A Review of Poets on Place

Among the writers that were assigned from Poets on Place by w.t. pfefferle, Mark Strand and Dave Smith were my favorite poets, which is unusual because I am usually attracted to the voices of female nature poets. It doesn't matter what gender speaks to me, because when Smith says "All the cold morning light does is leave/us standing," he's taken my breath away. In another moving line Strand ruminates, "I moved like a dark star, drifting over the drowned." Both of these poems take place during the morning, which is compelling when I attempt to understand my attraction to them. I usually find myself writing in the morning on a free day, when I have my coffee of course. Everything is quiet, still, peaceful. The birds are heard at that time of day. Each poem is also an instance of looking into another kind of world, whether by a different time period as in Smith's poem "Gaines Mill Battlefield," or Strand's poem "A Morning," which explores water/the sea as a separate world. In my poetry, I tend to remember a place and my relationships with other people in that location. What was I doing there? What occured there? What was discussed? What kind of pain or joy did I feel? For example, in the past I wrote about my family relationships, and I explored them by examining the outdoors surrounding my adolescent home. I have depicted the hard-wood floors inside the house as a source of pain and isolation, the raspberry bushes as a source of nostalgia and mothering, the stone walls as a representation of my father's personality. Nature, landscape, and environment run together as inspirations for my writing. It comes easily to me and I feel like I must always have an image or metaphor from nature. If I don't have something nature-like in my poetry, it doesn't feel like mine. Sometimes it becomes boring, feels overworked; it is difficult to come up with new ways to discuss nature poetically without being overly romantic. Furthermore, I often find myself writing about nature inside at my computer after I've experienced a place, that way I can meditate on what I've seen, felt, heard, and experienced. As many of the poets from the anthology discussed, place often comes from the imagination. While I'm at my computer and not immersed in the place, it is quite possible my memory has already altered that place. But I don't feel guilty about that because I feel that I'm sharing a truth or making a discovery about my identity. Strand says, "Our identity is in the way we use language, not necessarily the place from which we come." I underlined this urgently because I agreed with him. Our poetry is made through our interpretation of place, not its reality. Or maybe the place from which we come is always changing, and only minute details/themes will follow.