ࡱ> BDAg 1bjbjVV 4Dr<r<& ~~***>>>8v4>0-//////$dS*S.$h**--XE[~0*4SS~ : Artist's Statement Lucas A. Street I. In the late sixteenth century a long-held geographical tenet began to lose sway. Since the time of Pythagoras, philosophers and theologians alike had conjectured an immense if as-yet-undiscovered landmass: terra australis, the southern land. This continent was born of a hypothesis, the ancient Greek notion of a world balanced, symmetrical: surely all the "northern" landmasses (Eurasia, Africa) must be mirrored in the southern hemisphere. And so, any land sighted in the far south (e.g., Tierra del Fuego, New Guinea, Sumatra) must be part of some far-reaching coast unfurled around the world's polar region. Lacking large-scale perspective, cartographers transcribed reports of these discoveries into a disproportionate austral coast. Not until Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation revealed an absence of land south of the Americas did the first fissures in this continental assumption form. These fissures, though initially ignored, would amplify over the next two centuries with the voyages of Abel Tasman in the seventeenth century until finally, with James Cook's excursions, giving way into a land-swallowing chasm. The fictional continent of terra australis, fixed on maps and imaginations for two millennia, was no more. Today Alfred Hiatt writes, "The twenty-first century map of the world contains no unknown land." But does this cartographic certainty, realized only recently, truly preclude the possibility of such a land's existence? Few would argue with the premise that there are things in this world, whether spiritual or scientific, which exist outside our field of vision. What if the disappearance of this vast continent from our mapssunken like Atlantis, blotted out as never since Noahis less a testament to our world-mapping achievements than to a dispelling of wonder? II. All poets lie; as Stevens wrote, "poetry is the supreme fiction." Years ago I argued that the task of poetry was to show a thing as "truly" as possible. While this may indeed be the case, my a priori, presumptuous definition of truth proved flawed. By "true," I had meant factual. But what happens if we consider truth in terms of not facts but fictions? To speak of the ineffable through story is nothing new. Just as creation myths are not primarily historical texts but ways of understanding existence, terra australis was not merely an imagined landmass; it was a means of understanding the world by considering one's own culture against that of an Other. With this legendary continent discounted, in an age marked by "incredulity toward metanarratives," how are we to make sense of our world? Is there room for territory newly-made, unexplored? So I embark, hoping to find such a place: foreign and brimming with wonder, another new world. Yet, even if insulated, isolate, such a place must still provide purchase with the known world; if while engaged in exploration I am satellite, I must exert some pull of my own. Every travelogue must have its addressee; to whom, then, should I write? The choice is a false one. I will send no letters, only postcards, anonymously addressed. The reader should indeed insert herself into these salutations, but no more so than I insert myself. In this way (but by no means others), this body of work mirrors the circular biblical epistle: initially intended toward specific persons, yet ultimately circulated among communities. In this way I evade the troublesome question of "audience." Whether it is a satisfactory evasion remains to be seen. Neither is the old world exempt from such inquiry: from afar, I aim my telescope at the mainland and write what I see. I zoom in to scrutinize my old home abandoned stateside while yet looking to places I've never traveled. I wander from outpost to outpost, sending postcards all the while. Let these postcards serve as markers, points of entry into each subsequent grouping of accounts. But what of the travel guide? With what function should he be taskedmerely to indicate points of interest without commentary? Should he be concerned with consistency, with keeping disbelief at bay? Imagine Ishmael confined to first-person limited perspective. How much of Moby-Dick (all that makes it singular, perhaps) would evaporate, unsupported by mere factual self-selection? Imagine Ishmael without Queequeg, without Ahab, without the whale itself. It becomes clear that a narrator is notable only so much as he observes the fantastic, the riveting Other. I reject either/or for the polymath, the strictly observable for the elusive playfulness of the true. III. If I may speak for a moment of those observable frontiers, prose poetry remains a relatively new one in American (though not European) letters. The nineteenth-century American prose poems of Poe and Melville were seen through the lens of fiction, therefore ignored as prototypes of the fledgling genre usually attributed to Baudelaire. After the genre-expanding experiments of Williams and Stein, prose poetry in the U. S. lay fallow for decades until being picked up and dusted off by Ginsberg, Tate, Edson, Bly, and others, who turned their backs on centuries of poetic tradition by abandoning that most recognizable, hallowed attribute of poetry, the linerhyme and meter having been rejected as primary criteria for poems, resulting in the richness of Modernism, which itself folded into and reformed the mainstream poetry to follow. Edson believes the prose poem can and should spark a similar reformation, should force a reevaluation of poetry entire, posing the question, what remains when the one remaining requisite of the poem is absent? Language remains. Image too. And the sentences, those wonderfully sprawling or succinct, staccato sentences, are awarded the weight once afforded spatial manipulation or clever enjambment. Prose poems are strange, irrational, immediateadjectives that should apply to all poetry, but the institutionalization of poetry has allowed a practice of itself as mimesis: something crystallized, crystalline. I aim, with these prose poems, to dash it all. Not (as Edson seems to advocate) the arc and thread of contemporary poetry, but my own complacencyan overreliance on form, on consistent imagery, on emptiness disguised as "space" or letting a poem "breathe." I want the poem as organism. I want my poems to encompass: to span, to embrace. To open up. To be the vessels in which to mix elements, then decant them as a new substance altogether. Thus synthesized, these poems prove unpredictable, the settings and speakers slippery. Transcribing poetry into/as prose, for me, allows greater leaps of the imagination, more frequent forays into semi-surrealist flights of fancy. Once the weight of the line is lifted and fidelity to fact overthrown, a profound sort of levity moves in. An evolutionary process has been set in motion. Often the prose poem is anthropomorphized as a living thing with agency and erratic tendencies (see George Barker's description of the prose poem as a mythical beast akin to the Loch Ness Monster). The prose poem sets its own course, resisting excessive direction. IV. About the conception and expansion of terra australis, Hiatt writes, "Stitched together, the traces of disparate explorations added verisimilitude to the thesis, in existence since classical times, of a vast Antarctic continent." This body of work was formed via a similarly agglomerative approach: though linked by the terra firma of their prose form, these poems employ disparate speakers as well as addressees. Likewise incongruous localesboth geographical and temporalexist concurrently here. It may be that terra australis would never have existed without Greek notions of symmetry, but these poems resist such notions of equilibrium. Line breaks and stanzas would impose undue order on these vignettes, would suggest hierarchy, completion. This work is necessarily incomplete. The medieval cartographers, accepting of mystery, proudly dubbed the austral reach terra incognita, the unknown land; I am not ashamed to echo their sentiment. There will be no terraforming these poems, no lineation-as-industrial-development. I snub the signposts that crop up with such practices, drawing attention to certain curated features of the landscape (often the developer's favorite haunts). Where signposts nonetheless crop up in the work, I hope they exist in the same way medieval mapmakers invented for their unknown land ports and coastal featuresthat is, vague and wholly fictional. Another tradition I seek to avoid is the Gnosticism that taints so many of our western pursuits. To love a thing is not to ignore its unsavory elements. We do not love our partners only when they wear wedding clothes. We love their bodies, limited and embarrassing as they are. We love this world as it is, even full of grief and boredom. We love Nature, even though its nature is savage. We love God even when he hides himself. To ignore the unseemly parts of our being is to betray it; likewise, to revere a thing is not to gut it. Therefore, in these poems my children are portrayed as semi-patricidal, my God often aloof, my fellow humans bloodthirsty, and my faith frequently bereft. It does not mean I love them less. Since the eighteenth century, terra australis has been replaced by the smaller but more tangible Antarctica, the mythical land of the antipodes demoted to an icy desert. Now fully mapped, it nonetheless appears on few of our modern Mercado-style mappamundii which display only the six habitable continents. The transposition is complete: a once-accepted fact is proven false, while the factual land, once established, is similarly forgotten. These poems are meant to invoke both the veracity of that world in which we no longer believe, and the desolate beauty of the one we so often ignore. L.A.S. March 2010 Laramie, Wyoming      Eisler, William. The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook. Cambridge UP, 1995.  Hiatt, Alfred. Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes Before 1600. U of Chicago P, 2008. 3.  Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester UP, 1984.  Edson, Russell. "Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems." Claims for Poetry. Ed. Donald Hall. U of Michigan, 1982. 95-103.  Barker, George. "The Jubjub Bird or some Remarks on the Prose Poem." Warwick: Greville, 1985.  Hiatt, p. 1  Roberts, Leslie Carol. The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica. 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