spaaaaaaace!

i spend a lot of time thinking about and problematizing what it means to write about “place” and how “writing about place” as a genre in poetry and other literature has been formulated, particularly in terms of who and what is included under that umbrella. i think many would argue that the poems we’ve read for tuesday’s class aren’t “place” poems, because, in many, location isn’t centralized, isn’t the main event of the poem.  these aren’t bucolic poems or typical city poems—landscape isn’t the focus, necessarily. Maria Melendez’s poems detail the complex realities and experiences embedded in place, what happens AROUND a space, location, landscape. places hold stories, narratives are scarred into places, or narratives move within spaces or fade away. i’m thinking particularly of “An Illustrated Guide to Things Unseen” and “A Secret Between Lady Poets.” “An Illustrated Guide,” to me, is a panoramic landscape poem that picks up on fleeting relationships between natural, unnatural (forced, faked, manmade spaces like the arboretum’s “redwood grove”) spaces, people, and animals. her decision to include “the rapist’s habitat” in there is so jarring and so uncomfortable, but it’s fucking real. and it points to the different ways people navigate space—the different gendered, raced, sexualized dangers, (dis)comforts, etc. it also points us to remember these things that we easily forget depending on our positions (the histories we’re constructing over with our performing arts centers, the violence that lurks in bushes, what manicured spaces mean, etc). “A Secret Between Lady Poets” blows ocean/sea and beach poems apart. because water is never just innocent, cleansing, anointing, whatever. and she again makes sure to make us uncomfortable, but doing this is important. that “coffin birth” thrown in and her graphic imagining of Lacey Peterson’s body and the infant’s body bloated and discolored and ripped up is horrifying. relating the infant’s body to an anemone made me think of all those ecosystem descriptions and annotated maps we get in elementary science classes—here’s the ocean with its various fish, sea plants, anemones, and…

place isn’t just about natural features or even unnatural ones. what i like about many of these poems is that we often don’t get clear descriptions of place, which points to how folks on the margins have complicated relationships to location and features, how there is detachment, disconnection and lack of agency embedded in place. and also, places are charged and politicized and can be branded by hurt, violence, memory, love, etc etc. it’s emotional.

these poets complicate what “place” is. bodies are places. i’m thinking particularly about “In Biruté’s Camp” and “Nude Sonnet.” Melendez quarters Biruté’s scalp in the first stanza—lines are drawn like boundaries on a map on her head. and her body is mapped, overtaken by Pan-gan.

i thought it was important how Adela’s Najarro “San Francisco” shows us what we bring with us when we move somewhere and all the various aspects of different communities all pushing up on each other. how these symbols of different groups exist next to each other and then also next to dish network logos and some are more visible and acceptable than others, pretty much all are commodified and become trendy. and a poem titled “San Francisco” SHOULD point to the ridiculousness of a milan streetcar transported to an american city as a tourist attraction. like, yeah, what the hell?

i was also drawn to “Throughout New York City” because there’s something so interesting about what goes on in subways—these weird liminal, transitional spaces that no one really wants to spend time in but has to. they are completely utilitarian and so much an aspect of everyday life that you forget to think about the fact that you’re interacting with them. you don’t “go” to the f train. you “go” to your destination. when someone asks you where you went and what you did in a day, you don’t note the transportation segment of your day (typically) unless something notable happened while on the train or bus, and, for most people i know, that "notable" thing is often something fucked up. and then there’s all the complicated stuff about how people interact with each other in these cramped spaces. the hypermasculine guy taking up three seats with his spread legs, snobbishness, harassment, racist bullshit, the “gaze” stuff, etc. buses and subway cars are petri dishes.

i’m constantly trying to negotiate how personal narratives connect to the politics of space. can a poem about sex, dating, relationships (like Adela Najarro’s “My Mother, Sex, and Dating”) be a place poem? how does location feed into and inform these mundane, relatable experiences, and, also, how is that political? 

-rex