I’ve thought of myself as a poet of place ever since I started writing poetry. A copy of my college thesis turned up a while ago, and I remembered how many of the poems had place-names or months or seasons appended to the poem titles, a move I learned from many of the mid-century American poets I still love. Often I try to pass this move on to my students—you can, I tell them, put a real place, or a time, at the end of an abstract title to turn it real: “Thinking about Abstract Things, Cleveland,” “Thinking about Other Abstract Things, late May.” Poems don’t take place in word-land, I tell them. Once a student raised their hand and said, “but sometimes they do?” and the student was right—but still I tend to insist.
With the publication of The Upstate last fall, though, I started feeling a little itchy about place specificity, about the way being “local” can confine. Even though I gave my book an epigraph that that unravels the descriptor a little (C.D. Wright’s “it was not local it was systemic”), had I pigeonholed myself or, worse, staked a claim to something to which I have little right? In tying things to the real, I worry that I have created too short a tether, staked everything too close to the ground or to myself or even just to the literal.
But I do so love place! I love what it feels to know a place, and to know a place through a book. Lately I’ve been thinking of a few books of fiction that seem like they offer a sort of workaround, or maybe a magic trick, for this problem of the local / non-local. These are books that are set in a place that is both real and non-real—that is, they present a setting that has all the physical dimensions of reality and yet that is not any place I can pin down—not any place to which these settings can be reduced.
The first of these places is the marshland setting in Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, “a place of great but subtle beauty […] full of desolation and solace and mystery [which] hasn’t yet told its secret to anyone.” (I’m pretty sure this is not a real place I am supposed to recognize—if it is, if it’s obviously some English coastal location I should be able to glean from details in the text or Cusk’s biography, I hope someone will tell me.) Cusk describes the view from the house that gives the novel its name:
Those windows go from the floor to the ceiling, so that the huge horizontal bar of the marsh and its drama—it sweeping passages of color and light, the brewing of its distance storms, the great white drifts of seabirds that float or settle over its pelt in white flecks, the sea that sometimes lies roaring at the very furthest line of the horizon in a boiling white foam and sometimes advances gleaming and silent until it has covered everything in a glass sheet of water—seem to be right there in the room with you.
Cusk is so good at this sort of thing—real description of an unreal place—and she does it in Parade, too, though I have guesses about where some of her settings are in that book. In Second Place, we’re in the real world—Paris, Malibu, Rio, all these places are there too—but the marshland retreat seems to exist as, well, a “second place,” at a fictional remove and slightly abstracted, a landscape that is essentially the idea of landscape, just as the novel’s addressee, one “Jeffers” is, I take it, the idea of an addressee as much as anything else. This idea of landscape gives the place a glittering beauty that is almost excruciating and (this seems crucial) is also constantly in motion. “I have walked on the marsh every day for these past years and it’s never looked like the same place twice,” the narrator writes.
Maybe it’s not an accident, actually, that the second real-nonreal setting I’m thinking of is also a marsh. Last year I fell hard for French writer Julien Gracq (1910-2007), in Richard Howard’s marvelous translation. I would read Gracq’s descriptions in Howard’s translation forever, just the descriptions. There’s more to say here about the real and the unreal, especially in Balcony in the Forest, which is (as Howard says in his forward) the least oneiric of the books in that it describes a real place, but that that real place its itself a period of dreamlike suspension. What is I think Gracq’s most famous book, The Opposing Shore, takes place in one of the most memorable and also most slippery nonplacable real non-real places I have ever come across. The setting, a little like some of the places in Cusk’s Parade, is recognizably Mediterranean and European—think the “old port” district, the cold shade and the hot sun, the stink of the low air around the cobblestones, sandy soil, maybe a few stray cats. If you try to pin it down (this is Spain, Italy, Greece, this is Marseille) it slips away; but if you try to dwell only in the world of “fantasy,” there are Roman roads and Norman ruins and too many odd parallels to ignore. The book slaps you again and again back to this world.
Here the placelessness of the place has to do with history (The Opposing Shore was written in 1951). The plot revolves around the march of time, the wearing-on of nation-states, and the awful inevitability of conflict under certain conditions. No-place both is not and is everyplace, and there’s something both unsettling and extremely pleasing reading these long gorgeous descriptions that seem to be both fictional and totally real—here’s the narrator on his way to the swampy outpost of Syrtes for the first time:
Once beyond the ramparts of the old Norman fortress, the aura of the South was already becoming apparent in the gradual wasting away of the vegetation. The misty dew that poured over the dank forests of Orsenna had given way to a hard, luminous dryness, against which sparkled garishly, in the distance, the low white walls of lonely farms. The ground, suddenly leveling off, stretched to meet us in great bare plains which the road scarcely bruised, beneath the sun, with a sharper furrow; the wind of our speed clattered in our ears, forming broader gales over these throbbing steppes. The clean-swept horizons, where huge herds of storm clouds frolicked, seemed even more like those of the open sea when the tall Norman watchtowers would appear, irregularly strewn on the bare plains and overlooking the flat expanses like so many lighthouses. Herds of half-wild oxen staggered up out of their mudholes and trotted off, horns high, the whole massive throng suddenly bristling in the wind. […]
And here’s the secretive marsh again, as the journey draws towards its end:
To the left, not far from the road, the sea of reeds grew up to the edge of mudholes and empty lagoons, closed off from the open sea by gray sandbars where tongues of foam slithered uncertainly under the mist […] Beneath this smoky light, in this sleepy clamminess and this warm rain, the coach rolled on more carefully now […] the stifling languor of a nightmare’s end withdrew into the depths of time, recovering beneath this warm and moistened breath the summary contours, the indeterminate fluidity and secrecy of a primal prairie, with its high grass so suggestive of an ambuscade.
One more book: Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, a novel I loved very much. This is the outlier in my trio. Instead of long passages of description, Cain gives us setting stripped down to its elements. There’s a city, the country, flowers, oceans, deserts, a black river, a museum, walks to and from work, a restaurant. Real pieces of art by real artists are present. We are maybe in the past, but the writing makes no concessions to past-ness, nor to any specific time in the past, nor even to really staying in the past. Places and things—Jamaica, a fancy doughnut—seem to appear when the story needs them, summoned into reality, which is where they stay. This spareness makes everything come alive somehow, puts everything in sharp relief. And suddenly the effect of spareness isn’t spareness at all—it’s luxury and fullness, that the imagination should be able to summon things and make them real. In fact maybe it’s what I like most about all three books: that a place put down on the page becomes its own real place, which is first a surprise and then a joy.