Thursday, July 05, 2007

from the shores of Lake Erie

~Nicholas Howe, Across an Inland Sea




ljs said...

A fitting 100th post! It reminds me that, elsewhere, perhaps in "The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England: Inherited, Invented, Imagined", Howe wrote about the way impressions of the landscape on the Anglo-Saxon eye were very different from the way we (post-Constable?) of imagining, invent and inhert - which is to say, construct - landscape.

Given MK's thoughts on Buffalo, I wonder what internal landscape we bring to the poems and prose we're reading from a distant period. I've been re-reading a favorite poem of mine, "Internal West" by Priscilla Becker, with the beautiful lines

It's been so long since I heard
bells, I thought at first
I heard them wrong.

So here's my question: what's our Internal [Fill in Blank] that we bring to the Anglo-Saxon age? Mary Kate's seems to be Internal Interior Lake. Mine's Internal Island with Knowledge of Coast, I think. Others?

MKH said...

I like this idea of an "Internal X" we bring to AS -- but I wonder if it isn't something a little more complex, not unlike your "internal island with knowledge of the coast". It's like a whole internal geography, wherein we map our our own, literary journeys -- partially shaped by our lives, and partially shaped by the books that intersect them.

Never heard of "Internal West" but those lines are lovely. There's a certain degree to which that sense of being able to hear something wrong -- it resonates (pun partially intended) with the way in which things we go back to after a long time away seem different. It's as though in our own internal geographies, the landscape changes as much as it is changed my the texts we navigate.

Makes me wonder what will happen the next time I return to the Wanderer.