Coming to Imagined Places

 

 

    On the morning I left London, while killing time in my hotel room, I fired up The New Yorker poetry podcast which, shame on me, I rarely do. It’s a podcast in which a living poet, who has been published in The New Yorker (good luck with that), reads a poem by someone else that was published sometime in the NY’s history. It gets discussed between the reader and the NY’s poetry editor. In the end, the reading poet gets to read one of his own poems too.  Really, it’s a podcast I should listen to routinely; new resolution!

Anyway, I picked an episode at random, which turned out to be  Richard Blanco reading a poem by Elizabeth Bishop.  Here it is:

 

 Published in the print edition of the January 21, 1956, issue

 

        What serendipity! There’s a lot to unpack in this poem but in it, Bishop is considering what makes us want to travel, whether it measures up to what we imagine, is it right to cast our traveler’s gaze on local people getting on with their lives, and why can’t we be satisfied just staying put? All questions niggling in my thoughts as well, though never expressed poetically. 

Add to her concerns, our modern angst about travel: its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, and the effect on historic and fragile cities of hoards of cruise tourists swarming in for day trips. It all should weigh heavier on me than it does.

And yet, Bishop lists a number of experiences it would have been “a pity” to miss.  I like to think my desire to travel comes from a place of curiosity, but Bishop asks:

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?

She ends the poem with the dilemma unanswered, as it is for me.