Srikanth Reddy at Poetry Magazine:
In 2021, the American poet Forrest Gander began to walk portions of the 800-mile San Andreas fault, north to south, with his companion, the South Asian artist Ashwini Bhat. Gander’s intended destination, he writes in Mojave Ghost (New Directions, 2024), the “novel poem” that recounts his journey, was the “desolate town where I was born”—Barstow, California, in the western Mojave Desert.
One of the great walkers in contemporary literature, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gander has embraced “a theory and practice of go” beginning with early books such as the collection Deeds of Utmost Kindness (1994). Walking, in Gander’s poetic imagination, is fundamental to what makes us human. “A Poetic Essay on Creation, Evolution, and Imagination,” from The Blue Rock Collection (2004), chronicles the discovery of “the most significant Paleolithic path, those Laetoli / footprints / which show that early hominids / were fully bipedal long before / they developed tool-making capabilities or / an expanded brain.” Core Samples from the World (2011) repurposes the walking tour of Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior to document the poet’s cosmopolitan travels through China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, and the United States in the form of serial haibun: “Arigato-meiwaku, Bashō would say as he hiked through villages accumulating gifts he could not humanly carry,” Gander notes from the road, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.