Writers Who Love Too Much

by Cole Swensen

Overview

On Walking On looks outward onto—or rather, walks through—the work of various writers for whom walking was or is an important element of daily life. The number of writers who were or are serious walkers is striking, and the connection goes back to antiquity, more recently including Woolf, Nerval, Sand, Debord, Sebald, and many others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937658663
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

COLE SWENSEN is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including Landscapes on a Train, and a book of essays, Noise That Stays Noise. Also a translator, she’s the founding editor of La Presse, dedicated to contemporary French work in translation. She is professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Table of Contents

Chaucer
The Walk of Least Resistance
Rousseau: The Reveries of a Solitary Walker
A Walk on May 17
Wordsworth
Wordsworth
Blake
A Walk on May 31
Thoreau: "Walking"
A Walk on June 7
De Quincy
Dickens
Stevenson
A Walk on June 13
Sand: Promenades Autour d'un Village
A Walk on June 19
Nerval
A Walk on June 21
Woolf: "Street Haunting"
A Walk on July 1
Humboldt
Schelle
A Walk on July 7
Walser: The Walk
A Walk on July 9
Breton
Debord
Burckhardt
A Walk on July 13
Sebald: The Rings of Saturn
A Walk on July 19
Herzog
Sinclair
Self
Mullen
A Walk on July 31
Roberston: "Seven Walks"
References

What People are Saying About This

Robert Fernandez

“Swensen’s exquisitely rendered images, unexpected syntax, and surprising line breaks give us the feeling of something ‘delicate falling to pieces,’ while at the same time, in its falling, ‘perfecting the scene.’”

Editorial Reviews

03/27/2017
Utilizing both research and praxis, Swensen (Landscapes from a Train) draws on the rich history of writing about walking in this sonorous and attentive collection. The writers Swensen references span from Chaucer through contemporary poet Lisa Robertson. As a result, the collection moves across wilderness and city streets, by the light of day and the dark of night, over continents and centuries. What walking means for each writer ranges as dramatically as their environments, and the differences therein raise fundamental questions about the dynamics between self, composition, and world. When Robert Walser walks, it is a way to still and arrange: “A walk brings things out, wraps them up// in glorious scents, holds them out at arm’s length and keeps them there, just out of reach, perfecting the scene.” In contrast, W.G. Sebald writes and walks, “inflaming the line—in the sense that a nerve, sufficiently riled, thwarts any conclusion,// and instead radiates outward in all directions.” Early on, Swensen observes that “there’s a visceral relationship between the pace at which you walk and that/ at which you write.” These poems get into the body, tuning the reader’s attention to Swensen’s long, steadily percussive lines. Cover to cover, Swensen offers readers a path through “a rhythmed reverie they could all walk into and farther into.” (Apr.)This review has been corrected; an earlier version misspelled the author's name.

Publishers Weekly

Whether she’s contemplating cats and the creative process, language and landscapes, or centuries of fleeting yet extraordinary moments, Swensen remains an adept observer and a master of striking forms and line breaks.”—Briana Shemroske, Booklist

“Utilizing both research and praxis, Swenson draws on the rich history of writing about walking in this sonorous and attentive collection. . . . These poems get into the body, tuning the reader’s attention to Swenson’s long, steadily percussive lines.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

04/15/2017
In her latest, Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Swensen (Gravesend) turns putting one foot in front of the other into a ruminative collection of prose poems largely filtered through the musings (on the act of walking) of other writers. The ideas of Wordsworth, Blake, Thoreau, Dickens, Herzog, and Sinclair are explored. The language is crisp and heady—there are no laborers or soldiers slogging through mud here—and strides smartly across the page. In "Breton," for example, "Walking is as the revolution said you tend according to Breton to turn around and gasp though he did not himself but slightly graze admitting that pacing has a different stature entirely." Channeling poet Alice Sebold ("Somewhere Outside Dulwich"), Swensen blurs the line between walking and writing: "by not ending at his periods, but overflowing/ as each sentence follows equally inexorably into the next, page after page…/ Walking achieves the same thing physically and a walk of several days/ enacts the same excess as does obsessively associative writing." Poems of Swenson's own walks bracket those she invents. The net effect is that of a journal carried and carried on for a long time. VERDICT Thoughtful readers of poetry should investigate.—Iris S. Rosenberg, New York

Library Journal