It has been half a decade, or more, since I touched my feet to the sand on a beach. Singing beach: the humidity, the size of the grains, the wind, the shape of the sand (round) and the friction produced by walking can cause the beach to sing, to bark. To visit Gloucester, MA. To come to a talk at the Museum about Olson and place. To think about the "open field" and the "everything" which is language, geology, geography. Walking. Taking walks with no purpose, only to listen to the sand. The narratives in the fibers, alway together, always plural. Human geography.
Massachusett & Wampagnoag. Greek. Gaelic & Spanish. No one knows about cava because poets drink beer and Jameson. No one knows the properties of bubbles and the tartness of a liquid which tastes cheap but looks expensive. There was a party and there were young people and grown poets. A brown woman drinking champagne. An Asian sister looking after her baby. Was she a poet? Women and hosting. Women who think about food and their children. The poet Amanda Cook ordered pizza and brought me sushi (gluten and dairy allergies). We talked about place and architecture. I tried to fill her in on what the men were talking about (as if it mattered, as if we didn't have our own language and our own moments). Space and Time, somehow. Vertical "open field" and Umberto Eco. It's hard to not feel gendered. It's hard to not think of this when going to the writing.
It seems that Olson made a choice. The choice to live in Gloucester and to write from an experience of "place" and that such writing is only possible when you are the place and you are everything. What would Iain Sinclair or Olson say about writing when the everything is blurry or traumatic? Iain would say that the view underwater is always blurry and that in a way the point is not to evolve out of the ocean but to return. To write by gazing, as Olson did, but inside the mother.
