attached to a definite time and place. (132-133)
9.
Soul-making
requires place, being uprooted from place is to dig up the roots of one's inner
being from the psychic ground, from the material ground of place; if a tree is
uprooted then the tree dies, people who have lost place in their lives are
uprooted, they are deracinated. The soul flourishes in specific things, in
small and large things, in a specific place and in all of the details that make
a specific place unique and soulful; this includes historical places, buildings,
neighbourhoods, architecture, and people one sees on the street.
We
are increasingly living in a deracinated world, in a global community, but a
global community is an abstraction, an invention of committees and legislation
and driven by people's personal ambition; it is an intellectual construct, it
is not born organically, a process that may take several millennia of human
migration, political and military strategies, transformation of the arts, and
spiritual insight. If we are not careful we will soon be living in Orwell's
world of geographical regions, not places of vibrant specificity that are
containers of soul. Place is specific and local, it is not abstract but
concrete; globalism is an abstract concept that has little or no connection to
community or place. Abstraction denies the specificity of place; place
emphasizes the diverse world of things. Poetry requires community; it requires the
diversity of a specific place.
January
2020
Essay revised: 06 February 2020, 22 March 2020
Post Script, 1 of 2: Here is a quotation from C.G. Jung that seems appropriate (my italics),
“The question of overriding importance in the end is not the origin of evolution but its goal. Nevertheless, when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. When that happens, anamnesis of the origins is a matter of life and death.”
--C.G. Jung, Aion
PS, 2 of 2: Of interest regarding the relevance of A.J.M. Smith's statement about Canadian poetry, and the larger discussion of politics, being divided between "cosmopolitan" and "nativist" is this quotation from a recent communication from Conrad Black; Black writes (not about poetry but about the Davos economic summit): "He [not Black] credits capitalism with the triumph of globalization, and with it of freer and more prosperous societies, after what he bills as a close battle against communists, socialists and nativists." Since my subject is poetry and not politics I conclude from this that nativist poets rightly condemn globalization as lacking a human element and creating the soulless environment found in many major cities. Black should have omitted the word "nativist" from his essay, it might have been more convincing.
Post Script 3, 24 November 2022: I can see that I've been a lot more concerned about the meaning and value, and the importance, of poetry than most contemporary poets. Perhaps I've been wrong about this, I always thought it was a part of the work of being a poet. Most poets write their poems but they don't write anything on poetics and some of them are critical of me for being as concerned about poetics as I am. But poets have always been concerned about poetics, about the meaning and value of poetry, why poets write, and the significance of poetry. Poetics has always been a concern since it deals with, personally speaking, my understanding of why I write poetry and my place as a poet in the world.
BTW, regarding Conrad Black, above, in another article Black quotes from a poem by Irving Layton; I was impressed by this because it showed to me that Layton is a living presence in our cultural life, this is as it should be for any nation but in Canada to quote from or acknowledge the existence of our poets is the absolute exception and rarely the rule.
