Comments on Relationship Between Poetry and Place

In a post earlier today at “One Poet’s Notes” about lines of poetry composed by John Ashbery for display upon the span of a bridge in Minneapolis, I referenced a piece I had written last year about the relationship frequently seen between poetry and place. That article began with the following paragraph: “I have always regarded a sense of place as an essential element in much of my writing. Within descriptive passages I usually find my lines of lyricism and the language tools used to subtly allude to various issues or to learn further about a few of my own reemerging concerns. Like many before me, I enjoy employing aspects of landscape for symbolic or connotative purposes. Therefore, when I recently was asked to submit a group of poems and a prose commentary to Segue for that literary journal’s current issue, I chose to focus upon examples from my new work that illustrate my emphasis on place as subject matter or that use setting to some extent in order to promote the poem’s main topic. As I observe in the following excerpt from my essay, ‘Landscape and Lyricism,’ I believe a combination of landscape and literary techniques in lyrical poetry frequently provides opportunities for poets and usually proves to be a pair of compelling complementary components in contemporary poems . . . .” I invite readers to examine the full post, “Poetry and Place: ‘Landscape and Lyricism,’” for the rest of my writing on this matter.