I’ll begin with an admission: I’ve written a lot of what could be called “travel poems.” I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it does introduce questions. Henri Cartier-Bresson said that while great photographs could be taken anywhere, “the heart beats faster in some places than in others.” There is something about the unfamiliar feel of a country where the architecture, food, customs, and even the money are different. That unfamiliar something can free writers to reimagine themselves, to see themselves as part of a broader geography, one that the self has to stretch a bit to accommodate.
When we travel to a foreign city, we are the same people we were at home, but we’re still hoping for something different. We’re hoping to be changed by what we see and do. Even if Eliot was right that “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” that knowing involves a greater awareness. Perhaps the awareness may only be to realize that some vegetables taste better a little less cooked or that seeing the original of a great painting is a different experience from seeing a reproduction in a book or online. We may look out the hotel window at a busy square a little off to the side, knowing we couldn’t afford the direct view, and find ourselves excited to see baroque buildings and people wearing scarves walking out from the steps of the Metro. Of course, we know that for those people, this is just another day, and they’re in a hurry to take care of chores or head back to work. Why is it so different for us?
It’s possible that Kierkegaard may have underestimated aesthetic rotation. Our craving for changes in our circumstances may be far more than an avoidance of eat-your-moral-spinach ethical duties. Let’s entertain the possibility, which so much of our being desires, that in a new place we ourselves will become different. I’ll leave aside the metaphysical questions about the existence or nature of the self. It’s simpler to stick with the self that writes poems, which, regardless whether it’s constructed or grows like a turnip, certainly exists in one form or another. As much as I hate to say it, Nietzsche and Hume may have been wrong too. They argued that Descartes’s cogito ergo sum mixed up grammar with logic, that just because a thought exists doesn’t mean a thinker exists. Poems, however, exist at least as much as their poets and readers exist. If they are hallucinations without anyone to hallucinate them, then we’re also hallucinations and the distinction doesn’t matter. Maybe the place really can change us.
Let’s return to our travelers looking out the window, eating crisp vegetables, and going to museums. If the poems they write are good, those poems will make connections between their lives back home and their presence on another part of the planet. When they return, the connections remain. The poems resonate more deeply. History is less an abstraction when it’s cast in the image of bullet-scars on 18th century buildings. Rimbaud’s great realization was that “I is another.” To the extent that our travelers have a different perspective on their lives, they are indeed different people. Physical distance can create metaphysical distance. Their poems will evidence this.
Why, though, do these traveler-poets want to be someone different? They could slip into the stereotype of American tourists who stay at the Hilton, have eggs and bacon for breakfast, get coffee at Starbucks, and wrap themselves in the huge protective duvet of their own culture. But, they don’t. There is something about poetry itself that urges them toward change and difference. No one knows where poems come from. We cannot directly will poems into being (at least the good ones). Under the influence of feeling and thought and sometimes coffee, we make ourselves available to the language, and the language expresses something through us. Soon afterwards, we may read the poem with a kind of surprise that we wrote it, and after a year or two, it may seem to have been written by someone else entirely.
The voice of the poem is “another,” in Rimbaud’s sense of that term. It is ourselves, but more than ourselves, and when it is missing from our lives for a while, we feel it. How often do writers bemoan how long it’s been since they’ve written? I don’t know if it’s a healthy state of mind, but I believe writers, especially poets, aspire to become that voice, that other self. Poets gravitate toward change the way the needle of a compass swings north. It’s true that some poets resist this urge. I think of Philip Larkin. The tragedy that permeates his poems is his refusal of the drive to become someone else. He felt it so keenly that it may have terrified him. For other poets, ones for instance who’ve been forced into exile, travel may take on another meaning altogether. It may even express a weariness, as it did for Brecht, who wrote, “We went on, changing our countries more often than our shoes.”
But, our traveler-poets are not Philip Larkin or Bertolt Brecht. They innocently and quite happily walk down an avenue in a great city at night. All around them are vendors selling roast corn, candy, toys, and bright scarves. Musicians and dancers perform and pass the hat. The black sky shines with flashes of tungsten, and the wide steps of stone buildings welcome spectators. Our travelers see all this, hear it, and smell the roasted corn. They cannot help but be changed, be pushed a little bit more toward the voice of their poems.