Somehow, I’d been at my perch at the University of Cambridge for a month before I realized what a different range of texts and ideas this year would introduce to me. It’s not entirely surprising, I suppose. I arrived here for a year-long Visiting Fellowship at the beginning of September, a good month before Cambridge’s Michaelmas Term began; it’s just in the last week or so that the university’s full roster of research seminars and symposia has gotten underway. Last Friday, I strode across the Cam for a symposium in honor of Geoffrey Hartman (who told me, at the end of the day, about how John Crowe Ransom had once offered him a job at Kenyon, and that he visited campus and thought about it–just imagine it…). Among the provocative ideas laid out for us during some seven hours of papers and discussions was one speaker’s assertion that literary scholars ought to take up anew one of Hartman’s earliest claims: that we have barely begun to do the work of understanding how literature functions as a distinctive way of knowing the world.
Not an hour earlier, another speaker had introduced me to the Devon poet Alice Oswald, during a talk that raised the question (following Thomas Nagel) of “what it is like” to be a poem, to be that written thing voiced, read, studied, argued over, given different life on the tongue and in the ear of reader after reader. When this speaker distributed her handouts before her panel began, Oswald’s “Woods etc.” (the title poem from her most recent volume, published here in 2005) was on one side of a page, all by itself, with no author’s name listed. Its four quatrains needled into me immediately, with their evocation of walking, of a walk, of losing oneself while walking and wandering through “loose tacks of sound” (l. 4). She writes, “I remember walking once into increasing / woods, my hearing like a widening wound” (ll. 5-6); in sixteen sharp lines she winds round and round the feeling of being wounded and yet widened by such increase, such self-scattering steady stillness as can come upon one in trackless woods, particularly at this time of year. Late in her presentation, our speaker gave us the poet’s name; within a day I owned the slim volume from which this poem comes. But why, I wondered, had I not heard of Oswald before?
The quick and easy answer is that her three volumes–The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), Dart (2002), and Woods etc. (2005)–haven’t been published in the U.S. just yet. That’s about to change: Graywolf Press is bringing out her Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems at the end of this month (Amazon lists the volume’s publication date as 30 October). I turned this forthcoming volume up only after I’d finished reading Woods etc., and I have to marvel at the weird way my literary life works. Had I seen only Graywolf’s edition, I might have been tempted to overlook Oswald altogether: its title and packaging feel very sci-fi, somehow, and I tend not to spend much of my time or money in that particular cultural realm. But oh, what I would be missing–not least, her vivid and deeply grounded evocations of a part of England I know and love well, having lived there the last time I spent a year abroad.
As it is, a constellation (as it were) of events and appearances have conspired put her directly in my path in the past week: the unexpected presence of her poem at last week’s symposium; the perch of her three volumes on the poetry shelves at Heffers, my favorite local bookshop; the imminent release of this newest volume; and now, her appearance as today’s poet on Poetry Daily. She is, that is to say, in my air. Not that it’s really so difficult, once you know about the existence of such a poet, to find more and more and more and more and more about her. It’s the finding that’s tricky, and for that, the last week has reminded me, we have reason to be glad for serendipity.
I haven’t met Oswald in the flesh–not yet, anyway. But I’m deeply grateful that I happen to have been introduced to her work, and to have been brought by it to feel anew what it is like to hope, as her speaker does at the end of “Hymn to Iris” (also from Woods etc.), “And may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word, / Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing” (ll. 18-19).