We Are Not Where We Are by Matt Donovan & Jenny George

Description

Since its publication in 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has ensnared the American imagination. In We Are Not Where We Are, poets Matt Donovan and Jenny George perform a chapter-by-chapter erasure of Walden, challenging its deeply flawed beliefs about individualism, the natural world, and relationships between people and the land. The resultant poems embody Donovan and George’s collaborative spirit, unearthing in Thoreau’s text a pluralistic vision of limitless possibility and wild beauty.

From the authors: 

“I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond,” Thoreau writes in the opening of Walden, a book that is undeniably central to the American literary canon, as well as deeply flawed in its beliefs about individualism, the natural world, and forms of relation between people. If Thoreau’s engagement with nature and experiment in solitude might afford opportunities for self-reflection about our current ecological disasters and technological addictions, for example, it’s also well-worth interrogating his relentlessly patriarchal language, assumptions around land and belonging, and habitual surges of racism. As an act of collaborative intervention, We Are Not Where We Are was inspired both by the ways in which Walden continues to ensnare the American imagination, as well as its inherently problematic nature as a text. 

Our rules for creating these erasures were simple. The central chapters of Walden were divided equally between us and follow the order of the original text. All removed words and passages are indicated by a uniform length of blank space, and we didn’t change any of Thoreau’s original language or the order of his words on the page. Rather than create a blackout poem from the book’s long introductory chapter “Economy,” we instead appropriated passages from that section for the titles of our pieces. “Conclusion,” the book’s final chapter, was created together as a collaborative blackout poem at Jenny’s kitchen table. 

Advance praise for We Are Not Where We Are:

“Reading We Are Not Where We Are is an uncanny experience. It’s as if, via the operations of erasure, Donovan and George have conjured the ghost not of Thoreau but of the Walden text itself. And what does this ghost have to tell us, and Thoreau too, if his spirit can hear it? That Walden is not a setting but ‘a thought welling up,’ Thoreau’s ‘I am     cock-crowing / to fill the pauses.’ ‘I should not talk so much about myself’ is the title and critique of the book’s most exhilarating erasure, one that enumerates the ways in which, still, despite any I’s intervention, ‘The earth is all alive and     sensitive… peopling the woods with larger life / and frog     and song     and bloom     and blow     and the coming in.’”—Dana Levin

“Who among us has not felt the desire to live deliberately? To disappear for a time, literally or figuratively, into the woods? Or, better yet, to somehow learn to breathe underwater. Working from Thoreau’s own words—for the words don’t lie—Matt Donovan and Jenny George have excavated and complexly reimagined what it might mean to awaken the self, if only fleetingly, to the self, to dream ourselves more fully into memory and history, to open ourselves more intimately to the world around us, and to perhaps almost touch what might lie below and beyond. We Are Not Where We Are is an encounter with between-ness. At once fresh and timeless, this collection is a mesmerizing exploration of the unsolvable mystery of being alive.”—Kathleen Graber

“In poem after poem of We Are Not Where We Are, an erasure of Thoreau’s Walden, Matt Donovan and Jenny George enact what erasure, as a conceit, is so capable of producing—dialogue, collaboration, criticism, and challenge. The title suggests an emphasis on locating, and these poems effectively unearth a speaker in search of an actualized self and an understanding of that self in relation to the natural world and fellow humans, all while utilizing Thoreau’s contradictory and often problematic logic and imagination. In a way, their chapbook achieves precisely what Thoreau was perhaps after in Walden—it preserves something of beauty, form, and permanence in the world. Yet it also embraces flux, grief, and flow.”—Nathan McClain

Matt Donovan

Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks, including, most recently, The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA) and Missing Department (Visual Studies Workshop), a collection of poetry and art made in collaboration with the artist Ligia Bouton. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. 

Jenny George

Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason and After Image, both from Copper Canyon Press, as well as the chapbook * (Bull City Press). She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.