sense of place

For me, one of the pleasures of reading and of writing is the creation of worlds. The dynamics of that, I take it, are that if the “fictive” world (cosmos) that comes to exist in a poem is believable, credible, we can imaginatively dwell in it while we are reading it (and in a similar way when we are remembering it), and furthermore it stands in a reflective relationship with our imagination of our “factual” world (universe), thus giving our factual experience double meaning. Thus the mirror metaphor is often used for this, and the mirror-world can distort the image of ourselves in an aesthetically pleasurable and enlightening way.

In order for this act of creation to work, the created cosmos must be, not “life” but “like-like” (on this I follow e.g. Henry James and Wallace Stevens—“It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure”—it’s art not life but it’s like life and it gives an aesthetic experience). The verbal cosmos must have touches that make us say, “yes, life is like that,” and no touches that break that imagination.

Very often, one way in which a poem creates a cosmos, making that world credible, and providing the pleasure of such creation, is by touching in the sense of space and time (thinking eg of Kant). Place.

An extraordinary example is Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which he so fills and enlivens our imagination with a cosmos that is credible, and furthermore is credibly a specific historical spot and moment, including a known historical person (himself—even though we know it’s a persona, that he is even then in the act of inventing) who is observing and reporting it to us, frolicking in it, that we buy his argument that time and space are illusions, since we are experiencing exactly what he said/says we would experience, even at a great factual distance. It’s like the medium is long dead and communicates with the future-present living. It’s hard not to love the guy.

Later he took us into the timeless place of the war wounded. (Some of his prose on that.)

And isn't place a matter of verbally providiing the physicality that is so important in the aesthetic experience?

Some of my favorite “cosmic” places. As a way of pushing my thinking about this, I’m going to comment on some uses of place that I find especially effective, and personally memorable.

Sylvia Plath, "Tulips".
James Wright, "Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy's Farm.

Comments?

Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press