Set it to music, it should become the United States national anthem. To pick up on Matt's themes of writing on the experience of living with children as well as his most recent theme of violence coexisting with beautiful restraint, I would like to offer Sharon Olds's "The Clasp." “What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map,” he writes, “and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps.” We are stuck without recourse in the eye and its “I”; for me to testify to a place is strictly for me to talk about my experience of that place.
The poem, like Baudrillard’s simulacrum, is reality sui generis. The poems produced wouldn’t be ethical in the sense of a universal ethics, but ethical in the sense of a) acknowledging the limits of my perspective while b) trying to eclipse them and c) not wallowing in them, or reifying them. But what makes a gathering of people distinctly them obviously isn’t reducible to mileage legends and interstate numbers; there’s no translation of a zeitgeist, or even a mood, analogous to hatch marks and dotted lines. Now the clouds cover us both. Over the past few months, I’ve traveled from Hayward, California to Washington, D.C., then from D.C. to Manassas and Remington in Virginia, then to backwoods West Virginia—Hinton, Beckley, and the Irish Mountain area. But while the perfect way to avoid writing an imperfect poem is to never write a poem, I also understood that this isn’t a realistic model for people who don’t plan on calling it quits. Larry Levis enters this scheme in the last stanza of his poem “The Map”: At night I lie still, like Bolivia.
Take a guided tour of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, and many other cities.
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho The politicization of subject matter that narrative invites might be better elucidated by diving into it.
Sharon Olds, Topography This is one of my favorite poems. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters. Is Jerusalem? Rajnish Manga (11/29/2014 3:08:00 AM). all four bodies of the sky” because think about it this way.
Some, like Gregory Bateson in his 1972 essay “Form, Substance, and Difference,” are doubtful of the cartographical premise, be it in poems or in maps, that representations hold any semblance of the real territory at all. Or are Could you walk across a cartographical representation of the United States? In verbal or linguistic narrative, the reference points—the raw materials—that the photograph offers, however biased or partial, aren’t present. And in this way, the poems end up being less about place and more about the qualities of my own immersion into that place: they are, in my mind, more honest about their epistemological limitations, less monuments to locales than to my perspective. The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, John Ashbery’s 2011 translation of Rimbaud’s “Cities (I)”.
got in bed, laid our bodies
The poem echoes a trope taken up by Donald Justice in his poem “A Map of Love”: “Your face more than others’ faces / Maps the half-remembered places / I have come to while I slept—,” a penchant for the unknown that harks all the way back to Hamlet and his talk of death as that “undiscovered country.” Olds’s piece doesn’t help me answer any ethical question, necessarily, but confirms my suspicion about the complexity of those questions. How to be the right kind of language snob, weekly feature poem by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. My choice is a choice, then, between seeking reductiveness or seeking an unruly lacework of intricacy that I might never be able to parse. My desire to write about the specific locations my travels brought me through ended up calling into question my own coordinates: where, in fact, was I writing from?
Why sit down with the Cartesian grid and funnel the world into it?
What a map tells is a certain kind of information: the sort critical to navigation, research, and the once-every-decade federal census. There have been enterprises to adopt the poem as a tool by which to “map” the world; www.poetryatlas.com is a directory for poems “about” locations, for instance. But I decided, squished into the seats of trains and airplanes and buses and cars, that I didn’t want to relegate myself to my own impulse to narrate. Topography Analysis Sharon Olds Characters archetypes. Maybe it’s a delusion to think one can ever entirely escape one’s own perspective, but I was going to try as hard as I could.
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There’s an entire scheme of mapping (“self,” “not-self”) that must take place before I can begin to address cartography in the conventional sense. I wanted to do away with the trappings of narrative cohesion, which would force me to contort my subject matter into its mold. Olds was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998-2000. It self-generates.
Then, as now, I was unable to tell. Each might very well rely on its own artifice, but by rejecting the goal of writing “about” a place in a way that is linearly comprehensible, I try to avoid doubly imposing artifice. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. A perfect and absolute blank!”. My forests go dark. burning against my Kansas, your Eastern All information has been reproduced here for educational and informational purposes to benefit site visitors, and is provided at no charge... Recite this poem (upload your own video or voice file). Eliot Prize for the collection Stag’s Leap (2012). face to face, East to West, my short summary describing.
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best— This is precisely my dilemma: for the purposes of my project I accept the existence of a “self,” of my existence as a singular speaker, and yet I somehow have to crack the glass cage keeping me from the “not-self.” Like I noted before, this might very well be impossible. face to face, East to West, my burning against your Kansas your Kansas Dr Tony Brahmin (4/23/2020 3:49:00 PM) In the middle of the night, when we get up after making love, we look at each other in complete friendship, we know so fully what the … As west and east The photograph, on the other hand, strives toward empiricism; whether or not it achieves it is a different matter. I think you're really on to something with your analysis of "this"-I'm amazed how Olds fits so many various and numerous meanings into a single pronoun.
“They are merely conventional signs! all our states united, one Was this what I should work toward? Standard Time pressing into my In all flat maps—and I am one—are one, But the bizarre thing here is that, if one could write such a poem, it would resemble identically the experience it aimed to replicate: so why write a poem at all? The above pieces, to my mind, create hybrids out of the perceptual inputs of locations: just as they attempt to shrug off narrative while conscious their inability to totally disown it, so they also try to account for a variety of perceptual components: auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, etc. understand is if you think the world organizes itself around you…. I wanted my poems, then, to be like topographical maps: I wanted them to acknowledge their nature as surfaces, and to provide information about these surfaces, but—if successful—to function in such a way that surpassed each surface. The New Yorker’s “abstract” to John Ashbery’s 2011 translation of Rimbaud’s “Cities (I)” reads “The official acropolis beggars the most colossal conceptions of modern barbarity.” There’s much to be ascertained from productive, methodologically responsible poetic forays into the discipline of “geography,” broadly defined—even if each acropolis becomes a necropolis when embalmed onto the page. is functionally dysfunctional. Two Poets is looking for interviews, book reviews, essays on the art and craft of writing poetry, reflections on the writing life, or any other weird or interesting thing you might have up your sleeve.
A PoetryNotes™ Analysis of Topography by Sharon Olds, is Available!. Astronomically correct. But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank: Lend your voice to the discussion. Without the least vestige of land: Fire Island against my Sonoma, my Definition terms. I’d put money on it. Olds took a liberty in this poem, just as I will take a liberty in suggesting that you pull your head out of your pompous, misogynistic behind. “Understanding is not a table,” the speaker flatly announces in “All a Symbol’s Ever Done for Us is Reductive.” This is not a pipe—but, on one level of Baudrillard’s taxonomy, it is. It's simple, beautiful, magical and yet so tangible and real. Mr. Rumley,
There is important ethical and empathetic work to be done in exploring, however unsoundly, the “other”—especially when the “self” may be the “other.” That which is unmapped becomes less real than it would be if it were mapped. The blank map being, like the unwritten poem, the most ethical of options in that it does nothing and so can do no wrong. A character, finding pragmatic problems with this, concedes that “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”.
But pictures can lie, too, as can lists of “facts”—the cumulative presentation of individual facts can snowball into a larger falsity. There has to be, I thought, an approach I could devise not to render moot the ethical concerns I was facing but to placate them within the realm of my ability. The answer, at least for me, wasn’t to absolve myself of the responsibility of chasing the places I visited as subject matter. After we flew across the country w got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps lai So what’s the visitor to do? all our cities twin cities, But how does one write about places traveled to, or through—what counts as sufficient, or even possible, from a passerby? They would be photographs, stunted in what data they provided, and hindered by their own interpretations of that data. Set down the pen? A poem a day, complete with analysis, criticism, biographical info, literary anecdotes, trivia, and our own skewed sense of humour :-) Newer Posts Older Posts Home Topography -- Sharon Olds The Mortal One. Let's enjoy the poem "The Wedding Vow" written by poet Sharon Olds on Rhymings.Com! A woman as intelligent as Old’s almost certainly knows which direction the sun and moon come from. (Without opening another Pandora’s box I should clarify, here, that my appropriation of scientific terminology is purely coincidental; in no way do I think poetry should aspire to the same procedures and principles of the scientific process. My choice is a choice to move toward what I hope to achieve, aware that such a movement will never be entirely consummated. Learn more about Olds’s life and work.
Where did the self that would manifest in my work originate? For, though those currents yield return to none, Build from them what you will—or build nothing at all. They would aspire to be—as much as any photograph can—honest. If a 1:1 poetic map were possible—if it were possible to write a poem that actually did catalog every perceivable detail about a place in a manner that didn’t imply a filter (which it’s not)—and usable, then that, as far as ethics are concerned, would be the thing to aim for. (Flickr/Creative Commons; Manitoba Historical Maps). So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply I am so happy you two made it … Mahendra Singh’s illustration for The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll.
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