We Know It in Our Bones: Reading a Thirty-Five-Acre Plot in Rural Virginia with Three Poems by Charles Wright

This meditative essay considers what it might mean to “read” text and terrain comparatively, attending to the nuances of poetic and environmental form that shape experience. I explore this notion through a sensorial reading of a thirty-five-acre plot of land in rural Virginia, alongside three poems by American poet Charles Wright, “Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn,” “Lines After Rereading T. S. Eliot,” and “Reading Lao Tzu Again in the New Year.” Examining place in dialogue with poem, I explore how physical and formal elements in both terrains can produce parallel aesthetic, bodily, and emotional effects and resonances.