As a poet who, lately, has been increasingly drawn toward essay writing, and as someone with a deep and lasting fascination with place, I really enjoyed this recent essay, “The Essay as Realm,” by Elisa Gabbert. Something I always love about her work is the way she talks about reading—and she reads widely, in this case bringing a discussion of architecture books into her consideration of the essay. I always come away from her pieces having added several books to my to-read list.
“An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place,” Gabbert writes. “It has to give one the feeling of entering a room.” My favorite essays, I think, are ones that feel like entering many rooms all at once. First I am in the kitchen, the tea kettle whistling; then, suddenly, I’m in the living room where an old box television has just been clicked off, the screen still giving off static. I don’t remember walking through the doorway, but I don’t question my new surroundings, and I know the tea will still be warm when I come back to it.
I read Gabbert’s essay while also reading Eavan Boland’s 1995 book Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet In Our Time, a prose collection which recollects her early origins as a poet. Boland is also fixated on place, examining questions of nationhood as she grapples with her identity as not just a poet, but also an Irish woman. In her preface, she writes that she has constructed the book “not as a prose narrative is usually constructed but as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings.” She goes on:
Therefore, the reader will come on the same room more than once: the same tablecloth with red-checked squares; the identical table by an open window. An ordinary suburb, drenched in winter rain, will show itself once, twice, then disappear and come back. The Dublin hills will change color in the distance, and change once more. The same October day will happen, as it never can in real life, over and over again.
This insistence on return first occurs as she describes the room where she was first caught up in poetry—a study where she was learning Latin. Here is her description of the room:
The study where I worked was a somber room, with a scarred oval table and two armchairs. There were embroideries on the armrests, a bookshelf with just a few paperbacks leaning crookedly against one another. And a bay window. A wireless with a dial and a coarsely woven front grid stood on a lamp table in the corner. Under the window was a eucalyptus tree, a glittering exhibition which distracted me when the sea winds came in with the spring light behind them.
Boland also says, of the room: “I see myself there, more than I do in other places.” Reading this, I thought long and hard about memory, identity, and about the places I most often see myself—such as a bedroom in on the third floor of a house that I shared with five other girls in Pittsburgh, a balcony attached to it opening up to a perfect view of the downtown city skyline over which the sky blazed orange and red with sunsets most nights. I think of this room first, perhaps, because it’s the room where I started to take myself seriously as a poet—printing pages of my poems out to show my professor, writing for long stretches in a notebook in bed while incense burned on the dresser.
But more often, it’s not a room I place myself in—it’s a field, or the woods, some landscape that has left its imprint on me. In Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez writes about the interior landscapes we hold within us, writing that “the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.” I found myself talking about this recently after being asked about the significance of landscape—and, in particular, the landscape of the field—in my poetry. It’s something I’m still considering.
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that much of my favorite prose has been written by poets. What I loved most about Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons is the way it develops like a poem—as she said in the preface, she was guided by “turnings and returnings,” which I find to be a beautifully succinct way of summing up some of the magic of what poems can do.
Here are a few other books/essays from poets that I’ve admired, a nonexhaustive list:
The Crying Book by Heather Christle: a gorgeous blending of personal and researched reflections on tears, and which feels deeply guided by Christle’s poetic sense of associative leaps
throughsmoke by Jehanne Dubrow: a book-length essay written in lyrical notes, reflecting on perfume and scent
“Assymetrical Lines” by Katie Marya: a recent essay, and another beautiful blending of the personal with the critical. Take this first line: “I started thinking about asymmetrical lines in poetry around the same time I started thinking about having a child.”
S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt: I wrote about this book more extensively in a previous post, but I’ll mention it again here because it is such a stunning example of the merging of poetry and prose. The collection has been out of print for some time, but it’s about to be republished by Sinister Wisdom.