A Pocket Anthology of 20th Century Map Poems in the United States

Adele Haft
Hunter College of the City University of New York

This paper offers a selection of notable American map-poems and considers their place in a century unique for the number, range, and quality of such poems. It looks at the "map" poems preceding Elizabeth Bishop's groundbreaking "The Map" (1934), then turns to John Holmes's "Map of My Country" (1943), which argued that a poem maps a person's identity better than its graphic cousins. Other poets found inspiration and an analogue of their experience in a particular map, cartographer, or painter of maps. Since the 1960s, visual poets have shaped poems into maps of American locales, thus complementing more "conventional" uses of maps to trigger poetic memoirs of place. Influenced by Donne and Louise Bogan's "Cartography" (1938), the sexual revolution has popularized the body as map metaphor. And since 1980, map-fixated collections have been on the rise, inspiring this century's poets to consider what maps say about history, culture, ourselves.

Transcript

1. A Pocket Anthology of 20th Century Map Poems in the USA Adele J. Haft, Professor of Classics Hunter College: CUNY Literature, Illusions and Criticisms NACIS 2014: Thursday, October 9
2. Early Examples • Hilda Conkling, “Geography, “ in Poems by a Little Girl (1920) • Robert Frost, “A Brook in the City” (1921), in New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1923) • Nathalia Crane, “The Map Makers,” in The Janitor’s Boy and Other Poems (1924) • Thomas Hornsby Ferril, “Old Maps to Oregon,” in High Passage (1926)
3. The Carta Marina of 1539 by Swedish cartographer Olaus Magnus. Alluded to in Marianne Moore, “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns” (Observations, 1924). See Adele Haft, Cartographic Perspectives 46 (Fall 2003): 28-64, 77-80. http://www.nacis.org/documents_upload/cp46fall2003.pdf
4. First Wave of Feminist Poets • Marianne Moore, “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns,” in Observations (1924). • Jean Kenyon MacKenzie, “The Venture,” in The Venture: Poems (1925) • Laura Riding, “The Map of Places,” in Love as Love, Death as Death (1928) • Dorothy Brown Thompson, “Maps” (1935: for children), reprinted in Bridled with Rainbows: Poems about Many Things of Earth and Sky (1949) • Eunice Tietjens, “Old Maps” (1936: for children), reprinted in Bridled with Rainbows: Poems about Many Things of Earth and Sky (1949)
5. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map” (1934) In Trial Balances, ed. Anne Winslow [Verna Elizabeth Grubbs], 1935 • Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges where weeds hang to the simple blue from green. Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under, drawing it unperturbed around itself? Along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from under? • The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still. Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays, under a glass as if they were expected to blossom, or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish. The names of seashore towns run out to sea, the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains —the printer here experiencing the same excitement as when emotion too far exceeds its cause. These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods. • Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is, lending the land their waves’ own conformation: and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation, profiles investigate the sea, where land is. Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors? --What suits the character or the native waters best. Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West. More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.
6. As you lay in sleep I saw the chart Of artery and vein Running from your heart, Plain as the strength Marked upon the leaf Along the length, Mortal and brief, Of your gaunt hand. I saw it clear: The wiry brand Of the life we bear Mapped like the great Rivers that rise Beyond our fate And distant from our eyes. Louise Bogan, “Cartography,” The New Yorker 23 July 1938 subsequently reprinted in numerous volumes, including The Blue Estuaries (1968)
7. War Poems • Theodore Spencer, “The Inflatable Globe,” in The Paradox in the Circle (1941) • Randall Jarrell, “90 North” (1941), in Blood for a Stranger (1942) • Randall Jarrell, “Losses” (1944), in Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) • John Holmes, “Map of My Country” (1939- 1942), in Map of My Country (1943)
8. John Holmes, “Map of My Country,” Part I (1943) • A map of my native country is all edges, The shore touching sea, the easy impartial rivers Splitting the local boundary lines, round hills in two townships, Blue ponds interrupting the careful county shapes. The Mississippi runs down the middle. Cape Cod. The Gulf. Nebraska is on latitude forty. Kansas is west of Missouri. • When I was a child, I drew it, from memory, A game in the schoolroom, naming the big cities right. • Cloud shadows were not shown, nor where winter whitens, Nor the wide road the day's wind takes. None of the tall letters told my grandfather's name. Nothing said, Here they see in clear air a hundred miles. Here they go to bed early. They fear snow here. Oak trees and maple boughs I had seen on the long hillsides Changing color, and laurel, and bayberry, were never mapped. Geography told only capitals and state lines. • I have come a long way using other men's maps for the turnings. I have a long way to go. • It is time I drew the map again, Spread with the broad colors of life, and words of my own Saying, Here the people worked hard, and died for the wrong reasons. Here wild strawberries tell the time of year. • I could not sleep, here, while bell-buoys beyond the surf rang. Here trains passed in the night, crying of distance, Calling to cities far away, listening for an answer. • On my own map of my own country I shall show where there were never wars, And plot the changed way I hear men speak in the west, Words in the south slower, and food different. Not the court houses seen floodlighted at night from trains, But the local stone built into house walls, And barns telling the traveler where he is By the slant of the roof, the color of the paint. Not monuments. Not the battlefields famous in school. But Thoreau's pond, and Huckleberry Finn's island. I shall name an unhistorical hill three boys climbed one morning. Lines indicate my few journeys, And the long way letters come from absent friends. • Forest is where green ferns cooled me under the big trees. Ocean is where I ran in the white drag of waves on white sand. Music is what I heard in a country house while hearts broke. Not knowing they were breaking, and Brahms wrote it. • All that I remember happened to me here. This is the known world. I shall make a star here for a man who died too young. Here, and here, in gold, I shall mark two towns Famous for nothing, except that I have been happy in them.
9. The Bishop Connection (1957-c.1961): Poets who share Bishop’s understanding of the map-maker’s art — its imaginative power and limitations, its technical achievement and arbitrary nature. See Adele Haft, Cartographic Perspectives 38 (Winter 2001): 37-65. http://www.nacis.org/documents_upload/cp43fall2002.pdf • May Swenson, “The Cloud-Mobile” (1957): Clouds and sky form “a map of change” reflecting the slower transformations of the continents and ocean they resemble (Cage of Spines, 1958). See Adele Haft, Cartographic Perspectives 33 (Spring 1999). • Gloria Oden, “A Private Letter to Brazil” (1957): This African-American poet uses a contemporary National Geographic world map to connect her — geographically, artistically, and emotionally — to her mentor, Elizabeth Bishop (New Negro Poets: USA, ed. Langston Hughes, 1964) • Howard Nemerov, “The Map-Maker on His Art” (1957): Nemerov’s map-maker is both scientist and poet/artist, who with his “fluent” pen, wryly “translates” the thoughts of a “bronzed, heroic traveler” into his own “native tongue” and “writes the running river a rich blue” (Mirrors & Windows, 1958) • Mark Strand, “The Map” (1960): Strand contrasts the world beyond his window with the unified, unchanging, idealized version of his map and poem (Sleeping with One Eye Open, 1964) • Gloria Oden, “The Map” (c.1961): Oden’s second tribute to Bishop exposes the political and racial ideologies underlying the popular mid-1950s Rand McNally “Cosmopolitan World Map” “soldiering the white wall/ there behind” her living room couch (New Negro Poets: USA, ed. Langston Hughes, 1964)
10. Visual and Concrete Poetry (1959- ) See Adele Haft, Cartographic Perspectives 36 (Spring 2000): 66-91. http://www.nacis.org/documents_upload/cp36spring2000.pdf Visual Poetry “Letter, May 2, 1959” (The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick, 1983) This epistolary poem represents graphically the old Meeting House Plain in Gloucester, MA. Concrete Poetry John Hollander, “A State of Nature” (Types of Shape, 1969): This jig-saw puzzle-like map-poem recalls the Iroquois who once roamed throughout the area.
11. Maps that unlock memories of a particular place or time, and explore loss and the limits of control (1960- ) • Denise Levertov, “A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England” (1960, in The Jacob’s Ladder, 1961): As a child, Essex-born Levertov “traced voyages/ indelibly all over the atlas.” “Now in a far country,” “an old map/ made long before [she] was born” helps her recreate the intimacy of her childhood home against the vast and fragmented backdrop of her “New World.” (See Adele Haft, Mercator’s World 6.4 [July/August 2001]: 30-37.) • Karl Kirchwey, “The Geographer’s Line” (c.1986-1987, in A Wandering Island, 1990): Kirchwey compares his coming-of-age to a map of “the continental United States in 1803.” His choice of map conveys the homesickness of an American boy thrust into a foreign culture as well as his naïve belief that he can control his future — and avoid adulthood’s inevitable compromises and “betrayals” — if he can “get those boundaries right somehow.” (See Adele Haft, The Portolan 65 [Spring 2006]: 42-53. ) • William Stafford, “My Father: October 1942” (1963, in The Rescued Year, 1966): Stafford uses maps to explore loss and the limits of control. The poem deals with his father’s death in a car accident: “He picks up what he thinks is/ a road map, and it is/ his death: he holds it easily, and/ nothing can take it from his firm hand./ The pulse in his thumb on the map/ says, ‘1:19 P.M. next Tuesday, at/ this intersection.’ And an ambulance/ begins to throb while his face looks tired.” • Elizabeth Spires, “Globe” (1978, in Globe, 1981): Spires remembers the October day her father gave her globe-shaped coin bank, then took his four-year-old daughter for a walk on leaves “like gold paper.”
12. Brendan Galvin, “Old Map of Barnstable County” (1979) in Atlantic Flyway (1980) It doesn’t show how the cold edge of starlight pierced woodpiles, or the boy forking hay who one afternoon cries out to no one on the shore of Still Pond and runs away to sea, but crawls ashore years later, to lie under this mapmaker’s pinpoint, which stands for “humane house,” and gasp white-eyed on the straw floor, his hands scrabbling his chest for its breath. Who would believe, on this mapmaker’s Atlantic, which looks safe as a strip of corduroy, a schooner is floundering, and soon heartbreak will walk the sand roads up hollows to Mrs. Small, Mrs. Snow, Mrs. Dyer, sea widows whose lives will go on in ways the cartographer’s black squares for houses can never explain? A red dot for each vessel lost would turn this map to a rash like scarlet fever quick as a camera’s shutter that sea would close over islands, and the griefs that went by the names beside the black squares would move on to other squares, as on later maps even the black squares will have moved on.
13. listen, you a wonder. you a city of a woman. you got a geography of your own. listen, somebody need a map to understand you. somebody need directions to move around you. listen, woman, you not a noplace anonymous girl; mister with his hands on you he got his hands on some damn body! Lucille Clifton, “what the mirror said” (c. 1980) Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987)
14. Second- and Third-Wave Feminist Poets: African-American and Native American (1973- ) • Audre Lorde, “Equinox” (From a Land Where Other People Live, 1973): “As I read his words the dark mangled children/ come streaming out of the atlas/ Hanoi Angola Guinea-Bissau Mozambique Pnam-Phen/ merged with Bedford-Stuyvesant and Hazelhurst Mississippi.” • Alice Walker, “We Have a Map of the World…” (Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990, 1991): Her epigraph declares, “We have a map of the world showing how all nuclear tests have been conducted on the territory of Native peoples.” — Raymond Yowell, Western Shoshone National Council: Las Vegas, Nevada, October 21, 1988.” • Linda Hogan (Chicksaw), “Map” (The Book of Medicines, 1991): The poem’s opening suggests that “reduced to an artifact — a map — the earth is abstracted into the ‘world,’ a charted realm that can be named after the men who claim her” (Gould 2003). • Deborah Miranda (Esselen and Chumash), “Indian Cartography” (Indian Cartography, 1999): Her father’s “open[ing] a map of California” connects Miranda with her ancestors’ lost lands, especially a valley “drowned by a displaced river.” • Joy Harjo (Muscogee), “A Map to the Next World” (Map to the Next World, 2000): “I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky” into the next, possibly higher realm of existence, where welcoming ancestors — now “abandoned…to science” — dwell in peace.
15. Immigrant Poets (1989- ) Gregory Djanikian, In the Elementary School Choir” (1989, in Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, New York, eds. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and Jennifer Gillan, 1994): Brought to America from Alexandria, Egypt, when he was eight, he recalls being abused by his teacher for mispronouncing “Des Moines.” Denise Nico Leto, “For Talking” (1994, in Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, New York, eds. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and Jennifer Gillan, 1994): This poem’s central verses connect cartographic and ethnic stereotypes: Sister James Marie she points to Sandy Seavello & me giving a geography lesson ushers us to the front of the class I am day dreaming “Italy,” she says, “that’s where am jarred to attention when I hear the olive skinned people live. “Mediterranean” & “the boot” Like Denise & Sandy. See how dirty they look?” Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “The Geography Lesson” (1998, in Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, ed. Neelanjana Banerjee, Neelanjana, 2010 ): She recounts the nuns’ cold cruelty to a student who accidentally tipped a world globe off its stand
16. Map-Fixated Collections (1971-2000) • Howard McCord, Maps: Poems Toward an Iconography of the West (1971) • Debora Greger, Cartography (1980, a hand-printed limited edition) • Debora Greger, Moveable Islands (1980) • Richard Hugo, Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (1983, though with map-titled signature poems from 1961-1980) • Maura Stanton, Cries of Swimmers (1984) • Pamela Alexander, Navigable Waterways (1985) • Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) • C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road (1998) • Lucia Maria Perillo, The Oldest Map with the Name America (1999) • Susan Rich, The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World (2000)
17. Here is a map of our country: here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin we dare not taste its water This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy This is the cemetery of the poor who died for democracy This is a battlefield from a nineteenth-century war the shrine is famous This is the sea-town of myth and story when the fishing fleets went bankrupt here is where the jobs were on the pier processing frozen fishsticks hourly wages and no shares These are other battlefields Centralia Detroit here are the forests primeval the copper the silver lodes These are the suburbs of acquiescence silence rising fumelike from the streets This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling whose children are drifting blind alleys pent between coiled rolls of razor wire I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural then yes let it be these are small distinctions where do we see it from is the question Adrienne Rich “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” Part II (1990-1991) An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)
19. C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road (1998): 15 & 25
20. C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road (1998), 35 & 48
21. C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road, (57-58) …what’s what in the watersheds is this description:
23. Mapparium (1934) Mary Baker Eddy Library, Boston
24. Susan Rich, “Mapparium” (The Cartographer’s Tongue, 2000, ) In geography class we learn the world of oceans, continents, and poles. We race our fingers over mountain ranges and touch rivers lightly with felt-tip markers. Deserts, islands, and peninsulas tumble raw and awkward off our tongues. Kalahari, Sumatra, Arabia. We visit the Mapparium on a field trip. A made-up word we learn for the place where the world resides. We clamor in with falling socks and high octave squeals Palermo, Kabul, Shanghai, exploring the globe, crossing its circumference we take flight touch down on the see-through bridge. The earth as it was, a time called 1932 stays in a room—retracts our breath, our lives—makes history into color and light. We look up at the Baltics, see Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, lands my grandmother left. Sixteen and wanting the world. I want to stay inside this world, memorize the pattern of blue that conceals the origins of every sea. A wave hitting stone is the sound my voice leaves as a pledge of return on the glass. Feet to Antarctica, arms outstretched like beacons toward Brazil; I’ll take this globe as my own.
25. Susan Rich The Cartographer’s Tongue (2000) “In the Language of Maps” (27) Rich returns to Bishop’s poetic identification with mapmakers: The cartographer knows it is her maps which form the images in everyone else’s mind. She knows the language of maps is constantly changing. “How to Read a Map” (43) Echoing Bishop’s incessant questions, Rich asks: How to construct new cartographies? I learn the mapmaker’s legend aware she cannot know what’s been smoothed over, What we leave behind— Anymore than I.
26. Mick Wooten, 1968, Main Street (collage). In Sullivan, Charles. America in Poetry: With Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, and Other Works of Art. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1988.
27. Mark Strand, “The Map” (1960), in Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) Composed, generally defined By the long sharing Of contours, continents and oceans Are gathered in The same imaginary net. Over the map The portioned air, at times but A continuance Of boundaries, assembles in A pure, cloudless Canopy of artificial calm. Lacking the haze, The blurred edges that surround our world, The map draws Only on itself, outlines its own Dimensions, and waits, As only a thing completed can, To be replaced By a later version of itself. Wanting the presence Of a changing space, my attention turns To the world beyond My window, where the map’s colors Fade into a vague After-image and are lost In the variable scene Of shapes accumulating. I see A group of fields Tend slowly inland from the breaking Of the fluted sea, Blackwing and herring gulls, relaxed On the air’s currents, Glide out of sight, and trees, Cold as stone In the grey light of this coastal evening, Grow gradually Out of focus. From the still Center of my eyes, Encompassing in the end nothing But their own darkness, The world spins out of reach. And yet, Because nothing Happens where definition is Its own excuse For being, the map is as it was: A diagram Of how the world might look could we Maintain a lasting, Perfect distance from what it is.
28. Deborah Miranda (Esselen and Chumash), “Indian Cartography” (Indian Cartography, 1999) My father opens a map of California— traces mountain ranges, rivers, county borders like family bloodlines. Tuolomne, Salinas, Los Angeles, Paso Robles, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Saticoy, Tehachapi. Places he was happy, or where tragedy greeted him like an old unpleasant relative. A small blue spot marks Lake Cachuma, created when they dammed the Santa Ynez, flooded a valley, divided my father’s boyhood: days he learned to swim the hard way, and days he walked across the silver scales, swollen bellies of salmon coming back to a river that wasn’t there. The government paid those Indians to move away, he says; I don’t know where they went. In my father’s dreams after the solace of a six-pack, he follows a longing, a deepness. When he comes to the valley drowned by a displaced river he swims out, floats on his face with eyes open, looks down into lands not drawn on any map. Maybe he sees shadows a people who are fluid, fluent in dark water, bodies long and glinting with sharp-edged jewelry, and mouths still opening, closing on the stories of our home.
29. Visual and Concrete Poets (1959-1998) See Adele Haft, Cartographic Perspectives 36 (Spring 2000): 66-91. http://www.nacis.org/documents_upload/cp36spring2000.pdf • Charles Olson, “Letter, May 2, 1959” (The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick, 1983): This epistolary poem is a “totally visual representation” of the old Meeting House Plain in Gloucester, Massachusetts (Tselentis-Apostolidis 1993) • John Hollander, “A State of Nature” (Types of Shape, 1969): A jig-saw puzzle that Hollander had as a child inspired this poem/map of New York State. The words defining its borders recall the Iroquois who roamed throughout the area before the European settlers imposed the political boundaries we recognize as “real.” • Richard Kostelanetz, “The East Village” (1970-1971: I Articulations, 1974): This series provides alternative maps to a vibrant time in his neighborhood’s radical history . The visual appearance of his hand-written verses allows us to enter vicariously into the space and time Kostelanetz has mapped, while his language and poetry remind us to hear, smell, and even taste these blocks of New York City. • Paul Muldoon, “[Ptolemy]” (Madoc: a Mystery, 1990): A mental map of a dying man, “[Ptolemy]” shows the Nile-like — and penis-shaped — convergence of the Chemung and the Susquehanna rivers near the New York/Pennsylvania border. Part of a mystery examining Britain’s conflicts with the Native Americans and the Irish, Muldoon’s map-poem and its town names (“Ulster,” “Athens”) embody the work’s central question: Who’d be victimizing whom if the English poets Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey had established in 1795 their utopian community advocating “equal rights to all” on the Susquehanna? • Howard Horowitz, “Manhattan” (The New York Times, August 30, 1997): Concerned with a particular “bioregion,” this concrete map-poem is also a delightful advertisement. And like the borough it mimics, it packs too much into too little space.