Idea Transcript
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The Observances
and
Observations of Walks by the Sea ❖
thesis submitted for the degree of PhD at
Goldsmiths, University of London
by
Katherine Miller 2011
All that I present here for examination, new poems and a series of essays, is my own original work, undertaken for this degree. An earlier version of the seed‐ poem of the sequence Nereid with Seabird appeared under the title ‘Girl Running Still’ in my M.A. submission of 2006. October 2011
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ABSTRACT The thesis presents in Part One forty‐three new poems that exercise and foreground the visual, and in Part Two, a study of the determining work of the eye by three modern American poets recounting walks by the sea. Common to both parts are insights into the writer’s absorption with her/his experience of place and the passing of time.
Because it daily changes state, the beach is to writers a location that
heightens detachment and renders perceptions of the familiar doubtful. The extent to which vision dominates or yields to an underlying response to place, is considered in the Introduction and developed in Chapters One and Two, close readings of texts by A. R. Ammons and Elizabeth Bishop. The case studies trace poems’ inception and process within the context of the poets’ aesthetic and practical concerns. Chapter Three contrasts their modes of representing what is immediate or invisible by comparison with Jorie Graham, whose work is influenced by her predecessors’ emphasis on attention and swerve to the metaphysical. These essays also reflect on criticism by scholars evaluating attempts to locate the lived experience, in work outside the ‘confessional’ mode. The Conclusion returns to questions of how a poem forms alongside day‐to‐day preoccupations.
Integral to the enquiry – and implicit in the work conducted in Part One –
is the testing of when writing is ‘real enough’, neither too literal nor exalted. Comparisons are drawn between poets’ linguistic range and pace in transcribing physical immediacy or imaginatively reconstructing environment, aiming to maintain a poem in flux in order to convey a sense of place through which the mind moves. Part Two observes instances of change in receptivity at the boundary of the visible world and, as must happen in practice‐based research, the creative work goes hand in hand with the commentary.
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PART ONE The Observances NEW POEMS As It Was
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Illustration
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After the Ban
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At the Dew‐pond
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Every Book Is A Long Walk
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The Sea is Midwife to the Shore
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Naming the Rain
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An Order for One Hundred Greys
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A Man that Looks on Glass
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Out Walking With Matisse’s Eye
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Nature’s Pink
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The Song A Place Makes
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Underpinning
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Enter, The Sea
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Solo
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Trapped
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After My Brother, The Sea Swallows
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The Crossing
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Again (reprise)
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Sole Bay with the Sound Down
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Rehearsal for A Long Goodbye
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Stopped
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After Image
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Nereid with Seabird
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The Apple Farmers’ Calendar
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Last Act
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Observance at Paleochora
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Wallflowers
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Nymph
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Heading Home
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Couple in the Park with No Kids
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Giraffe
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Four Horses
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Observance of A Long Goodbye
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To Know Them by Their Hands
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Patient at Paimio
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Which Path?
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Reach
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Regarding A Cloud
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PART TWO
OBSERVATIONS OF WALKS BY THE SEA COMMENTARY
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Introduction Beyond the meditation place demands
Topoi, settings out
to see with a reading eye and to read with a seeing eye
exercise (preamble to the close readings)
Why the walk?
On The Beach
Chapter 1
When A Walk is a Poem (reading ‘The Constant’)
Ammons the Observant
An Eye for the Particular
I discovered the universe this morning
the shore ... the state in which poets are made and unmade
A Poem Is A Walk
I was in no mood for wonder
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Chapter 2 Many things about this place are dubious (reading ‘The End of March’)
looking for something, something, something
Ties
a bit of description ...
the secret of the held balance
my proto‐dream‐house, my crypto‐dream‐house
Echoes in ‘The End of March’
A light to read by – perfect! But –
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Chapter 3 Entanglement. Immediacy. Three Seers Face the Invisible
Who is the third who walks [always beside you?]
Walking I try to tell ...
Who’s speaking? Who’s Asking? Forms of Address
Entanglement. Immediacy. Defining here and now
Scripting description
Paying Attention
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Conclusion Let us go then, you and I – where observations become observances
Oh, do not ask, ‘what is it?’ Let us go and make our visit
time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions
and revisions
I have heard the mermaids singing ...
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Appendix A The Constant by A. R. Ammons
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Appendix B The End of March by Elizabeth Bishop
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Appendix C
EUROPE (Omaha Beach 2003) by Jorie Graham
Acknowledgements
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Bibliography
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PART ONE
The Observances
NEW POEMS
[Part One, pages 9-61 has been removed at the author's request.]
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