First and first because
it was the first use of the word
that sparked my interest
in it,
via Raymond Williams:
“…the view,
the ordered proprietory response, the prospect…”
The prospect is the view
from manorial windows,
the visual declaration of
the view is mine,
the sweep of green lawn,
the formal gardens, the topiary,
and further on, forest,
woods. A line
of wilderness on the
horizon. From which
poachers have been
evicted.
I’m
only just now getting to
New York poet Marcella Durand’s The Prospect
(Delete Press, 2020), a book-length ecopoetic around landscape and the common, writing
the edge of the prospect, the edge of landscape and its depictions. “the region
was drained by a river,” she writes, “and takes on the name of that river // a
sign of a fish appears and now it is watershed // the entire region draiing //
into the sea // every creak, every stream // goes joining together [.]” I’m
curious how she writes in tandem, in response and in conversation, with the work
and thinking of
English poet John Clare (1793-1864), a poet known for his celebrations of
the English countryside. She offers poems to John Clare, to herself from John
Clare, to herself from herself, riffing off an extension of Clare’s own lines
as an investigation around the conversation of ecopoetic. “In John Clare’s day,”
she writes, “the commons was laid claim to. / The common land of the people was
enclosed. / The commons was claimed and closed. /// John Clare wrote to himself
as a child as a witness to enclosure. / His was the first recorded case of ‘ecodepression.’”
There is something interesting in how she works in conversation with the
pastoral with a contemporary, ecopoetic eye, assembling a book-length suite of
poems, fragments and sketch-notes set within a particular and contemporary
landscape (and a particular and contemporary anxiety around climate change),
one that includes elements of the past, as a landscape can’t help but absorb. She
places contemporary concerns upon that old landscape, seeing Clare’s depictions
of his immediate through an updated lens, one that includes her own self,
placed set in the centre of this updated portrait. Further on, offering: “It’s
difficult to write to oneself. // As far as I get today.”
But most photographs of
façades do contain an angle
being not stitched
together from thousands of digital photographs,
instead, they are viewed
from one place—
the viewer is the point
of perspective, singular
when flatness is
indication that the point of perspective
begins from what is being
viewed—the image is the
spot of origin
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