Category: landscape

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I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray vinyl seats linked like
unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall
be summoned to the gate, soon enough
there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers
and perforated stubs—but for now
I can look at these ragtag nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge.
Even the lone executive
who has wandered this far into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees—even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.

Vacation, Rita Dove

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How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel’s end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!’
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed, being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide;
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his ide;
    For that same groan doth put this in my mind;
    My grief lies onward and my joy behind.

How heavy do I journey on the way (Sonnet 50), William Shakespeare

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Friend or no friend,
darkness or light,
vowels or consonants,
water or dry land,

anything more from you now
is just gravy
—just send me down forgiveness, send me down
bearing myself a black cupful of light.

To the Black Madonna of Chartres, Jean Valentine

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How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!
And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

How like a winter hath my absence been (Sonnet 97), William Shakespeare

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In 2002 [Anne] Carson became the first woman to receive England’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. Paris Review (2004).

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To me, one silly task is like another.
I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride.
This flesh will never give a child its mother,
Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

Cassandra, Louise Bogan

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It is a shocking thing 
to know how possible finality can be:
the burden of it, weighing on backs.  
Look up: hear that cheeping that comes 
at dusk: focus on the sound of it: looking  
for direction, avoiding obstacles. 
There is no comfort in this. 
This is me hoping to find something  
in the resurrection moss. How it clings 
to limbs that make arches over the roads  
that I drive. This is me leaving the nail 
in my tire. Filling my tire with air every ten days. 
This is me leaving again.

Manifesto, Kelan Nee

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River of Grass, a film by Sasha Wortzel. Website. Fb. (10/17-23 @ Coral Gables Art Cinema, Miami, FL)

Marcuse’s utopia: right here, not yet, and over
Margath Walker, Department of Geography and Geosciences, University of Louisville, USA

The most striking aspect setting Herbert Marcuse apart from other principal figures identified with the
Frankfurt School is his unwavering commitment to the utopian spirit, to the possibility of a better
future. While there are many lines of connection between Marcuse and Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope, most notably in the idea that the process of attaining utopia is a self-generating one rather than a pre-existing ideal state to strive for, Marcuse politicizes the concept by building on Bloch’s formulations. He writes that while the established reality principle has cast utopia as a placeless place beyond reach, the notion and desire for utopia is a necessary component of the human mind. Here, I seek to characterize Marcuse’s vision through a geographic lens and argue that utopia is a realizable place, itself part of his larger project of dialectical thinking. Utopia is commonly understood as both ‘good place’ and ‘no place’ but for Marcuse it is more. Across the breadth of his work, utopia is right here, not yet, and over. In elaborating these three phases, I argue that utopia stretches beyond juridical-territorial conceptualizations reconfiguring temporal borders through an activation of the ‘disallowed’, an articulation of oppositional space rooted in imagination. Spatio-temporal plurality is precisely what imbues utopia with power; at times translating into elusiveness and at others appearing right before us to thwart pessimism and defeatism. Marcuse’s work on utopia is integral to a prefigurative politics where the concept of becoming is integral. It is synonymous with struggle, change and overcoming material and metaphorical borders.

via Utopia at the Border, 2016.

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Spatializing Marcuse, Critical Theory for Contemporary Times, Margath A. Walker · 2022

On Marcuse And Liberation Philosophy: Arnold Farr, interviewed by Margath Walker. May 15, 2015.

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Herbert Marcuse

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& I’ll admit I like the poem
for its casual insistence
on the weirdness of—for instance—

New Here, Nick Laird