Through poetry, Living Methods writers created “porous” maps of the Kinney Center as a physical and textual site: not just a place-to-write, but a place formed and reformed by writing. Each writer documented their ongoing relationship with a location of their choosing on the Center’s grounds, a place they felt drawn to investigate through poetry.
Robin Arble
Statement
As I say in my poem, the view from the meadowscape bench “satisfies/my body’s need to be everywhere at once.” It’s been a summer of views. The Friday I handed in my senior thesis to my committee, me and my best friend hiked Mount Norwottuck, the lipped mountain that presides over Hampshire’s campus. We met during orientation, and we’ve been best friends ever since. In our first year, we’d take long walks through the woods behind campus and talk about all the discoveries we were making, within ourselves, in our classes, and with all our other peers. Climbing Norwottuck, then, always felt like a literal and symbolic milestone we needed to check off our bucket list before we graduated. So, one day, we were sitting on a picnic bench in the middle of the library lawn and thought, “Let’s climb that.” So we did. We didn’t look up directions on our phones. We just walked in its direction. It took us all day, and a lot of cuts and scrapes along the way, but we finally got to Nortwottuck’s peak with the sun still up. We looked down and saw the Mr. Roger’s replica of Hampshire’s campus. This was the first time we’d seen all of Hampshire at once. There’s Prescott! There’s Greenwich! There’s Dakin! Hey, I think I can see my house from here. It was a view that only four years of highly intentional living could have given us. The woods behind campus looked so small. We couldn’t believe the best years of our lives so far were made and spent on such a modest plot of land.
I loved feeling the mountain in my sore muscles for the next few days. It felt like nature was inside of me in a way I don’t often permit it to be. I want to eat organic. I want to take more hikes. I want to grow my own. Right before we got to the peak, both of us scraped our shoulders on a small cliff. In the weeks after our hike, I noticed my scrape had scarred over. I can still see it in the mirror. It might be fading, but if it is, it’s fading too slowly for me to notice. It feels like the mountain took a little piece from me to keep before it granted me admission to its highest view.
I’ve been obsessed with views ever since. I grew up in Western MA—I was raised in Holyoke, spent time in Belchertown, Amherst, Hadley, and Northampton in high school, then came to Hampshire when I was 19. Getting my Driver’s license changed my life. I know the whole of western MA like the back of my hand. Climbing its best peaks and looking at huge swaths of it all at once feels like a literal and symbolic way of knowing my home. It’s the closest way my mortal, finite body can be everywhere at once. This reminds me of how CAConrad ended the prose reflection in their last book. Maybe I want my poems to be mixed with my ashes, but I’d rather be scattered from a western MA peak on a windy autumn day. This is where I belong.
We determined, at the end of the first class we had outside, that the meadowscape faces west. That’s Northampton. I can’t tell what that structure is coming out of the hills. Can you see into the Berkshires from here? Oh, it’s mostly forest anyway. What a stunning view. Yet it’s highly curated—UMass bought this plot of land. What we think of as Nature is often a combination of natural and man-made: meadows, forests, streams, trees. Colonialism is continuous. Part of this knowledge is recognizing that, on a wider view, everything is natural, even humans and their behaviors. I try to hold all this in mind when I gaze out at a view that feels like “the most natural thing.” This doesn’t detract from my reverence, but it informs it.
I wrote this poem on the back of our handout, and I interspersed my thoughts with remembered lines from the recording of Tongo Eisen-Martin’s poetry. That’s where God paddle came from. Maybe I’ll find one the next time I’m sitting in front of a view that’s new and old as any god. Maybe the lines widen because the mind widens the longer you sit in nature without distraction? I also had CAConrad—that class’s other reading—on my mind. And James Schuyler’s friendly, pantheistic talkativeness was also fresh in the folds of my brain. The page is a canvas.