True to form, I dawdled at the tail end of the tour group, scribbling in my journal while the docent talked. On February 19, 2006, I joined a small tour of Jeffers’ house, Tor House, and the adjacent observatory, Hawk Tower, both made of stones that Jeffers rolled or carried up from the beach. Jeffers is supposed to have said, “There’s nothing like travel to narrow the mind.”
Reading Jeffers’ poetry, you have the sense that it’s founded on a deep, ongoing investigation of that one patch of coastline where Jeffers planted his stake. Jeffers had an itinerant childhood, but from his early thirties onward lived in a stone house of his own construction in Carmel, California. I think of the poet Robinson Jeffers, shown here, as a kind of anti-travel poet. I tell myself that I travel not for the sake of enlarging my understanding, but to encounter things that I can’t name, with the consciousness that my own country, seen through the eyes of an outsider, would be no less mysterious.
There’s a lack of rigor in the willingness to glide through the world, asking only to be dazzled, and no doubt it’s presumptuous to write about things you don’t really understand… but is it a poet’s job to understand? Doesn’t a poet need unknowingness to find that literary state of grace that Keats called “negative capability”: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”?
I suppose that a tourist is often thought of, unfavorably, as a dilettante who admires unfamiliar places and cultures mainly for their alienness, without trying to understand what it would mean to be a citizen of that unfamiliar place.Īnd I can understand the criticism. The pattern of blown sand: streams of quickly moving particles being lifted into the air, and underneath, smaller grains rolling along the ground, like soldiers.īut as much as travel–no, let’s call it what it is: tourism–nourishes my writing, I think I’d bristle if anyone referred to me as a “travel poet.” Volcanic sand is blowing everywhere, stinging our eyes we swallow it. Bromo, we walk 3 km across “The Sea of Sands,” and then up the slope of the cone.
In fact, these days when I sit down to write, I usually begin by flipping through my journals, which are full of notes like this one, made on a recent trip to Indonesia: During the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to have some opportunities to travel, and not surprisingly, the places I’ve visited have begun showing up in my poems.
0 kommentar(er)
