Anthology, Volume 8, Spring 2002 Page: X
xiv, 15-97 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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would lie upstairs in my un-air conditioned attic room-I
remember hot weather more than the cold-thumbing
through the World Book encyclopedias my favorite aunt
had given us. I read about far-off places: pyramids,
Yankee Stadium, all those military outposts where my
father had served, Mars. Exotic as they were, if those
volumes taught me anything, it was that something like
nothing happens everywhere.
Philip Larkin wrote, "I hate home and having to be
there," yet that's where he largely stayed. He didn't care
to travel. He thought the poet's job was to recreate the
familiar, even if it was a familiar he didn't much enjoy.
He said he'd like to see China someday if he could get
back by dinner. He was a great poet, but he didn't have
much to say, and his reticence likely kept him from
writing many bad poems, and what he wrote about most
meaningfully was the nothing of his life.
I grew up with similar dissatisfactions about home
and about having to be there. I have them now about no
longer being there. It's hard to have some idea of home
when your imagination keeps pushing you elsewhere.
Home is not where it is; it's not even where it was. I don't
think we can find it by wandering through life pretending
to be ourselves. I'm not saying that family and the past
aren't important. I'm just saying that you can't live there.
You can however, recreate them as fictions the same way
you can the places you haven't been and the people you
haven't met. Art is the elsewhere for people for whom the
world can never be enough.
Jerry Bradley
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Tarleton State University. Anthology, Volume 8, Spring 2002, periodical, Spring 2002; Stephenville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth494683/m1/14/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Tarleton State University.