On Walking On

“The collection presents Swensen’s own “walk-about” poetic excursions alongside her sequential micro-essays on writers who also wrote about walking, forming an overlay of literary gems on this topic. Ending with a bibliography of allusions in the collection—essayists, novelists, philosophers, architects, and cultural critics who once published on the topics of psychogeography and wandering, whether urban or rural—the book’s overall effect is kaleidoscopic yet coherent in its lucid typologies of walking, indicative of a poet’s intuition for an eclecticism beyond the avenues of persuasion that a philosopher might pursue on a similar theme.”

“Imagine an anthology of the literature of walking, with examples ranging from the Middle Ages to the present. Further imagine that the selections have been provided with commentary, supplying biographical and historical context as well as some perceptive analysis. Now imagine that that these commentaries are poems, usually in long lines, lyrical and prismatic. Finally, imagine a book containing only the commentaries, without the accompaniment of the texts that inspired them, supplemented instead with the commentator’s prose poems on walks she herself had taken one summer. On Walking On is like that.”

“Known for incisive book-length explorations of single subjects—hands, in The Book of a Hundred Hands (2005); gardens, in Ours (2008); ghosts, in Gravesend (2012)—here, in her sixteenth collection, professor and translator Swensen probes the profound bond between writing and walking. Weaving works of influential authors, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Lisa Robertson’s “Seven Walks,” into luminous meditations, Swensen follows Thoreau through a “cathedral of trees”; Sand through the “iridescent hum” of a French riverside; and Woolf through London, lamp-lit at dusk. But Swensen walks alone, too, and she intersperses these singular, paragraph-long musings throughout. Whether she’s contemplating cats and the creative process, language and landscapes, or centuries of fleeting yet extraordinary moments, Swensen remains an adept observer and a master of striking forms and line breaks. In “The Second Walk,” Swensen attests “the beautiful is also real, often / accidental, often in the middle of a phrase, a street, a day.” And though there’s nothing accidental about them, Swensen’s phrases, glowing with incandescent imagery and searching wit, are themselves vividly real things of beauty.”

“The relationship of the walked line to the written one is clear in many of the poems; breath plays a role, as does rhythm.  In “Rousseau,” the ways in which the hand makes a written line on the page are shown as akin to the walker’s passage across the landscape, and revealed through the rhythm and scrawl and “loping slant” of the body:

Any walk     Rousseau once said     is endless where     the wild
          might seem
     to have a name undone from within     the unanswered f law
          written out

     by hand.  The entire text of what is now known as The
          Reveries of a Solitary Walker
     was found scrawled     and the hand goes on, has its own
          hundreds of miles to
     go.