CONSTRUCTION, ABANDONMENT, AND DEMOLITION: POETS AND THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

6 7 R C O N S T R U C T I O N , A B A N D O N M E N T , A N D D E M O L I T I O N P O E T S A N D T H E U R B A N L A N D S C A P E D O L O R E S H A Y D E N While historians, geographers, and anthropologists identify patterns in the urban landscape, poets do similar work when they reflect on individuals’ attachments to places or exploit the resonance of wood, stone, and brick to follow the trajectories of construction , abandonment, and demolition. Poets also often outline the nuances of personal territory within public realms: Rachel Hadas watches her child walk alone on a New York sidewalk in ‘‘The Red Hat’’; Charles Wright rambles down older U.S. highways in ‘‘Lonesome Pine Special’’; James Dickey’s ‘‘Cherrylog Road’’ delivers teenage sex in an automobile graveyard; and Leslie Monsour hunts for an elusive Los Angeles space in ‘‘Parking Lot.’’ When I teach an undergraduate seminar at Yale called ‘‘Poets’ Landscapes,’’ we investigate some of the vernacular building types and landscape types these poems represent. Much has been written about poets’ concern for the natural landscape – Bonnie Costello’s Shifting Ground is an excellent example – while far less has been said about poets’ engagement with the urban landscape and the culture of building. The built environment is a constant material presence in everyday life. The Cana- 6 8 H A Y D E N Y dian poet Anne Michaels tells us, ‘‘There is no city that does not dream / from its foundations.’’ Evocative traces of physical history may remain in the landscape as roads, bridges, and buildings, although American towns and cities once understood as firmly rooted places have often given way to more complex, anonymous metropolitan spaces. Decades ago, the geographer Carl Sauer developed cultural landscape studies to explore the ‘‘combination of natural and man-made elements that comprises, at any given time, the essential character of a place.’’ The physical scale of a place is one of its most important features, and scale is perceived in relation to the human body moving through constructed spaces such as the room, the building, the neighborhood, the city, and the region. Geographers and anthropologists have theorized ‘‘place attachment’’ and ‘‘embodied space’’ to situate the body in the context of urban places, but increasingly they also write about the problem of ‘‘placelessness’’ or ‘‘non-places.’’ This essay traces how some American poets have grappled with place and non-place through the evocation of the built environment undergoing construction , abandonment, or demolition. Place Attachment and Embodied Space Place attachment is defined by the anthropologist Setha Low and the environmental psychologist Irvin Altman as the innate tendency of humans to attach themselves to loved places in an emotional bonding process similar to the way children form attachments to parental figures. Poems such as Emily Dickinson’s ‘‘Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers,’’ Robert Frost’s ‘‘Directive,’’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘‘For the Union Dead,’’ all set in the context of traditional New England towns, suggest how poets have conveyed this bond. Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, settled in 1731, a Puritan covenant community; Frost, in diverse towns in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont; and Lowell, in Boston , a Puritan town founded in 1630 that became the largest city in New England. The recognizable and lively elements of a New England covenant community that generate attachment to the place – central green or common, houses, meetinghouse, and civil war monument – appear in their work alongside more disturbing C O N S T R U C T I O N , A B A N D O N M E N T , A N D D E M O L I T I O N 6 9 R elements. The scale of the body and various inhabited buildings play against uninhabitable space in the form of a cemetery, an abandoned farm, and an underground excavation. Setha Low’s theory of embodied space extends the idea of place attachment to address the accumulated experience of...