tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post5814940537561205716..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Edward Dorn: The Sundering U.P. Tracks / William Henry Jackson: Rock Cuts along the Union Pacific, 1869Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-5685807970683435462011-08-27T05:59:08.373-07:002011-08-27T05:59:08.373-07:00Barry,
Dorn had come from a railroad town in Illi...Barry,<br /><br />Dorn had come from a railroad town in Illinois; his father, a railroad brakeman, having drifted away shortly after his birth, he received a measure of protection in childhood from his maternal grandfather, a railroad man on the Illinois Central. He wrote this poem while residing in Pocatello, a UP railroad town. The poem remembers the monopoly ownership of the Union Pacific by the Harrimans, a family representing one of the great 19th c. American capital accumulations. In it he figures the railroad as an instrument of domination and division, apportioning western lands into determined corridors of power and turning open spaces into private tyrannies of ownership. The arrogance of attitude which would draw a straight line through the major landforms of a continent, and cut and blast its way through them for the sake of profit, stands plainly as a symbol of the bisected heart of not only a country as a geographical unit but of something larger. <br /><br />A subplot in the poem (which is quite long, I've selected only the two small bits) brings in anecdotal evidence regarding a black photographer and friend of the poet then visiting Pocatello (they were to work together on a book about the Shoshonean tribe of the Fort Hall Reservation). In this regard the sundering tracks become emblematic also of "how many thousand years" of racial and territorial divisions, the boundary lines that partition-off white and black sections of the town -- or impose a borderline of cold distance between a sympathetic heart and its "desires". For Dorn that "other" side of the tracks would always be a district fraught with complex meaning, often occupied by those he loved.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-58884322405393408272011-08-27T03:12:47.344-07:002011-08-27T03:12:47.344-07:00These images are like studies in that (literal)con...These images are like studies in that (literal)construction of geography that ED and Sauer speak of, and in the too often competing human/ecological significance of geometry and line: as commentary on that remarkable final image of the bridge, I wonder if I could put forward this, from AR Ammons's 'Corson's Inlet':<br /><br /><br />I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,<br /><br />shutting out and shutting in, separating inside <br /><br /> from outside: I have <br /><br /> drawn no lines: <br /><br /> as <br /><br /><br /><br />manifold events of sand <br /><br />change the dune's shape that will not be the same shape <br /><br />tomorrow, <br /><br /><br /><br />so I am willing to go along, to accept <br /><br />the becoming <br /><br />thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends establish <br /><br /> no walls: <br /><br /><br /><br />by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek<br /><br />to undercreek: but there are no lines though <br /><br /> change in that transition is clear <br /><br /> as any sharpness: but "sharpness" spread out, <br /><br />allowed to occur over a wider range <br /><br />than mental lines can keep ...Barry Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02121653352771218338noreply@blogger.com