Sarah Gord Blog Post 3

I really appreciated how many of these poets continued to present place as intertwined with human experiences and emotions associated with a physical location. In “Plucking Flowers,” the speaker’s experiences blur into the changing landscape of Tokyo, while in “After a Turn Around the Temple,” the speaker links pride with not only the physical place of the temple but the greater spiritual significance of place.  

I was particularly struck by Anjum Hasan’s poem, “A Place Like Water.” In this poem, place – and changing forces like water in a place – is impossible to separate from the relationship of the “we” in the poem. Hasan plays with the ways that people map their feelings and desires onto a place, illustrating how something as simple as water can take on a variety of shapes and meanings. She refers at first to the “sadness of coming / into wet city at dawn,” a sadness that stays “all through the day.” The reader gets the sense that the wetness itself is not creating sadness, but the gloominess of the city enhances the palpable tension between the two people who are “not speaking, neither of us.” The people in the poem feel a nostalgia for somewhere else they have just been; they are “still thinking of that other place worked on by the sun,” a description which contrasts the gloomy, wet sky with a brighter environment. They “shake out sand from folded clothes,” which also makes it appear that they are unpacking from a beach vacation. The contrast of the shouting of people on the beach with the “wet stairs where / no one’s been for days” makes the place to which they are returning seem even more quiet and lonely. The “wet stairs” take on a greater significance as a place where people have not been.

For most of the poem, Hasan uses water to signify rain, which seems to emphasize the gloominess and strained nature of the people’s relationship. She says they are: "thinking it ought to be the case that one / returns with screws, a piece of string, some word or turn of phrase, something to fit somewhere, that click or slide or /resolution that has been wanting." These lines make it seem as though there is something absent in their relationship, and they left on vacation to find some missing piece that has been solely needed. The next line, “Instead a winter monsoon / blurs the world” presents the alternative to the resolution of their relationship as violent, windy rain, again mapping the stress of their relationship onto the weather itself.

Near the end of the poem, however, the people seem to be wishing for something contradictory. The “where we / want to go” is “a place like water when it lifts us in a magnet wave / to set us down again, and we’re unencumbered, weightless, brave.” For most of the poem, water takes on a negative meaning, but here, Hasan highlights more positive characteristics. The desire to see water and wetness in this light seems hopeful for the people’s relationship. It appears as though they might be able to reframe the water as a positive element to bring them back together. But the final line is bleak: “our questions turn to images of strangers waving across fields, / pointlessly, insistently, across fields, through falling rain.” These last two lines repeat the phrase, “across fields,” implying a great distance, and ends with “through falling rain,” which we have been led to believe is equivalent to sadness for most of the poem. Looking "through" water is different from being lifted by water, and it implies a lack of clarity and effort. 

Ultimately, this poem shows how much an environment can relate to human emotions and how impossible it is for place alone to repair chasms in a relationship. It seems as though these people traveled to find something that was missing in their relationship, but were ultimately the same people. Therefore, people have more of an impact on what “place” means than “place” does on who people are.