mblergh it's me!

I believe that each of us internalizes a landscape composite of myths and stories, and we carry that psychological terrain within us as we make our way through the world, whether we are facing that green divan that Anna Akhmatova slept on in Saint Petersburg or gazing out at Stone Mountain in Georgia, an overlay by which the future is often colored and through which it is often perceived. However, like Lillian Smith—“Miss Lil”—some of us attempt to refashion that inherited landscape through consciousness. That is, we attempt to bring ourselves to an awareness of what has shaped us. Since landscape is both regional and emotional, I learned to meditate on everything around me, people and nature.

Memory then. But of course such a thing exists, and is the linchpin of poetry. Everything we are is beholden to it. It’s built right into language, past tense and all the deliberate ways to score that, to break that open and split hairs—past perfect and present perfect, the pluperfect and so on. The older we get, the more memory clouds or clears what we see. We don’t merely imagine its pressure, don’t always let it slide into an overwhelming terrible weight or pure squish, though both are dangers. How it works in poems: the how is crucial. Because memory’s ache is enormous.