{"id":882,"date":"2021-10-25T11:16:47","date_gmt":"2021-10-25T16:16:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/?p=882"},"modified":"2021-10-25T11:16:47","modified_gmt":"2021-10-25T16:16:47","slug":"emplacement-as-a-way-to-new-territory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/emplacement-as-a-way-to-new-territory\/","title":{"rendered":"Emplacement as a Way to New Territory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

John Morrison, whose poem \u201cFourteen Rules for a Game Called Ghost\u201d appears in SRPR Issue 46.1<\/a>, <\/strong><\/em>traces emplacement away from territory and into strange linkages. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope none of what I write ever comes back to jinx me, as I write this piece about a ghost poem and emplacement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you ever consider your poetic lineage? It\u2019s kind of a poet\u2019s parlor game, to trace the mother and father poets who have raised you in your art. In fact, you can find in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer<\/em>, edited by Robin Blaser, a fun but potentially profound exercise Spicer came across in a Robert Duncan workshop, a worksheet designed as a grammar school-style mimeographed questionnaire. Blaser refers to a key item in the questionnaire as the \u201ctree or constellation of poetry\u201d where, in either a hierarchical or a spiral fashion, you identify your influences, poetic and otherwise. There is no room on the constellation worksheet for \u201cplace.\u201d Yet, the poems of my parental poets\u2014most notably Richard Hugo and James Wright\u2014fed on the bread and butter of place, which, honestly, was a continuation of wrenching American poetry away from an elevated diction and demeanor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just so you know, I grew up outside in the hills of Northern California, and though I schooled in the deep South and settled in the Pacific Northwest, those hills and the oak savannah are my home\u2014and often my dream\u2014landscape. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The truth is, I can write \u201cplace poems\u201d all day long. The formula is coded right into my hand. What\u2019s compelling about the poetics of emplacement is how it asserts place as foreground but only as a point of departure for the imagination: a grounding, so we are free to imagine and invent. The challenge of place poetry, and often a challenge place poetry can fail, is to reach beyond representation. If the poem remains simply about place without that place arriving at metaphorical significance, the poem will remain only flatly two-dimensional. When place becomes metaphor, however, the poet and reader arrive in new territory, a psychic dimension.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, this is what T.S. Eliot meant by the objective correlative, and is what Rilke writes about when traveling east into the plains of Russia, how the outer landscape became the inner landscape. (Don\u2019t make me find that passage\u2014I did not make it up!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the calendar, my mother passed away a while ago, but for me, it all just happened\u2014that morning, that noontime, how she let go and how we shared our loss just after. In my poem, \u201cFourteen Rules for a Game Called Ghost,\u201d place and imagination collide, like banging together two rocks for sparks. In many ways my mother\u2019s death cast me into a childhood loneliness again. I am, let\u2019s say, twelve, and it\u2019s like I\u2019ve run away from home, again, for all of two hours and no one even notices. That\u2019s good and invisible! The poem\/game includes the cruelty of children and the inviolable, arbitrary rules that shunt us away from each other. For me, this is true in the game and in the truth of my mother\u2019s disappearance. Margaret Mary Weber was a gem. You would have liked her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To find a writing trance and surprise myself, I anchor in what I know. The creek mentioned in the poem? Wild Horse Creek, and I can take you there if development and climate disruption haven\u2019t ripped out the cottonwoods and dried the springs up on Twin Sisters. The dog? Bucky. I can introduce you, or could have. Spiders? I know where they stretch webs from oak to oak. See? This really is sounding like a two-hour runaway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poems I\u2019m writing right now begin with place and as quickly as possible slip away from the known on the way to metaphor, which is often just another word for \u201cmystery\u201d to me. It strikes me that my current poems are about exploring a new, personal mythology. No, I\u2019m not sure what that means. In the case of \u201cFourteen Rules for a Game Called Ghost,\u201d the slipping from the known is for forever. Though virtually every line has a concrete place trigger, I\u2019m pretty sure the reader would neither know nor care so I don\u2019t either, which means the allegiance of the composition shifts quickly from the \u201cfacts.\u201d If I\u2019m lucky, music and surprise and resonance will be enough to carry the poem. This is the promise of \u201cemplacement\u201d: those concrete borders or boundaries given by place that all of us have are just the markers we pass on the way to new possibilities and discoveries. And that\u2019s fun. And if I have the chance to grieve for my mother for the extent of a poem, that counts as meaningful, too. <\/p>\n\n\n

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John Morrison\u2019s second book of poetry Monkey Island<\/em> was recently published by redbat books<\/em>. His first book, Heaven of the Moment<\/em>, published by Cloudbank books<\/em>, was one of five finalists for the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal<\/em>, Cimarron Review<\/em>, Poetry Northwest<\/em>, Rhino<\/em>, and elsewhere. He teaches as an Associate Fellow for the Attic Institute and is an associate editor for the fabulist journal of literature, Phantom Drift.<\/em><\/p>\n

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You can order a physical copy of 46.1 on our website<\/a>, or purchase a 2-year subscription.
And if you want to keep up with us on social media, you can follow us across
Instagram<\/a>: @srpr_news
Twitter<\/a>: @srpr_news
Facebook<\/a>: SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review)<\/p>\n

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John Morrison, whose poem \u201cFourteen Rules for a Game Called Ghost\u201d appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, traces emplacement away from territory and into strange linkages. I hope none of what I write ever comes back to jinx me, as I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[263,273,12,266],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogpost","category-poe","tag-issue-46-1","tag-john-morrison","tag-poetics-of-emplacement","tag-srpr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":884,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions\/884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}