Here and There. Bill Conlogue

“Some blocks” (1), and “the real mountain with its / Four undisturbed seasons” (28–29). This in-between world, without people, stripped of vegetation, hacked open, and trashed, represents what human work has wrought in creating and sustaining built environments. An indeterminate space, this place divides two orders: the wholly human and the completely natural. This space demands our attention because “It is, above all, the unacknowledged, / The unreclaimed, the entirely / Useless, that will not be forgotten nor / Disowned, but follow us to spread / Their shapeless variety at the edge / Of all we have made, and give us / No peace” (30–36). A silent presence, this ground cries out, reminding us of the war waged against it.

      If a pastoral landscape represents the middle landscape between city and wild environments, the negative version of this middle is a mining landscape, a sterile ground of massive upheaval. As much as a pastoral landscape may represent a positive link in a continuum between the urban and the wild, the in-between world that mining creates registers the negative picture, the absolute disconnection between city and wilderness. The pastoral may face in two directions, but mining turns away from both town and mountain. After all, mine land cannot renew itself the way farmland can, at least ideally. And no families live at the colliery. Mine land requires reclamation.

      The land at the end of Luzerne Street has changed some since the mid-1950s. Instead of open space, there are two junkyards (ah, sorry: “auto recyclers”), one on either side of the street, a moving company, and no culm banks, although their remnants constitute the ground across which spread junk cars and trucks in various states of dismemberment. The street now extends beyond the railroad tracks, where it suddenly becomes Dalton Street. To one’s left, an abandoned boxcar sits alongside the tracks, forming a section of one junkyard’s enclosure. The area is still a blank spot on city maps. In fact, most of the blank spaces on Scranton city maps were once the locations of collieries. The blanks remind one of no-man’s-lands in war zones.

      Those who wage this war graduate from the “new high school” of the poem’s opening line, West Scranton High, whose mascot is the Invader. “Some blocks beyond” the school, Luzerne Street ends in a “weedy tract / Of shale and cinders... / Too indefinite to be called a field” (1, 4–6) that stretches between the city, below and behind, and Bald Mountain, above and ahead. Bordering this space is the Hyde Park breaker, whose “disused mine-shaft, full / Of water, leads under the graves” (18–19) of the Washburn Street Cemetery, where the victims of the Avondale disaster are buried. Human-made, the graves and the shaft direct one’s attention to the underworld, the realm of the dead. The cemetery’s potter’s field, which “spills out / From among [the cemetery’s] trees,” points to the poor, the unknown, the unmarked, who are simply numbered to lie forgotten beside the community’s named dead (16–17). These lines, in their focus on death, echo what Merwin said in a 2009 TV interview with Bill Moyers: “It’s the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It’s the mystery. That’s always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it.” In the same conversation, Merwin later claimed, “I think poetry always comes out of what you don’t know.”²⁰

      What the speaker knows is a human-made ruin. The graves echo the “canyons left over from / Strip mines” (20–21), which the landscape’s “shallow stream,” Lucky Run, fills with “bottomless basins, shoes, and [its] stained / Deposits” of mine acid (22–23). Beyond the canyons rise “Symmetrical mountains / Of culm,” orderings of waste whose mimicking of the real mountain calls attention to their sterile artificiality (24–25).

      Studying “Luzerne Street” on Luzerne Street is a good idea, sure, but doing so raises issues of interpretation. Does one study the place as it was when the poet was writing about it? This would demand a historical approach that is itself a stew of questions (e.g., what can we really know about that spot in that time?). Or does one study the place as it is when the reader reads the poem? (Does it matter whether the reader is already familiar with the place?) Both poem and place are new moment-to-moment; connotations and contours change. But the poem and the place change independently of each other. Then again, each also expresses continuities; the poem’s words don’t change, we hope, and the place’s location remains constant, sort of. If it’s true that the grounds of interpretation shift over time, how does one build a case for a place-based interpretation of the poem, even an open-ended interpretation? You cannot, but you can try.