I apologize for the delayed creation of my blog! After months of telling people that I would create a travel blog, I finally sat down and made one with only a day to spare since I leave for my first stop (Sligo, Ireland) tomorrow night. True to being a writer, I agonized over the title of my blog until I finally settled on "postcard poetics." In a way, this blog will serve as my postcards to you all (although I will try to send as much snail mail as possible) with updates on my travels. However, it will also be a place for me to share poems, words, or phrases that I write/encounter during this upcoming year. I would also love to hear your responses to anything I post whether it be my poems, photos, or musings.
Here's my most recent version of my itinerary:
Mid-July, August: Ireland
September: Northern Ireland
October, November: England
Early December: India
Mid-December: Bangladesh
January, Februrary: Trinidad & Tobago; St. Lucia
March, April: Germany
May: Czech Republic
June-mid-July: Provence, France
To conclude my first post, here's one of my favorite travel poems by Elizabeth Bishop:
Questions of Travel
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:
"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
I took a boat out to see the Lake Isle of Innisfree. Once lonely in London and homesick for Sligo County, Yeats wrote one of his most famous poems and vowed, "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree..." I'll post more about this day trip later.
A letter from Yeats regarding The Abbey Theater. (On display at the Sligo Country Museum)
A view of Sligo town and the Garavogue river.
My bedroom in the hostel Yeats Village. It comes with my own dresser, desk, and bathroom as well. I also have access to a full kitchen with cooking supplies. The only problem is that I'm a horrible cook.. (I'm working on it!)
