mistaken landscape

I remember once reading a new draft of a poem I was quite proud of, only to be corrected after by a member of the audience, that the mountains I called Sierra Madre must have been Sierra Nevada, given other details of locale in the poem.(Gah...a head-slap here). He was right. Somehow John Huston's classic movie had insinuated its landscape into my composition, and I hadn't noticed it.

abrupt edge

The abrupt edge is actually an ornithological term that I have turned into a metaphor . . . It’s that area of greatest interest and intensity— for birds, of course, but I think also as a metaphor— between the dangerous open space and the bower or covered safe place, let’s say the woods as opposed to an open field—where the danger is, where anything can happen. If [ I ] can find a sense of the experience where there is both danger and safety—and maybe the safety part is the form— then I think I’ve got it right. The danger, of course, would be in the content.

—Stanley Plumly, A Conversation with Maryland Poet Laureate Stanley Plumly by Kathleen Hellen, The Baltimore Review.

free from mirrors

In the spare and luminous language of Machado, we find extraordinary sensitivity to place and landscape, as well as a genuine feeling for local folklore and for song as a living tradition from which to learn. His poetry is not the poetry of closed rooms but that of the open air. Many of his poem were written as the result of long walks through towns and hillsides. He often entered the inner world by first penetrating the outer world of landscapes and objects. “It is,” Machado said, “in the solitude of the countryside that a man ceases to live with mirrors.”

From the preface by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney to There is No Road (White Pine Press, 2003) by Antonio Machado.

the image

In the image, imbalance suggests movement, a movement toward balance and stability.
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The image is the unlocked door between the adjoining rooms of imagination and memory.
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The poem is not a system for the reproduction of images, but one for the making of images.
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The image allows us to experience time as if it were a landscape.
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Through the image, memory forestalls the ephemeral.

—Eric Pankey, from “The Image,” Vestiges: Notes, Responses & Essays, 1988-2018 (Parlor Press, 2019)

beauty blinded

This light, this landscape (Poros, Greece), these days start to threaten me seriously. I close the shutters so I can work. I must protect myself from beauty...You feel your brain emptying and lightening; the long day absorbs it. Today I understood why Homer was blind; if he had had eyes he wouldn't have written anything.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (The Belknap Press, Harvard U. Press, 1974), translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos.

loving and severe spirit

Among the many senses that modern painters have lost, we must number the sense of architecture. The edifice accompanying the human figure, whether alone or in a group, whether in a scene from life or in an historical drama, was a great concern of the ancients. They applied themselves to it with loving and severe spirit, studying and perfecting the laws of perspective. A landscape enclosed in the arch of a portico or in the square or rectangle of a window acquires a greater metaphysical value, because it is solidified and isolated from the surrounding space. Architecture completes nature. It marks an advance of human intellect in the field of metaphysical discoveries.

—Giorgio De Chirico, “The Sense of Architecture,” Artists on Art (Pantheon Books, 1945)

landscape and weather

By 1969 Richard Hugo had completed his third and even his fourth book of poems. As we must expect, it is the Northwest poems which conduct Hugo’s trial by landscape, his arraignment by weather, to a further pitch of excruciation: the menace of place is acknowledged to correspond to destructive energies in the self….

—Richard Howard, “Richard Hugo: Why Track Down Unity When The Diffuse Is So Exacting?,” Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (Atheneum, 1980)

landscape cloak

The title of Zanzotto’s first collection, Dietro il paesaggio, indicates what has become an enduring desire to indeed go behind the landscape, into it, and out upon it, to literally wrap it around the self—as is expressed in the closing lines of the poem “Ormai” (By Now), in which the landscape is conceived of as a type of protecting cloak: “Here all that’s left is to wrap the landscape around the self / and turn your back.” Zanzotto’s recognition of the total encirclement of the self by one’s surroundings reveals a deep rootedness, at once warmly familiar and yet also uneasily enclosing.

—Patrick Barron, introduction to The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (U. of Chicago Press, 2007), edited and translated by Patrick Barron.

flickering effects

Like Constable, Tomlinson admires accidents because they are governed by laws, however difficult to fathom (just as his poetry careens between seeming laxness and the occasional inevitability of rhyme and meter); he most values the peculiar combination of revelation and concealment brought about by changes of light in a landscape. The pleasure of seeing and then rendering, whether in paint or in language, the unstable, flickering effects in an external scene “discovers” (his word) one’s true identity, allowing the artist to become himself only during the moments when he is actively engaged in reproducing his passive observations. What we see uncovers what we are; what we are defines what we discover. By using as an epigraph to his poem Constable’s own inquiry into the relation between science and painting (“May not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?”), Tomlinson implicitly asks whether landscape poems might not constitute equivalent experiments.

—Willard Spiegelman, “Just Looking: Charles Tomlinson and the ‘Labour of Observation’,” How Poets See The World: The art of description in contemporary poetry (Oxford U. Press, 2005)

carrying the record

But all the greatest landscapes have been painted indoors, and often long after the first impressions were gathered. In a dim cellar the Dutch and Italian master recreated the gleaming ice of a Netherlands carnival or the lustrous sunshine of Venice or the Campagna. Here, then, is required a formidable memory of the visual kind. Not only do we develop our powers of observation, but also those of carrying the record—of carrying it through an extraneous medium and of reproducing it, hours, days, or even months after the scene has vanished or the sunlight died. [p. 29]


—Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime (McGraw-Hill, 1950; Cornerstone Library reprint, 1965; previously printed in Amid These Storms, Scribners, 1932)

imaginative elsewhere

Poets dream within their imaginative elsewhere. In Scotland we live with very occasional illumination, so ours is actually a rather sunlit verse; by contrast, the Spanish poet is stalked by shadow.

—Don Paterson, The Blind Eye, Faber & Faber 2007

landscape into language

If I sit by a pond to write, my poem shimmers like the water’s surface. If I sit by the river and write, then its flow carries over into my language. When I write on the mountainside, I make a poem with a wide ambit.

traceur poet

Poet, be a traceur through the languescape!

concentrated attention

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing--to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "A Self On Trial," Journals, vol. 8.