The Gathering — Wendell Barry and Amanda Gorman
The Poetics of Place
I’ve been reading the poets on Medium lately as well as others, and am most intrigued by those poets who create a sense of place in their poetry. Perhaps it is because I’m deeply influenced by Tim Cresswell’s theory of Topopoetics, which sees a poem as a way to interpret the interaction between the poet and the “geographical world.” According to Cresswell, space and place are not the same. While space is bountiful and “limitless,” place is a “bounded” segment of space, which opens up humanity’s imagination to impose on it connotative psycho-social, racial, political associations.
Place is thus constructed within a space. Using their imagination, poets thus create a sense of place calling readers to come and join together and imagine our individual and collective moments of humanity. The poem itself becomes a site of gathering as in Wendell Berry’s “The Gathering” in which he describes the gathering of fathers and sons across generations growing into a brotherhood of memory and being.
The Gathering
By Wendell BarryAt my age my father
held me on his arm
like a hooded bird,
and his father held him so.
Now I grow into brotherhood
with my father as he
with his had grown,
time teaching me
his thoughts in my own.
Now he speaks in me
as when I knew him first,
as his father…
