IMAGINARIUM: Sightings, Galleries, SIghtlines by A. Robert Lee by 2Leaf Press

Imaginarium Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines

Imaginarium Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines Poetry by A. Robert Lee

NEW YORK

www.2leafpress.org

P.O. Box 4378 Grand Central Station New York, New York 10163-4378 editor@2leafpress.org www.2leafpress.org 2LEAF PRESS is an imprint of the Intercultural Alliance of Artists & Scholars, Inc. (IAAS), a NY-based nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes multicultural literature and literacy. www.theiaas.org Copyright ÂŠ 2013 by A. Robert Lee Cover art: @DrAfter 123/iStock Vector/Getty Images Book design and layout: Gabrielle David Ebook design and layout: Angela Sternrich Library of Congress Control Number: 2013953971 ISBN-13: 978-1-940939-05-6 (Paperback) ISBN-13: 978-1-940939-06-3 (eBook) 10

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Para Pepa, necesariamente.

CONTENTS

PREFACE ..............................................................................V

Sightings IMAGINARIUM

J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship ............................................................... 3 Claude Monet, Water-Lilies .................................................................. 4 Paul Gauguin, A Man with Axe ............................................................ 5 Joan Miró, The Singing Fish ................................................................... 7 George Grosz, The Funeral .................................................................. 9 Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird ..................................................... 10 René Magritte: Ceci n’est pas une pipe ............................................. 11 Romare Bearden, Southern Recall ..................................................... 13 Edward Hopper, Nighthawks ............................................................. 14 Jackson Pollock, Silver Over Black ..................................................... 16 Francis Bacon, Study After Velásquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X ............................................. 17 David Hockney, A Bigger Splash ........................................................ 18 Sidney Nolan, Kelley and Horse ....................................................... 19 Tarō Okamoto, The Myth of Tomorrow ............................................. 20 Lowry Street, Constable Country ...................................................... 21 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man ...................................................... 23

Galleries Chauvet-Pont dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arc............................................................................ 27 Place de la Concorde ....................................................................... 29 Pau Balcony .......................................................................................... 31 Do The Strand ..................................................................................... 32 Bristol Quayside.................................................................................. 33 Africa Gallery ...................................................................................... 34 Cuenca Solid and Abstract ................................................................ 36 Cartagena Time Zones ...................................................................... 38 Caravaca Cross and Crescent ......................................................... 40 Mallorca Starling Dance ..................................................................... 42 Bosphorus Deck Seat ........................................................................ 44 Changi Walkway .................................................................................. 45 Shinjuku Station Arrival ..................................................................... 46 Texas Crossings................................................................................... 48 Sonoma and Napa Wine Tasting ...................................................... 49 Barrio Vistas ......................................................................................... 51 Washingtonia ....................................................................................... 53 Stage Sight: Three Musics................................................................... 55

Sightlines Metro Sight and Sound ...................................................................... 59 London Post Office Tower ............................................................... 62 MarchĂŠ de Beaune .............................................................................. 63 French Station Fare ............................................................................ 64 Hohenzollern Castle .......................................................................... 65 Tokyo Rising ......................................................................................... 66 Kegon Falls ........................................................................................... 67 Okinawa goya-chanpuru ...................................................................... 69 Badeling Wall Curve .......................................................................... 71 Taipei Snake Alley ................................................................................ 73 Victoria Peak, Victoria Harbour ....................................................... 74

Pasig Currents ..................................................................................... 75 Tamil Nadu Hill Station...................................................................... 76 Sydney Blue Eucalyptus ...................................................................... 78 Niagara Mist ......................................................................................... 80 South Side ............................................................................................ 81 Minnesota Lake Sight ........................................................................ 83 Beale Street Reprise........................................................................... 85 Black Hills/Páha Sápa .......................................................................... 86 Moab River Wall .................................................................................. 87 San Diego Whale Pod......................................................................... 88 Hawai ‘i Diamond Head .................................................................... 90 Moats Asian and Modern ................................................................. 91 Hard and Soft Oldenburg ................................................................ 93

Thirteen Flights of Imagination ........................................................ 97 Stretch of Imagination...................................................................... 100 Imaginarium........................................................................................ 104

IMAGINARIUM

Imaginarium

ABOUT THE POET ............................................................111

iii

PREFACE

What is called Imagination is a very high sort of seeing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

IMAGINATION. SEEING. Poetry, indeed all literary writing,

IMAGINARIUM

would be hard put not to call upon their interaction. Each the condition of the other. Certainly I hope they will be thought to have acted as keynotes throughout this collection. As often, if not always, Emerson has it about right. The versification at hand, accordingly, is conceived as observer imagining, the one or another eye-test as it were. Sightings, as departure point, summons paintings with which, precisely, I have had eye-to-eye friendship, seasons of visual intimacy. J.M.W. Turner to Frida Kahlo, Romare Bearden to Tarō Okamoto. Readers might care to revisit the artwork as they take on the poems. Galleries extends the usual term to include sites of historic French cave excavation, Bristol art museum, Spanish harbor, Turkish straitscrossing, Singapore airport, Japanese train station and California wine valley. Sightlines draws upon more explicitly spatial dimensions. These range from Metro depths to London and Tokyo tower heights, and from Minnesota lake width to China Great Wall curvature. Each gives a frame to first-hand encounter. Imaginarium as title-sequence offers three rosters. “Flights,” acting upon thirteen well-known bird poems and with Wallace Stevens’s “Blackbird” as benchmark, contemplates avian image and imagination. “Stretches of Imagination” looks to varieties of sight in Science

A. ROBERT LEE

Fiction film, airplane travel and a panel of US photography. “Imaginarium” addresses imagination as itself a process to be imagined, enumerations and amplitudes, the mirror turned back on itself. The international compass of these poems, I also hope, will be a draw. It has been my good fortune to have lived within a consortium of cultural geographies. The span begins in the England of my birth, the London of student years, and the decades as literary teacher at the University of Kent in the medieval city of Canterbury. Europe embraces France and the wider continent as far as the Bosphorus, and through to present residence in southeast Spain. The United States came early, a first two-year stay with thereafter a host of years on professorial and other visits, East to West Coast. Latterly, for fourteen years, there has been Tokyo and teaching at Japan’s largest university with ventures into other Asia and the Pacific. These all, one way or another, yield refractions. Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines, whatever else, offers tribute to the imagination of seeing, the seeing of imagination. A twoway dynamic. A poor show to have attempted less. — A. Robert Lee Murcia, Spain July 2013

Sightings One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture… — Goethe

J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I would choose this. — John Ruskin Try the full title. Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhon coming on. The anger presses into brush stroke, the billow of image. Before you the painter’s confirming motion of sky, ocean, light. You see your way into the picture only dimly. A storm of color, blurring wave and surge.

The three-master rises, spectrally, upon a background crest. Spray roars, foam rises, curls of ocean clash.

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Almost abstract, but the senses sharpen. Each viewing sifts detail from mass, specificity.

Fish monsters, open-eyed and slack of jaw, approach in opportunity. Sea-fowl fly low, avian ocean raveners. The bodies float, tied leg, raised arm, reaching fingers. Dangled manacles keep company into death. Centre runs a white-yellow ray of light, sky to water. It almost mocks the desperation, the lost cries. If illumination it descends upon vital brutality. Enslavement figured, men, women, reduced to bait. The picture’s motion becomes a shared drowning. How not to see with Turner the world overboard?

Claude Monet, Water-Lilies I can’t pretend flowers, floral painting, was an early passion. There were the Van Gogh sunflower posters, to be sure. Pre-Raphaelites made early sightings, Rossetti and Millais. But it took Giverny to work magic, pond-garden into canvas. Time and travel gave access to the serial Monet of les nymphéas. Impressionism as water-lily, flower and saucer leaf. Each afloat, islanded in reflections of branch or cloud. A horizontal water-dance of bloom.

A. ROBERT LEE

First encounter it seemed to be color fields only of verdure. But then eddying surfaces gave blues and purples. Others turned roseate, woven shades of red, white, pink. Ripples of light took on hue, the diaphanous. One summer, guest-visitor, I stood upon the curving bridge. How not to hail those descendant lilies, new lineage from old? Over seasons, now, I have pondered their oil-on-canvas image. Gallery salon as may be, the hail persists, the eye of recognition. Time and again the outline softens. The dissolved lily spills out, only shape, or tint, or almost aroma. In other vistas it’s an archipelago, a gathering. Lilies in dynasties, cousinships. There’s further Monet, Rouen and London, haystacks and sea. A thousand companion flower portraits, wisteria or tulips. But, like the painter lui-même, ever you come back to the lilies. His life motif, his floated color, gifted.

Paul Gauguin, A Man with Axe Tahiti. Unlikely-ever sighting I thought. You might make California but the South Seas? Captain Cook figured in boyhood national history. Defoe’s Crusoe did you island-marooned proud. There’d been the further reading, Ballantyne, Stevenson, Loti. Jack London was nothing if not ripping yarn. Brando as Fletcher Christian on the Bounty gave you film Pacifica. I remember a school showing of Thor Heyerdahl ocean crossing. Margaret Mead had opened a window to sex and Samoa. There was Bikini Atoll which led away from swimwear to things nuclear. Cinema intervals flogged kia-ora, kia ora, Maori-worded drink. But getting there, it smacked of never, at best maybe.

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A double-pathway, two names, led the way. Melville. Gauguin. Decades later, finally, passenger, it was palm, reef, motu. Melville’s Papeete, Bora Bora, Moorea. What cruise boat other than the m/s Paul Gauguin? Thesis-study had led in mind to Nuku Hiva and whale-path. Before long you could spell Marquesas, accent Galápagos. Later came your editions with due art-covers. To include Typee, South Seas of fact yet fiction. Everyman imprint. Bound in Gauguin. A Man with Axe. Gauguin canvases had seemed all women, beauteous, breasted. Oval faced, fruit-bearing, at repose. The languor reigned, sarong or gardenia amiable. Tattoo. Body. Lips. Fluidity, curve, luxuriance of color, grouping. Nakedness but always stylized, compositional.

A. ROBERT LEE

So A Man with Axe? Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Homme Ă la Hache. Gauguin said it connected myths of earth and heaven. The maker-boatman, a woodcutter, of life. Maybe the voyager, woman and craft. The face, for sure, passive, contemplative. Yet always you thought there was un-bespoke energy. Gauguin figuration somehow against the rule. It looked active preparation for a journey. One, I thought all too grandiosely, To meet my own.

Joan Miró, The Singing Fish Fun? Playful? I’d say so. Shape, color, thrust. Look at that eye. Red circled, black of iris. See that head. Yellow into black snout. Contemplate the mouth. Pointed, dark whiskered. Touch that spiny back. Black, Green, Blue, Black again.

Enjoy the sea or pond décor. Asterisk. Circle. Prism.

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Regard the water. Plant-green, blob and dot.

Trace that clarity of line. Needle sharp, en-graphed. Look outside, look inside. Body flesh and X-Ray. Swim upwards. The rise to surface. Invoke the surreal. The surreal real.

And singing? I’d say so. Imagination’s fish tune.

A. ROBERT LEE

Fishbone. Le Chanteur.

George Grosz, The Funeral I painted this protest against a humanity that had gone insane. — George Grosz My God, plunge yourself back into the Great War. Gas, trench, smell, lunatic flags and death. Re-read the poets, Owen’s war and the pity of war. Revisit Erich Maria Remarque. His Western Front all quiet only in irony. Then fix the gaze on Grosz. Humanity as Dada street-warp.

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Homework explains the dedication to Oskar Panniza. Writer-iconoclast of banned syphilis play, then breakdown. Disease infects the cubism, plague the futurism. Bodies jig, windows distort, buildings threaten. Skeleton dances its dance of death seated upon coffin. Nothing stems the madcap, the motley. Dys-harmonium rules, footfall of Black Death, Skull. The white cross mocks, a priest’s diminutive jest. Flag and pole tilt in fallen jubilation. The procession resembles a lunatic orchestra. Flesh plasticizes into smiling death mask. Trumpets, tashes, a female rump. Café, Bar, Heutedanz, the hollow revelry. The living hardly recognize their own corpses. At Staatsgalerie Stuttgart I looked on aghast. At Staatsgalerie Stuttgart I looked on in admiration. 1917-18, the hell-red cartoon of a headlong age. Collapsing bodies, belief, custom. How not to relish this fierce invention? How not to esteem this art’s anti-art? Visionary dark, graffiti of light.

Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird I think it’s the audacity, the insouciant composure. Christ’s martyrdom appropriated. Mexico, and life-beyond, she had her own calvaries. Polio. Traffic wounds. Pierced womb. Amputation.

A. ROBERT LEE

But no Santa Teresa. Flesh and politics pressed close. Rivera always, but Trotsky and La Baker. Her own visited self of a half-hundred portraits. Staring. Defiant. The certainty bred of pain. You can do the symbolism. The hummingbird spent of luck and good fortune. The Poe black cat with warning stare. The spider monkey all fidget and chance. Her body mocks supplication, even the white robe. The neck vaunts its necklace crown of thorns, a splatter of blood. The bunched hair wears butterfly clips, the dragonfly hovers. The moustache refuses depilation, maquillage. The eyes repudiate your might-be sympathy. The eyebrows double-arch in black, a bold frown of challenge. What to make of those jungle leaves, green, yellow? Exotica, the plant growths of an inner self? Magic-real, surreal, does not quite fit the bill. It’s Frida’s sense of alien presence, her own. A force of being held from outside herself, displacement. Sumptuous, exact, the un-bodied body.

René Magritte: Ceci n’est pas une pipe The thing is you can hardly call it a painting. Your everyday un-exotic smoking pipe. Brown bowl, curved shank, black mouthpiece. Likely briar, cherry, even maple. You had to think advertisement, brochure, That is, before smoking became war-zone. Who had not seen it? Poster or postcard, book plate or wall sign. French thinkers had written it up. Cartoon and commercial had made it familiar. IMAGINARIUM

And had not the real thing, ironic phrase, travelled from surreal Belgium to its gallery in no less surreal Los Angeles? Meantime you had learned “Magritte.” Le trahison des images. Figuration un-bracketed from reality. The companion canvases. Fireplace time-locomotive. Listening Room apple. Quarter-moon bowler hat mysteries. Golgonde’s downpour of over-coated men. The caged egg of Elective Affinities. So now you were surreal-savvy. Fully abreast with Breton, Dalí, Miró. But none, quite, had created so magic a contradiction.

The pipe that isn’t. You could even dare to think when it isn’t that it is a pipe.

A. ROBERT LEE

Sight unseen as it were.

Romare Bearden, Southern Recall The artist is a kind of enchanter in time. — Romare Bearden i Dixie collage, the very room of memory. Blues collage, the very chord of memory. It could be Harlem or any black North. The stored remembrance of before migration. ii Look at the Mingus hat, the Bessie face. Hear that guitar, inspect that weave.

iii The window opens into recall. A promised sun, a dreamed of new day.

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Regard the child, cat by chair. Observe the wood-slats, quarters hut.

The remembered wait, the call on change. Family time, nation time. iv History’s black fragments gathered. Scissored, disjunctured, un-spaced. Art’s black fragments gathered. Coordinated, junctured, re-spaced. v A Bearden enchantment. Quite out of, and quite in, time.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks Both Summer Lakeside heat and Windy City chill had me enter Chicago’s Art Institute for Hopper. The one season or another it was also film noir night time, not that I expected to run into Chandler, even Cornell Woolrich. Nor was it likely to be M or Touch of Evil, Bogie, Dietrich, or later Polanski, were hardly on hand. But that diner was, street-corner shadow and fluorescence, the customers, the server, the nocturnal coffee quartet.

A. ROBERT LEE

The tableau spare, clean, painting’s freeze-frame of meticulous horizontals. Ground-level balcony, window, bar, each curved against the left-side store empty in below and above window. The detail looks dropped in place, actual yet choreography, a stilled mise-en-scène. Trilby and red dress, sugar and milk, kitchen doorway align against the urns, parked water cylinders, each steel-upright. Does not the lighting reveal the one frame inside the other, the wall yellow spill into the sidewalk green? Does not the counter’s brown underwrite the leaning elbows, jacketed or bare? I knew there’d been poems in homage, a page or two of fiction, and Blade Runner, it was said, owed debts, its screen noir.

Yet this was always Hopper-aloneness, key to the American city, where, if for a moment, other life drops away. I ordered my own fantasy refill, did my own slump forward, and imagined it a night, I, too, couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sleep.

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Galleries Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an arcade in Naples they call the Galleria Umberto . . . In August, 1944, everyone in Naples sooner or later found his way into this place and became like a picture on the wall of a museum. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; John Horne Burns, The Gallery

Chauvet-Pont d’Arc i First gallery. Europe’s oldest wall art. Ardèche opening into image and beast. 30,000 exquisitely museumed years. Gateway into age, silence, signature. Creviced limestone. Hillside threshold. Stalactite pendant sculpture. Stalagmite upright candelabra.

ii First gallery. You hear the experts. Paleography. Glaciation. Cro-Magnon. Neanderthal. Hill-cave discovery in 1994.

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Chambers now torch illuminated. Under-foot walkway, hand-line rope. Corridors of shadow, rock, flicker. Spectator privilege, modern gaze.

Thoughts of Altamira red bison, Thoughts of Lascaux racing steeds. Thoughts of New Mexico Three Rivers petroglyphs. Thoughts of Australia Anhem Land emu. Werner Herzog 2010 documentary. Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Modernity entrance to ghosts. “Enchanted world of imagination.”

iii First galley. Antler, tusk, nostril, shank, hoof. Horse, ibex, elephant, hyena, lion. Bear skull to rhinoceros horn. Bison hulk to panther sleekness. Palm print to the one human footprint. Salle du Fond anima and dream. And the horses, heads forward, kinetic, poised. Eye, tongue, mane, neck, charcoal-impressionist.

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Mural flourish and invitation. Earth inter-colors, red, brown, black. Shamanist, Ceremonial. Magical life chambers. Magical art crypts.

iv First gallery. Chauvet-Pont dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arc cradle. Animalia as genesis, prime zoology. Line drawn and crafted early beauty. The caved interior of imagining.

Place de la Concorde Isn’t this Paris, daytime or night-lit, as city-square theatre, the capital’s on-site performance? But every occasion, modernly, you hover and cross it’s always a shared step into the traffic of history. Seine to Eiffel, Arc de Triomphe to Champs Elysées, each a French space filled with national signature. But afoot, sometimes bus or taxi, your visiting self enters time as much as site, le piéton of France’s calendar. 8ième Arondissement for eatery, fashion, hotel, the thoroughfares of showpiece and see-Paris. But the eight-sided geometry of column and flagstone summons kingship, revolution, empire. IMAGINARIUM

The sculptured décor has its beckoning, public art, installation, height and width. But sign on to timeline, Louis Quinze, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, guillotine and the Revolution’s 1300 executed. Relish Concorde’s gifted scale and prospect within the city’s enclosing radius. But it’s also entry into the past of the present within Madeleine and Tuileries, Rue Rivoli and even the American Embassy. The one sweep does tramline, streetlight, le klaxon, a thousand tourists and guides. But the other does chronology, regimes of Napoleon III or De Gaulle, draftsmanships of Ange-Jacques Gabriel or Baron Haussmann France it evidently is, the overheard langue française, latest couture, Le Métro. But it also summons the Egypt of historic Obelisk, the Africa of colonial women-fringed La Fontaine des Mers

A. ROBERT LEE

Other squares, other Places, exert their call, Beijing’s Tiananmen, Manhattan’s Times, London’s Trafalgar. But Place de la Concorde was my own early Paris architecture of locale and time.

Pau Balcony Several seasons over I have looked up and south from Pau. One of many balconies but due claimant to Porte des Pyrénées. A better mountain curtain would be, well, hard to imagine. Two geo-theatres, France and Spain, along with Catalan Andorra. Summer or Winter there has been the journey into height and skyline. The pre-Tunnel ascent, the crag and fauna along Le Col du Somport. You can do your Pau history, Henri IV birthplace, les Huguenots. You can do your Pau sights, Château and Funiculaire. Napoleon, later Mary Todd Lincoln, took their leisure here. Pyréneés airport updates rail-station connections to Toulouse or Paris.

But ever the eye travels out from Pau, Parc Beaumont and more. France’s ascending pathway of August greens or December snows.

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There’s the Pau of first ever Euro-Golf course, the Tour de France. The English early savored Pau, their imprint in place-name and shop.

Pau affords the viewing, a township if history then always geography. From ground-level the prospect is crest, chain, peak, risen crust. One summons Europe’s other ranges, Alps, Sierra Nevada, Snowdonia. But none so evidently partitions, geology and nation, rock and speech. You have access to Hautes-Pyrénées Tarbes and pilgrimage Lourdes, An Iberian itinerary leads to Huesca and Zaragoza, even A Coruña. Merci you hear yourself say of a morning, gracias of an afternoon. Pau as natural balustrade, vista and languages, Pau le balcon.

Do The Strand Strondway, Stronde: London Thameside in Middle English. Do the Strand: London recording in 1973 Roxie-music vinyl. They bridge a thousand-years, busy with capital sound. You hear it still treading from Trafalgar to St. Clement Danes. The river, now embanked, keeps its distance. But the names remind, St. Mary Le Strand and Aldwych. 1960s and you learned London’s other celebrity thoroughfares. Tottenham and Bayswater, Oxford and Kensington.

A. ROBERT LEE

Travel has added its street roster. Manhattan’s Bleecker, Singapore’s Orchard, Sydney’s Castlereagh. But I think back to that new-found student map pride. Stanley Gibbons, Somerset House, Irish pub, Italian eatery. I could now traffic-dance my way Charing Cross to the Savoy. Later I bought Darjeeling in Twinings, ate once at Simpson’s. You could trace the Elizabethan mansion, the Regency townhouse. But earlier palaces were business office, headquarters. I had an eye for writer haunts, Dickens or Carlyle. A turn one way, and you, and your music ear, were in Covent Garden. When does the one road-way do duty for a city? When, like 1 Across or 1 Down, I first did crossword London. When does the one High Street give you the others? When, like city crosswords to follow, I first did the Strand.

Bristol Quayside The point had been to visit the Arnolfini Gallery. Van Eyck-named for his expectant Flemish couple. Tea warehouse Victorianism. Narrow Quay modernity. Bristol’s old into new waterside art, dance, music, forum. Dock footfalls of merchant histories, ship voyaging. Wasn’t this a Norman port, then John Cabot’s point of exit? Wasn’t this vintage slave city, hub to Africa thievery? Wasn’t this John Harvey Wine Cellar, Wills Imperial tobacco? Into mind came Avon and Frome, twin river Bristol. Cathedral city but not without Wesley-Whitfield Methodism. Genteel city, but not without War bomb, riotous St. Pauls. Brunel city: Bridge, Great Western Railway, SS Great Britain. IMAGINARIUM

Built Bristol, not least the paradox of Bath stone. Each quarried honey-rust limestone. Street terrace, church, mansion. Then high-rise modern, glass office. World Bristol: Virginia, New Brunswick, Nevada, Jamaica, Peru. Celebrity Bristol: Blackbeard to Banksy, Cary Grant to Julie Burchill. Political Bristol: Stafford Cripps, Tony Benn, Jonathan Sayeed. Tower block Bristol: 1960s-brutalist, inner city. A visitor, in line, mobile to ear, speaks of parking. Best cost, shade, door-lock, the left-behind parasol. Yourself, in line, thinks the other world of The Tempest at the Old Vic. Bristol, home and away, in galleries of present and past.

A. ROBERT LEE

Africa Gallery

i Gallery time British Museum. Songhoy, Mali, Ife. Textile and Reliquary. Musée du Louvre. Benin Bronze, Baga Mask, Mbédé wooden spirit. Smithsonian. Yoruba sculpture, Zigua/Pare healing figure, Fang head. What eyes were these looking into your own? What eyes could you bring to look into these? The art-Africa you thought you knew paled. Even Picasso, even Matisse. It has meant time learning to see. Face, force, god, pattern. The loss of dark continent within you. ii Politics time The process required recognition. Africa’s un-colonizing was equally your own. First those Big Man images, the ironic figurings of Empire? Amin, Bokassa, Toure, Mobutu. Then the wiser images of rule. Nkrumah, Nyerere, Annan, and always Mandela. Third World served as cleaned-up lexicon. No longer this, that, European Colony. Developing World became another euphemism. Your own, none other, was the developed world. It has meant time learning to see. Power, bodies, minerals, freedom. The loss of dark continent within you.

iii Writer time A 1960s Achebe London lecture won the day. To an unwitting child of Empire lay the question. Whose Africa story belonged to whom? Things Fall Apart gave the key. Igbo-Nigeria the futureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s symptom. Europe the vacating landlord. Naming itself an accusation: Niger, Guinea, Ivory Coast. History waved farewell: Rhodes, Smuts, Pied Noir. The pages turned: Soyinka, Ngugi, SembĂ¨ne, Neto, Head. Achebe chastised Conrad, dared to question Schweitzer. It has meant time learning to see. Word, image, narrative, voice. The loss of dark continent within you. IMAGINARIUM

Cuenca Solid and Abstract i Gorge and rock-face magnificence. Enter, approach, as though into a canyon theatre. You feel yourself time-spiraling into Spain’s Castilla-La Mancha. Stone-archived history. Escarpment to fortress. Moor to Civil War To be sure, on arrival, there’s the new town, Plaza Mayor, RENFE station, a thousand bars.

A. ROBERT LEE

Then wander Alta Cuenca, curved street, grill-shuttered. Home to cathedral, convent, Semana de Música Religiosa. Stand on the metal-latticed footbridge, sway dizzyingly. Look upon las casas colgadas, buckled hanging homes. There’s the parador, up-marketed from Dominican monastery. Cell into hotel room. Pulpit in the cloister breakfast-area. Outcrop and el castillo, cliff and Mangana Tower. Cuenca of geology and monument. Solidities. ii Ticket your entrance into the Museo de Arte Abstracto. Hanging House gallery, its own art-piece. Give due homage to Fernando Zóbel. Founder, his small-scale washes, his re-sketches of Goya. Eye each small-spacious floor of display. Non-figuration, obliquity, Spain’s visual postmodern. Hover over Tapiés, Saura, Mompó, Sempere, Arroyo. The hundred-plus exteriors of interior geometry.

Consider if this is heirship to Picasso or Catalan Miró, Then equally tradition of the new, signs and wonders. Relish graphics, color-mass, the reflexive. Zóbel’s 1960s rebuke of imagination to Franco mediocrity. Light and discovery. Break-through and pattern. Cuenca of invention and exhibit. Abstractions.

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Cartagena Time Zones i ARQUA, nautical window museum, Arqueología Subacuática. Spain’s Carthage, coastal Murcia. Eight metres under Mediterranean waters. Two millennia under Mediterranean chronology. Contemplate change-waves, trade-route, conquest. Cartagena land and sea, sailor and language.

A. ROBERT LEE

Imagine past commerce of oil, lead, wool. Vinarii, frumenatii, amphora, even on-board rats. Byzantine and Punic to Canaan-Phoenician and Greek. Rome’s Mare Nostrum to Caliphate and Reconquista. Eighteenth-century castle to the Republic against Franco. Contemporary shipyard, navy, cruise-stop. Consider the port for each regime of offence, defence. Lighthouse and 1888 Isaac Peral submarine, Punic War parades. Above all view Phoenicia’s custodial ship-rib, anchor, prow. Sea-borne, sea-going, Cartagena’s sunken time raised. ii TEATRO ROMANO DE CARTAGENA. Museum and stage. Spain’s Carthage, citied Murcia. Gaius and Lucius Caesar built, 1to 5 BC, Carthago Nova. Pitched for 6000 spectator-audience, ampitheatre. Think of Plautus, Terence, Seneca and Melissus. Seated laughter, high tragedy, mask and toga costume.

Semi-circled audience, orchestra and proedria. Vaulted gallery, section by section horizontals. Time’s fade into half-pillars, each broken row and box. An architecture of then yet now under shared pink sunlight. Above all recall the actor’s line and gesture, Roman echo. Theatre-time, theatre-going, Cartagena’s mise-en-scène re-found. iii CALLE MAYOR. Walk the city. Walk into modernism. Spain’s Carthage, Art Nouveau Murcia. Ayuntamiento decor, town-hall frontispiece. Prow shaped. Triple domed. Picturely windows.

Look to the Gran Hotel, its rising levels in rose-brick. Rounded, adjacent, balustraded into art-architecture.

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Pillar entrance under balcony and carvings. Stately yet ornamental, just the hint of Gaudí.

Look to the Casino de Cartagena, façade, lobby, stairwell, salon. Heritage reconstructed. Modernity in iron, wood, and tile. iv Cartagena de Murcia. Carthages of Tunisia, Colombia. Seen and to be seen geography, seen and to be seen time-zone.

Caravaca Cross and Crescent March 19 Fallas Valencia, carpenter saint, ninot Spring burnings. May 15 San Isidro Madrid, farmer saint, chulapo fashion and dance. June 24 San Juan Alicante, apostle saint, summer bonfire. July 7 Pamplona San FermĂn, martyr saint, firework and bull-run. Spanish festival comes with the territory, city and pueblo. Rituals of belief. Calendars of ceremony. Procession, music, the Spain of body and spirit. Share as you watch, duende and alegrĂa.

A. ROBERT LEE

Caravaca, Caravaca de la Cruz, provincial Murcia, early May week. Township of skyline, castle, basilica, Los Caballos del Vino statue. Convent hilltop, natural fringe of sierra. Enter by the double-arm Holy Cross, angel-born. History and myth, caliphate and conversion. Abu Zeid and Father Perez Chirinos, Reconquista and Fifth Holy City. History in wall and tile, the parochial church of San Salvador. Walk Calle Mayor, Calle de las Monjas. You find your vantage-point, head for the tiered city-built stands. Section by section they parade, four days of Christian and Moor. In-step, parade-slow, line-organized. Remember counter conquests. Two religions. One overlap. Templar knight armor. Saracen warrior robe. Mother Mary gossamer. Fatima muslim veil. Each couture the perfect manikin fit. Observe the lance with crucifixion pennant, the curved Arabian sword.

Music, too: each group its own march-band, black suit and tie. Thumping drum, cascade of trumpet and horn, flutes. Castilian horse king and queen, the deafening fire of blunderbuss. Listen to the watching cries of guapo, guapa. On each march turns and re-turns, square yet circling. You allow the paradersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; wrist-watches, some Nike shoewear. Yet, always, your invite is to legacyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s costume. Take your seat, join the privilege of gallery.

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Bosphorus Deck Seat April-morning ferry as it eddies Europe to Asia The breeze light, playful, helpfully one-way. Minutes-only crossing towards a full-time skyline Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, Ottoman mansion and Grand Bazaar. Water-shimmers of map and time for Istanbul’s histories, Byzantium to Constantinople, Topkapi and Bosphorus Bridge. April-afternoon ferry as it returns Asia to Europe Against the breeze, brisk, chugging turn-around.

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Step ashore to İstiklal Avenue, ancestral tram and Tünel subway, Galatasaray High School entrance, Dolmabache Palace. Edifice and hotel markers for other Istanbul. Rumeli Citadel to Agatha Christie’s Büyük Londra Otelï. Menus, cuisine, of table and tradition. Restaurant order külbasti, adana kebap, mevsim salata, Read up Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul and Memories of the City Inside trader of time, culture, art, Nobel footstep. Span land and water, Anatolia and Black Sea. Span demographies, Turk, Armenian, Kurd. See tide and spray, back and forth, each ferry passage. Hear the deck-whisper of two ancient shores. With Istanbul Attatürk Airport to follow.

Changi Walkway It must have been underfoot that I first took note. A carpeted walkway between flight-gates. And then came les toilettes. Sculptured conveniences, porcelain minuets. Washbowls that smacked of Versailles, Klimt. Attendants keen as hospital anaesthetists. There was the permanent cadre of airport assistants. Docents. Curators. Meet and Greet strolling minstrels. A garland of welcome-to-Singapore smile. It made even a changed flight-time near pleasurable. SIN, teasingly, marks the luggage label. Singapore Sling with a twist. IMAGINARIUM

Sure, after all, this is an airport, not the Beaubourg or MOMA. Sure, other airports compete, Hong Kong or Schipol. Sure, you could elsewhere dine as lavishly, Rio or Lyon. Sure, other Asia also has baby fish to nibble-clean feet. Sure, other Terminals afford gardens, greenery. Sure, everywhere, the flight-calls summon in airport English. But it’s the lounge of the place, the facility music. Mall chic, arcade glamour, flâneur commerce and eatery. Why not have your teeth done, hernia fixed? Why bother with onward journey, ground transport? Why not turn connecting flight into final destination? Feet up, and also down, upon those easeful walkways. Passenger stress never, or rarely, gets appeased. Delayed flight or where’s the boarding card. Ear blockage or luggage not on carrousel. But Changi tempts the almost space-orbital illusion. You discern the greater comfort, the beckoning of excess. You could carpet yourself here, and for some time.

Texas Crossings We’d gone to College Station, a gathering at Texas A&M. The rail-track town gave sight of a ranger with star-in-a-wheel badge. Academic panel speech was one thing but a ranger, a Texas ranger? The mind’s screen-eye filled. Wayne’s Comancheros, Norris’s Walker. The West Texas of Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men.

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Within a trice it was The Last Picture Show, small-town loneliness. I remembered The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, frontier justice. Later had come Lone Star, border geographies, Tex-Mex overlaps. But Texas, image and road, called to other crossings. Each broadcast of Bing studio-singing the Río Grande, yippi yi yo. LBJ in the White House even as I first-time sailed the Atlantic. Houston I’d driven to, its Space Center upward pledged to moon-landing. San Antonio joined Alamo past to Seaworld present. El Paso, with transit to Ciudad Juarez, seamed Texas to Chihuahua. History’s un-joinings, as much as junctures, pressed. Te-haas, Tejas, Texas: Caddo, New Spain, Lone Star America. Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty to Secession, Depression to Dallas 1963. The Chisholm Trail, open range and longhorn, brought you cattle Texas. Giant to Dallas, and who shot JR, brought you oil Texas. Jasper 1998 beheading of James Byrd brought you race-death Texas. Tribal Texas. Mexican Texas. Independence Texas. City Texas. Size and mix. Santa Anna to George Dubbya. Cross-currents. Crossings.

Sonoma and Napa Wine Tasting Valley speak In part you can’t help yourself. Mention Zinfandel or Chardonnay and you’re the seasoned vintner. Grape, vintage, varietal and you’re magicked into viticulturist. Learn estates, domains, harvest, soil and you’re winemaker general. Kind of. There’s tannin of course, not to mention phylloxera. Blends come into it, oak or steel barrel, each style of corking. You can even have talk about air-pump or regular corkscrews. The suspicion arises that within you lurks the secret sommelier. Kind of.

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You think up the films. Lugosi-Dracula’s “I never drink wine.” “A nice chianti” in Silence of the Lambs. Sideways for comedy Bacchus, sex and writing. Kind of. It’s not too long before you are spouting wine geographies. Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Logroño, Alsace, Rhône, Barolo. Step across oceans to Barossa, Marlborough, Stellenbosch. And that Greek holiday tipple, not to mention Croatia. Kind of. But then there’s Sonoma and Napa, California sun and soil. Never mind West Coast gold rushes, covered wagons at the frontier. This is wine trail, your bid for tasting-sheet residency. Red, white, rosé, each or all, you are ready for the cup to runneth over. Kind of.

Sonoma You can do Sonoma history, Tribe to Mexico to Bear Flag Republic. Mission, Plaza, Jack London. But the grapes have it. Vine row, bottle, cellar. Petaluma River pinot. Russian River champagne, Glen Ellen and Bodega Bay. Kenwood and Sebastiani. Dégustation. Wine and Time.

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Napa You can do Napa geography, Calistoga to Rutherford to Angwin. Valley, coast, lake. But it’s grapes again. Fermentation, temperature, label. Charles Krug sparkling. Robert Mondavi cabernet. Beaulieu Latour sauvignon. Plump Jack syrah. St. Helena merlot. Dégustation. Wine and Place.

Barrio Vistas Eastlos My first American barrio. Xicano, Xicana Los Angeles. Chicano/a heirship to Mexican-America. ¿Hablas español? Well yes. But the accent was Castilian. Just as the English was British.

Boyle Heights delivers Mariachi. Estrada Courts deliver the murals. El Pino delivers the tree marker.

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Foodways were part of the route. Burrito. Chimichanga. Mole de gallina. With Dos Equis. History was part of the route. 1848, 1910, Zoot Suit 1943, Chávez 1960s. Street was part of the route. Lowrider car, la música, gang turf, la iglesia. Screen became part of the route. La Bamba, Born in East L.A., Stand and Deliver.

Extranjero, though not quite gringo, you may be. Order menudo, listen to Los Lobos through to Kid Frost. Time to learn the Americas, West Coast latinidad It wasn’t that hard to see yourself at home. Loisaida The islands, Manhattan and Puerto Rico. I’d bowed in through the Nuyorican Poets Café. East Sixth, then East Third, under Miguel Algarín’s baton. Lower East Side, tenement LES. Avenue C, Avenida C. Español-hablante but Nuyorriqueño/a rules.

So you ate your way in. Cuchifritos. Mofongo. Pasteles. With Ajonjolí. So you studied your way in. 1508 Ponce de León. 1952 Commonwealth. 1960s crossings. So you read your way in. Laviera or Hernández Cruz poem, Piñero play. So you heard your way in. Island-mainland speech, Boricua,Jíbaro/a.

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No one doubted other seams. Jewish Lower East Side, Slavics, Chinese. All, in mix, New York’s New Yoikers,

Nor did you miss out on Spanish Harlem. Or lose sight of la comunidad dominicana. Time to learn the Americas, East Coast latinidad. It wasn’t that hard to see yourself at home.

Washingtonia i Washington, not to mention Franklin, Lincoln, Kennedy, King. The name-plates of American history. Washington, Father of the Nation. First in War, First in Peace. Washington, Myth and Man. Cherry Tree and Mount Vernon. Washington, Time and Presence. Valley Forge to Farewell Address.

Washington signatures. Capital and New York, High School and movie house.

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Washington, Place and Roots Virginia Family, Virginia slaves.

Washington nomenclature. Washington Irving to Booker T., G.W. Carver to Washington Cable. Washington authored. Albeeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s George and Martha, Kochâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Crossing the Delaware. Washington currency. One dollar bill. ii Sign on for the city and do the geometry. DC of Potomac and Mall. Once tallest Washington Monument. Obelisk vertical, memorial height.

Street Washington below. Capitol East-West, number and J-less lettering. L’Enfant planned, quadrants. 16th Street NW, Obama and predecessor residence. Beltway Washington of sex lies and videotape. Gilded Age fortune. Teapot Dome Oil and Bribe. Watergate Nixon to K Street Abraham.

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Span the districts. Learn radius, circumference, square. Political DC, Black DC, Memorial DC. Washington of this, or that, diagonal. iii Step west. Coast and Cascades. Seattle of Boeing, Gates, Coffee. 1962-built Space Needle. Disk and light. Observe from atop the vistas. Olympic Mountains, Puget Sound. Gas Works Park, worth its own name-prize. Broad Street, a NW of horizon blue, cloud, rain. Eye on the screen. Sleepless in Seattle, radio show near-miss love. Dante’s Peak, volcano cloud to shadow Mount Helena. The Business of Fancydancing, Spokane Coeur d’Alene passion. Think Chief Si’ahl. Think Klondike and jazz. Remember Mary McCarthy birth, Kurt Kobain rock. Washington of this, or that, state-line.

Stage Sight: Three Musics i Cuba in America. Buena Vista Social Club, Red Rocks, Colorado. Old men don’t read novels said Tolstoy. But they do make music, Caribbean, island-tropic. Son, Guaracha, Bolero, Salsa. Rocky Mountain August, open-air stage and heat. “Chan Chan” and “Candela” seizing the night. Compay Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer in voice and guitar. Superabuelos. Octogenarian art, memory. Ry Cooder input, Wim Wenders screen. Ensemble rhythm, Latin air. Hot Cuba from out of Cold War US. IMAGINARIUM

ii America in Japan. Jarrett in Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space . Piano-jazz gladiator in a hall for 2000. Music as risk and conquest. Riff, crescendo, descent, chord. Footfall of Blakey and Davis, Chopin and Handel. You hear the grunts, the pitched moans. You watch the upright stance, the sweat. You know he’ll shout down audience noise. What inner measure holds and operates? Each composition there and then, yet not. Each improvisation magically regulated. iii Canada in Spain. Cohen at Palacio de Deportes, Madrid. You can’t help thinking there’s some gap. Athletics, trampoline, shuttlecock, scaffold seats. Those throaty speech-songs of sadness. Hallelujah and No Cure for Love.

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Dance Me and Next We Take Manhattan. Are they dirge, lamentation, whispered music sonnet? Hebraic, Buddhist, Tantric? Then you watch his departing skip-jig. Hat at tilt, arm raised. The sport of ballad, the soloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finishing line.

Sightlines We are as much as we see. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Henry David Thoreau

Metro Sight and Sound

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i Think of those ground phrases. He has his feet on the ground. She covers a lot of ground. Stand your ground Above ground. Grounded. Think of those underground phrases. He’s now living underground. She’s gone underground. Hidden underground. Life underground. I’m underground. Think of those Metro phrases. Ground and Underground. The thesaurus travels with you. Terms purchased with train pass, ticket, coin. Kind of fellow-passenger word luggage. ii Metro seat A thousand times you have sat. Look at each strap-hanging wrist. Regard each midriff from your cheek by jowl seat. Position each bag defensively upon lap. People-watch, as from a seat (if lucky) in the veranda. Take note of footwear, couture, tee-shirt wordage. Doze, half-doze, neck-crook to check station. Side-glance, as if unobserved, at the newspaper alongside. Spy out the rush hour pathway to corner rail. Get into observer mode, train view concentration. Cell-like yet in track and tunnel motion.

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iii Metro sight Moscow Subway chandelier-lit galleries. Surely youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re reading Dostoevskiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Notes from Underground? Beijing Line 6 Chaoyangmen Station with Grand Canal mural. Would you be deep in Mo Yan or A Yi? Stockholm Metro art platforms. A dip into Stieg Larrson tattoo crime? Metro de Madrid in diamond-sign red, white and blue. Why not try Madrid Tales? Toronto platform yellow-strip, TTC five-subway. Page of Attwood, Davies, Munro? Each station its own display case. Each train its own basement library. iv Metro sound The Mind the Gap alert of the London Tube. The rubber-wheel whisper of the Paris Metro. The haiku whoosh of the Tokyo JR. The clank and speed of the Manhattan A Train. The easeful purr of the Taipei Tamsui Line. The door-latch click of the Metropolitano de Lisboa. Basement recording studio. Subway acoustics archive. v Metro sight and sound Look at escalator panel. Listen to elevator decibel. Read station sign writing. Catch platform causerie. See carriage fluorescence. Hear carriage white noise.

Seated or standing. Metro eye. Metro ear.

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London Post Office Tower Build high, highest. Trophy architecture say the doubters. BT Tower, London Telecom Tower. Conway Street, London W1. 1962 and it seemed a finger to the sky. 1964 and it opened a skylight to New Britain. Manhattan had the Empire State. Chicago was about to have the Hancock.

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Kuala Lumpur would ascend with Petronas Towers. Dubai had yet to build Burj Khalifa. Another age, this was London prime ran the buzz. Aerials, communications, airwaves. Cylinder future perfect, the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spyglass. Height dreams at right-angle with the sleeping Thames. Viewing platforms, for sure, panorama. Appearances in Dr. Who, V for Vendetta. Provisional IRA attention brought height to ground. 1971 and semtex or related dynamite. Yet the memory of the urban exotic lingers. Top of the Tower, 34th Floor rotating eatery. Years of other up-high eating have made their bow. Big Apple One World Trade Center to Taipei 101. But this was the menu never sampled. This was the height I saw but never reached.

Marché de Beaune First of all you bring a wine-box of names. Montrachet, Pommard, Auxey-Duresse. Burgundy vintage, Burgundy language. Route Nationale and Route Départementale. The kilometers edge you towards Vin de Bourgogne. This is grape geography, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay. Imbibe the names, savor the soil. Nuits-Saint-Georges, Côte de Beaune. You might almost be travelling glass-in-hand.

You ponder label, denomination, year. The line of bottles wins eye (and nose). At last you are a wine committee, a diner’s club.

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Marché de Beaune, Place de la Halle. The table run of tastings, the scallop wine cup. The ritual of smell, mouth swirl, spit, comment.

But the ritual begins to hint of further sampling. What have been the wine occasions of history? What wine has toasted godhead, conquest, love? You can do Burgundy as place and image. Duchy, Empire, Dijon, Mâcon. There’s burgundy lipstick, moquette, dress. This one wine corridor, as you sip, opens to every other. The cépage of human change, the viticulture of human life. And then you place your local order.

Tokyo Rising Tōkyō Tawa. Tōkyō Sukeitsuri. Tower and Skytree. Twin beacons of decade-plus gaijin residence. The Tower: it looked like new Eiffel. Red and white lattice, antenna, observatory. How not to think Japanese Paris?

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The Skytree: futurist broadcast column. White-blue lattice, spire, deck. How not to think Japanese space-probe? Custodial heights. Seen on arrival and departure. Girdering time columns. Night illumination. Two digital Roman candles. Tokyo electric torches. The yin-yang polarities hold you fast. Vertical soar to bonzai manicure. Perpendicular rise to haiku syllable. Ascend either, both. See city ganglia, shrine to freeway. Upright Tokyo above ancient and modern.

Kegon Falls i Kegon no taki. Tochigi Prefecture. High beauty waters. Suicide waters (read Fujimura). Falls theatre. ii Nikko first. Mountain-sun-cedar.

Worship theatre. iii Kegon seasons prism. Sun, ice, rainbow, mist.

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Futasaran shrine. RinnĹ?-ji-temple.

Earth-cover green and brown. Leaf and branch. Weather theatre. iv Kegon whitewater cascade. Poured beauty. Lake Chuzenji fed. Rock partitioned Crag theatre.

v Kegon water artery. Crevice rivulets. Torrent roar. Flow echo. Sound theatre. vi Kegon water rush. Silver-seam descent.

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Nature cleanse. Spirit cleanse.

Sight theatre.

Okinawa goya-chanpuru i Okinawa-jima. Fish? This is Japan. Sushi, sashimi, Tsukiji. But then head Pacific-south. Name-poems of Hokkaido to Honsh큰 Shikoku to Kyushu. Enter Okinawa. Ry큰ky큰 Islands. Near-China cuisine.

Goya-chanpura. Bitter melon, tofu, miso. Meat shards.

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ii Okinawa-jima. Meat? This is Naha. Signature pork dish.

Elderly spoken language. Rain and tropics. Count the islands. iii Okinawa-jima. History? This is kingdom. Coral geology Trader independence. Ming to Meiji. Annexation.

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Battle of Okinawa dead. Occupation politics. The meats of change.

Badeling Wall Curve Off from Beijing in December cold. China Great Wall Badeling. A mind-ply of other walls. Berlin. Frost poem. Pink Floyd. Qin, Han, Sui, Ming dynasties. Juyongguan Pass. Read up on Manchu, nomadic Mongol. Fortified, unfortified China. Then funicular mountain-ride. Then pathway, watchtower, embrickment.

Snow-strewn walk. The very postcard of a 10,000 Li Wall.

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The eye-line follows. Rise and dip. Corner and straight.

One of the visitor throng. Winter-clad, headgeared for climate. What is for you alone? What does the sighting eye claim for its own? You follow wall curvature, swerve. And, just, enter the imagined deeper bend. Time-bend, history-bend. The lean into epoch, dynasty.

Breath expels, legs seize. But mind conjures gyre, China cycle. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a hard imagining in the frost. A cold wall of emperor, soldier, change.

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Then you revolve back to present. Your next best leg forward wall corner.

Taipei Snake Alley Difficult not to halt at the name. Coil, slither, scale, venom, right in the city. Add the mention of cuisine, choice of platter. It doesn’t make you quick to reach for your diner’s card. Once it was Huaxi Street, brothel and stripper turf. Then market thoroughfare, Wanhua night eatery and stores. Now lanterns, massage, paifang entrance, temple, and new girls. On a pair of occasions I have tacked back to the alley. If bound for other dining again the tour of those snake windows. Hard to forget the fat blanched fellow or his scale-black companion.

Aphrodisiac or health-food, beverage or future fashion. Alimentary or pharmaceutical prospect. 2013 or any other calendar Year of the Snake.

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Just once I saw three victim-serpents awaiting razor. “Blood give new manhood” said the owner with earnest wink. Next door you could order snake soup, wine, medicine.

Name and aisle. How to imagine I even half understood this China-street?

Victoria Peak, Victoria Harbour Island territory. Peak Terrace. Harbour Star Ferry. Hong Kong at geographic bracket. Island history. Opium and Crown Colony. 1997 China. Peak and Harbour change-time.

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Island tiger. Mountain-top Peak Galleria Waterfront business skyscraper. Hong Kong of bank and visitor. Island art. Cha chaang teng foodway. Opera, Bruce Lee martial art. Po Wah Lam memoir. Island night. Neon street galaxy. Lit Kowloon, New Territories. East West bar. Island sight. Viewing platform. Lower terminus. Scottâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Peak Tramway. Up and down spectacle.

Pasig Currents Follow the river line Metro-Philippines. Laguna Bay to Manila Bay. Bisect the Isthmus. Intramuros. View the boat traffic. MalacaĂąan Palace. Think Presidential power. Follow the time line Maynila to Brunei-Islam rule. Three-centuries Spain to 1898 America. Japan bayonet to Sovereignty. OFWs to 90 million at home.

Follow the money line San AugustĂn and cathedral gold. Harbor Square and Robinsons. Manila city business wealth. Read Hagedorn Dogeaters.

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Rizal monument-memory in Luneta Park. Dynasty top family rule. Marcos decree and Imelda shoe. Aquino death and wife-son heritage.

Tondo tenement dross. Street body and sex. Manila city slum poverty. Read Brown Inferno. Follow the river line Metro-Philippines. 1990 declaration of bio-death. Water currents of gain and loss. Pasig life. Pasig waste.

Sydney Blue Eucalyptus Due west from Harbour and Opera House. Un-citied, creviced, rock and boulder. Sydney lung, breath-space. Sandstone to sky edge, eye-space. Blue Mountains township. A-hop docile Joeys. Regard the canopy’s green. Gaze the horizon’s blue curtain.

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Take your caged tunnel descent. Gradient-steepest Katoomba funicular. Learn the name-map. Three Sisters, Weeping Rock. Foot-walk to Wentworth Falls. Giant fern, pathway shrub. Savor each water cascade. Stream and cliff music. Think rainforest. Southern Cross arboretum. Look to Eucalyptus. Gum trees we’d called them. Count the many. Evergreen trunk and leaf encampments. Take note of physiology. Fissured bark, stem, crown.

Do your NSW tree homework. Eucalyptus regnans, Eucalyptus deanie. Contemplate the signature Eucalyptus. Sydney Blue Gums. Think green but think blue. Eucalyptus continent.

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Niagara Mist Border waters, three-Fall epic of gorge and drop. Horseshoe, American, Bridal Veil. River-divides, each thunderous, of New York and Ontario. You take cover even as you marvel at the spray of power. Look down to the eddying dare of Maid of the Mist tourist boat. Postcard the visits, the honeymoons. Stir memory of Annie Taylor, first in Over the Falls barrel. Think Blondin to Flying Wallendas, highwire virtuosi.

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How not to relish Nature’s water cliffs? Who resists the descending splits of torrent? Yet amid the water cloud you start to think other Niagara. Imagination goes behind the theatre’s curtain mist. Maybe the name itself, Mohawk, Iroquois. Maybe Champlain as explorer, Joseph Brant and Fort Niagara. Maybe 1812, US and Canada in their English war. Maybe Thomas Cole portrait, Olmsted conservation. Slave-leap to freedom on the Underground Railway to Upper Canada. Join DuBois and the Niagara Movement, the NAACP pending. Remember 1896 Niagara Power Plant and world electrification. Play slots at Seneca Niagara Casino, USA, Casino Niagara, Canada. A library of association comes into play. Josiah Henson Life. Beecher Stowe Cabin. Mark Twain’s “Niagara” to Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Patrick McGreevy’s apt-titled Imagining Niagara. The Falls pour on, rush, river plate. Ear, as eye, fills, to the landscape’s sublime. But a pause of mind adds each further current. The one Niagara screening quite many another.

South Side I’d first driven in on I-57, Dan Ryan’s own. The Windy City at last, lakeshore, park, pier. Eye upwards to the L of Rapid Transit overpass. But it took better sighting, city and time, to speak Chicago. I learned the Loop, strolled Lincoln Park. North and South Halstead grew familiar, throughways. Skyscraper Hancock did architecture’s vertical duty. Wrigley Field gave first-time access to Sammy Sosa baseball. I did apprentice history, the Algonquian name, La Salle’s arrival. Cattle city, Union Stock Yard meat-packing. The Fire of 1871, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and lantern. The Mayorships, both Daleys, Harold Washington. IMAGINARIUM

I read, and kept reading, citied Dreiser of Sister Carrie. To follow, Sinclair’s Jungle, Sandburg’s Hog City. To be added, Farrell Irish, Bellow Jewish, Guzlowski Polish. Wright’s Bigger-tenement bowed in, later, Cisneros’s Mango Street. I reached the South Side, Hyde Park, under a contrast of awnings. Hyde Park in white, in black, in both. 55th Street into Big Ten University of Hutchins, Nobel, nuclear fission. 51st Street into Robert Taylor projects, State Street, the Defender. I’d sallied from England’s white northwest to America’s black midwest. Afro-Chicago of Great Migration, 1919 riot, 1960s burning. City of Gwendolyn Brooks Bronzeville, of Jesse and Obama. Leon Forrest, authorly amid Bloodworth Orphans, gave early guidance. I took up invitations to blues and stand-up. Muddy revivals, Aretha Franklin concerts. Homesick James playing from Blues on the South Side. Redd Foxx acts (“If you think this aint funny hope your dog dies”).

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I saw, as heard, Chicago-speak, black on white, black on black. You saw the losses, wounds and mean street. You saw the wellsprings, music and vital wit. A South Side ever in remembered sight, stoop and story.

Minnesota Lake Sight An acquaintance, two-seater pilot, flying circles. Look down, he said, and it’s a reverse galaxy. Day and night scintillations, light-sources. The names alone make all-nation lake poetry. Vermillion, Otter Tail, Mille Lacs, Winnetonka. Blue-grey waters lapped to green-brown foliage. The Dakota language has it right for Minnesota. Sky reflecting lake waters. And 10,000 or more you can hardly believe.

The Mississippi holds sway, Itaska headwaters to Delta. Yet summer or ice the lakes rule equally. The land, for once, rests, the sentry at the edge.

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It would take a Thoreau in matching thousands to do justice. Maybe Francis Parkman’s “river, lake, and glimmering pool.” Meditation and water are wedded for ever says Melville.

You seize upon each water-run across season’s change. You think underground channels, sources, gushes. You summon stream under-labyrinths, multi-founts. Waves surround islands, feed roots of cedar and fir. Waters share with walleye and loon. Ripple or sheen, in depth or shallow, each lake a life womb. Weather does attendant duty, sun to wind-chill. Rain sleet cuts, snow curtains, hail pelts. Yet lake for lake holds ground, or rather, treads water. L’Etoile du Nord does apt service as Minnesota motto. The unwitting aviator-poet may have it just right. Each lake stellar, a North’s earth-and-space mirror.

A. ROBERT LEE

The lakes come upon you, freshwater eye sockets. You come upon them, eager eyed for sight. Exchange looks, mutual vision.

Beale Street Reprise Home of the Blues and why wouldn’t you want to go there? I’d met it, radio and record heard it, but always in absentia. Memphis Minnie had my ear, Howlin Wolf and John Lee Hooker. Mississippi river music, jug and stomp, r&b, and Elvis in train. To step into Memphis was indeed to go down-home. Club-land stage far from Egypt’s Nile. Footfall of W.C. Handy, Muddy Waters singing, B.B. King chord. Louis had been there, Bessie, too. But the name in lights was Ma Rainey, or rather Ma Rainey II. Had I not relished the original’s raunch? Black Bottom song and lyric? Bad Luck Blues, Bo-Weevil Blues, Black Eye Blues. IMAGINARIUM

Ma’s gold teeth, pendant gold coins, feather and sequin. Baddest ran the legend, ugliest said the scoffers. But the vocals were magic, Booze and Blues, Moonshine Blues. So was this ghost-time, return from Paramount Studio’s other side? Lillie Mae Glover, diminutive, Mother of Beale Street. Blues Alley stage, moan and shout rhythm. One after other, homage blues, her own blues. Old-new memory blues, black folks music. Memphis Tennessee, I and II, twice-over, thank you.

Black Hills/Páha Sápa i The beautiful Indian hills that I love. It was Doris Day and my schoolboy film-going 1953. Calamity Jane. Wild Bill Hickock. Lost my heart . . . in the Black Hills of Dakota. Doris in Custer’s coat. Deadwood City.

A. ROBERT LEE

ii North by Northwest and not a few musicals later. South Dakota transit. Mount Rushmore. The presidential quartet, head-stones. Klansman Borglum sculpture. Granite white America. National memorial. iii Custer County, no less, and out-waves of Crazy Horse. Bernadin’s girl-line Cabaret Paris, Le Crazy Horse. Neil Young’s “Everyone Knows This is Nowhere” with Crazy Horse. New Zealand’s steakhouse (with Guinness) Crazy Horse. Tom McGrath’s literary-review poem and story Crazyhorse. iv Time for, well, time’s Black Hills. Lakota time. Six Grandfathers time. Sacred Center-of-World time. Páha Sápa time. v Custer, again, leading 7th Cavalry gold search 1874. Silver miners to follow. Little Big Horn to follow. Sioux reclamations to follow. Watch this space to follow.

Moab River Wall Moab of two Easts, Jordan River and Utah. Check Genesis or Ezekiel. Check Rand McNally D10, neighboring CO, AZ, NV and ID. Old Testament in the New World. Old and New in the Ute tribe-lands. Colorado River dusk road. Ochre red. Rothko red. Wall paint red. Evening sun on cliff-face red.

It’s maybe a trick of the eye. Not quite hieroglyph, even petroglyph. You think morse, braille, computerese. Natural dash and line-language. The hyphenations of original print.

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Rock wrinkles, stretch-marks. Canyon splinters, eyelets. Crenellations, notches, slate-like step. Wind-carved swerve. Whorl, knot, shadowed ledge.

To hand, and view, there’s other Utah. Canyonlands to Arches. John Ford’s Monument Valley. Whitewater or Trail, not to say uranium scar. But, time-old, this is river wall librarianship.

Hawai ‘i Diamond Head i Nothing like an error of greed, and by your own countrymen. Did not those English sailors think the crater diamond rich? Never mind O’ahu beauty, Lé-ahi as tuna-back name. Cash, the hard stuff, get yours quick. But then calcite is not diamond, mistaken crystal. Hawai ‘i wrong treasure.

A. ROBERT LEE

ii Off you trek, Waikiki upwards. Fish body volcano trail.

Pacific horizon shimmer. Cone interior shrub and slope. Earth open iris, clin d’oeil. Hawai ‘i right treasure.

Moats Asian and Modern They weren’t items to draw the eye in my raising. Some screen-drawbridge Errol Flynn maybe. A dash of Sir Walter Scott maybe. Years after there was Bodiam Castle. English photo-shoot. Backdrop medievalism, The Loire supplied Chambord. French-royal classical. Chateau grandeur. Weren’t there also the moated granges of Shakespeare, Tennyson? To come were the castled waters of Japan, China, Cambodia. Asia moats, the entrenchment arts of the East.

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Tokyo Imperial Palace could not but draw the eye. You looked upon the Nijubashi, two entrance bridges. Tokugawa shogunate and Edo dynasty haunt the walls. The war bombers still echo silently through the reconstructions. Garden, plaza, sakura, imperial residency all interweave. But, for myself, the moats preside, their water-surrounds. The décor, tunnels and tree edges, gives sightings. Sublime anachronism, no doubt, as the city joggers make their circle. Yet becalmed or wind-rippled each moat reminds and cleanses. Their currents help ease the mud-times of history. Beijing Forbidden City could not but draw the eye. Zijin Cheng. Mongol. Ming. Qing. PRC. Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor gave one taste. But then you got there, Tiananmen and Mao wall profile. Gates within gates into a near thousand red-yellow buildings. Names to invoke the Heavens, even the Palace of Earthly Tranquility. Supreme Harmony. Yellow Crane. Hall of Literary Glory. Slope of roof. Yin Yang design. Buddha and Tao shrine. All watered by widest moat, China court rectangle. See the reflections of power, the images of memory.

A. ROBERT LEE

Angkor Wat could not but draw the eye. Walk the causeway into the temple-city. Khmer hive-tower, Cambodia wall-pillar. Hindu-Buddhist tides of belief. Bas-relief friezes of Brahma, Vishnu, Krishna. Carved walls of goddess-dancing apsara, devata. Buddha images to play against Khmer war scenes. Giant root-arms spread around the inner walls. And water to en-square avatar and cloister. Situate yourself within ancestryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s moat.

Hard and Soft Oldenburg A giant electric plug in Baltimore. Prongs. Bakelite. It was my first Oldenburg. Before long a whole household came into view. Some kind of sculpture-apprenticeship there’d been. Museum Raphael, Michelangelo. Rodin Burghers. Epstein Saint Michael. America had its Calder, Duchamp, Noguchi. I’d seen Augusta Savage Gamin. Jacob Hunt’s Ladder would follow. But with Oldenburg it was to be licensed wit. IMAGINARIUM

Oh you could get serious enough. Installation kitsch itself mocked. Pop happening as permanence. The art of the un-banal banal. But how not to relish the fair? Light switch and toilet. Vacuum cleaner and bath-tap. Garden trowel and safety pin. How not to smack lips? Giant BLT and green ice cone. Floor cake and Warhol 7-up. Pastries and apple core. Hard or soft this was art-fun. Adult toy regime. Modern Brobdingnag. Small life sighted large.

Imaginarium The world is but canvas to our imaginations. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Henry David Thoreau

Thirteen Flights of Imagination i Joy Harjo, Eagle Poem The sacred wing and loop of the eagle invites a dawn, a morning, of imagination. Salt River, Arizona, “circles of motion.” Outside view yet “inside us.” ii William Bysshe Shelley, Ode to a Skylark Spirit, star, hymnist, glow-worm, rose. The litany embodies “keen joyance.” To imagine that songbird’s call to ear summons the skied elation of being.

iv Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Lost Lenore and blackness. The memorial chamber. Beak, eye, feather, repeated tap of Nevermore. Is not this to fantasy-imagine the Raven of despair?

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iii John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale Evanescent music of life over death. Hampstead-written if you like. But this enters the dream-real, “poesy.” The imagined immortality of bird chord.

v Emily Dickinson, A Bird Came Down The Walk You follow the bird’s staccato progress. The jaunting hop, bite, drink, glance. Then, in caution, it’s the airborne rise and glide. The seamless noon-flight into ocean imagination. vi Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush Midwinter frost, an ended century, dead season. Bird-song, rare, alone. The throated music offers its cry of life. The stoic hope of new imagining.

vii Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover Falcon hover, tensile, vertical, then into swing Each syllable alliterates the sight. Rhythm sprung. God sprung. The poet yes, but yourself can’t quite imagine the power.

A. ROBERT LEE

viii W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole Those swans, all fifty-nine, the grace of love’s remembrance. October, twilight pond, circle-winged ascent. How to re-visit their treasure? Only in memory’s imagination. ix William Carlos Williams, Gulls New Jersey local, the whirred fissures of town and church. Gull trio in the wake of circling eagle. Theirs is music beyond hymn, the warring praise. They bear the horizon’s imagining of civil ease. x Ogden Nash, The Grackle Avian jester, bad boy ugly. Think up a cv of trill or loud guttural. Speaks like Cagney, yellow-eyed bird bully. Imagine the antic blackbird peck in the rear. xi Ted Hughes, Hawk Roosting Tree perched, a raptor’s soliloquy. Un-circumscribed, neither proud nor humble. Claw armed, beak curved, warrior bred. No need to imagine any damned thing. xii Linda Hogan, The Heron Proverbial one leg, eye open, wader. Watched, envied, its own language of poise. But fallen, hand-held, its powers still elude. It takes imagination to think it human, yourself a claw.

xiii Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Ah Mr. Stevens, that look of arbitrary blackbird number. Thirteen, maybe one hundred and thirteen. Mountain, snow, autumn, light, cedar, even Connecticut. The invitation to a one and all share in the imagining.

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A. ROBERT LEE

Edward S. Curtis took his shots. The North American Indian. Ethno-volume, set, album. The tribes, the supposed vanishing. Stares of disappearance into lens. Navajo or Oglala, Apache or Crow. Yet if Native inertia how the still-live continuity? Savvy-unsavvy camera. James Van Der Zee took his shots. Harlem on my Mind. Harlem Renaissance. Duke, Negro League, Cotton Club, Black Cross Nurses. Florence Mills. Barefoot Prophet. Bar and mortuary. The portraits, weddings, brownstones, street. Each unknown face, each celebrity face. Lenox Avenue camera eye. Robert Frank took his shots. Les AmĂŠricains 1958. Grove Press 1959. Said Kerouac: Sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film. Off-guard America. Tarp covered car, window flag. Budweiser bar. Girl-child smoking. Counter ice cream. New Orleans back of the bus black and white. The diners, Coney Island clinches, parades. Swiss focus. American homespun camera. Robert Mapplethorpe took his shots. Patti Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Horses cover, unaffected, punk. Each lily and orchid, self-prints at one remove. The Manhattan-priced silken Warhol. Didion, Ashbery, Shange text and image. The Perfect Moment, man bodies, loved, fisted. Polaroid to Studio, Hotel Chelsea to AIDS-blight. Free speech. Free camera.

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Diane Arbus took her shots. The twins (ahead of The Shining), the caped carnival lady. Eddie Carmel stooped under home ceiling. Add in nude camp waitress, out of time debutante. Tattooed body, lipstick lips, hatted dwarf. Love couples, at angles, in their own right. Self-portrait, hand-held flash, mirror, wary aperture. Displacements. A freak of camera.

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Imaginarium To see clearly is poetry. — John Ruskin We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves . . . The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined. — N. Scott Momaday In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

A. ROBERT LEE

— Wallace Stevens An imaginarium refers to a place devoted to the imagination. — Wikipedia i Imagine seeing How best? Effort, energy, transcendence. Imagine ourselves How best? Mirror, face, mind. Imagine the word How best? Edit, translation, idiom. Imagine a place devoted to the imagination. How best? Conjure, magic, creation. Sight, self, word, imagination the world’s measure for measure.

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Sight, self, word, imagination the world as imaginarium.

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ii Imagine cosmology. Big Bang, early universe, space. Galaxy, nebula, gas-dust. Black Dwarf, Solar Mass. Supernova, pulsar, comet. Milky Way, Andromeda. Gamma ray, cosmic wind. Eighth, ninth planet from the sun. Lunar trajectory, Mars parabola. Astronomical units and parsecs. Ellipticals and spirals. Halo, disc, cluster, event horizon. Luminosity and parallax. Light speed, star chart, wave length. Astrolabe, sextant, lens. Hubble Telescope, Jodrell Bank. Einstein and Hawkins. Time relative. Time deep. Dark Matter. Dark Energy Measures of ratio and instrument. iii Imagine landscape, waterscape. SagarmÄ tÄ Everest ceiling reach. Ontupqua Grand Canyon depth. Uluru-Ayers continental sandstone. Machu Picchu highest Andean ridge. Rhone Valley river wine length. Muir Forest imperial sequoia stand. Greenland ice sheet, berg and geyser. Lake Vostok sub-Antarctica. Lake Victoria Africa wave. Yangtze swirling Three Gorges.

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Panama Canal inter-ocean. Venice Lagoon renaissance. Amazon giant snake curve. Toyama exquisite Hannoki Falls. Windermere-Wordsworth lakes. Atlantic roller, Pacific current. Measures of contour and horizon.

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iv Imagine route-makers. Morocco’s Ibn Battuta from Tunis to Mali to China. Venice’s Polo to Kublai Khan Mongolia. Discovery voyagers Columbus, Magellan, Da Gama. Zheng He, China’s own America circumnavigator. Heyerdahl Kon-Tiki Peru to Polynesia. Gagarin, Armstrong, in orbits of Vostok, of Columbia. Ellen MacArthur yachtswoman solo globe-sail. James Cameron deep-sea dive to Mariana Trench. Foot, ship, rocket, submersible. Measures of itinerary and exploration. v Imagine palette and frame. La Gioconda, harmony and smile. Picasso broken-horse war Guernica. Vermeer earring-girl turn of head. Ukiyo-e floating wave. Rivera Mexican-worker mural. Van Gogh tournesols, Paris and Arles. Rothko prism’d color-field. Gaugin tropic heat-and-gardenia Pacific. Duchamp ironic commodity urinal. Munch bridge flight scream. Warhol knowing silkscreen poster. Image, studio, brush, model. Measures of color and eye.

vii Imagine deities. Yaweh, God, Allah. Torah, Testament, Koran. Hindu, Buddhist, Rasta. Veda, Buddhavacana, Selassie. Africa Damballah, Haiti Erzulie. Native Coyote, Native Wendigo. Aboriginal Dreamtime Biame. Māori Aotearoa Whiro. Creation stories. Origin myths. Earth, sky, body, spirit. Measures of heaven and hell.

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vi Imagine sound and chord. Mozart Requiem. Mass. Music. Chorus. Beethoven 5th. Legendary opening. Majesty. Verdi La Traviata. Sex, tragedy and Violetta. Piaff La Vie en Rose. Street voice and savvy. Joujouka music. Sufi Berber in concert. Coltrane Love Supreme. Jazz heights. Stravinski Firebird. Orchestra and Ballet. Schoenberg twelve-tone concatenation. Choirs Mormon Tabernacle and Vienna. Ellington Big Band harmony and chord. Keith Jarrett jazz-classical piano spontaneity. Marley reggae-wailin’,Trench Town and Jah. Lennon “Imagine” pop sonata. Symphony, song, score. Measures of rhythm and ear.

viii Imagine Science Fiction and speculation. Sea-bed, centre-earth, moon, with Verne. Forward and back in Wells time machine. Dick’s robots dreaming or not in their sleep.

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Marooned in space with Alfred Bester. Fantasy, dare, alien, mirror. Measures of maybe, could be.

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ix Imagine society. Family, school, work, marriage. Politics, government. Sociology’s case-study and statistic. Anthropology’s kinship and mask. The novel’s canvas. Theatre, film, TV’s news and script. Media, image, couture. Language, power, code. Measures of behavior.

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x Imagine literature and journey. Homer Greek ocean odysseys. Virgil Latin war aeneid. Li Bai Tang drink journeys. Dante three-tier dream visitation. Brant Narrenschiff, fools aboard. Shakespeare Tempest island, Ariel flight. Cervantes Quijote windmill circle. Bunyan heaven and hell pilgrimage. Camões Luciads war and glory itinerary. Milton-Vondel Paradise fall. Bashō Japan by foot and haiku. Swift Gulliver-tale of high and low. Coleridge albatross’d Antarctic. Melville whale-path of Ahab-Ishmael Pequod. Rimbaud oneiric bateau ivre. Thoreau travelling much in Concord. Equiano interesting narrative out of Iboland. Hart Crane trans-America bridge. Sartre roads of soi and freedom.

Proust travel descent into time-past. Joyce travel ascent into day-present. Grass tin drum sound of march. Theroux Great Railway Bazaar. Poem, story, epic, life-text. Measures of fabled motion. xi Imaginings Seeing full of itself. Self full of itself. Word full of itself. Imagination full of itself.

Each inside the other.

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Autoverse. Universe. Omniverse. Multiverse.

Each outside the other. Each its own measure. Sight, self, word, imagination the world as imaginarium. Imaginably.

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ABOUT THE POET

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A. ROBERT LEE was a Professor in the English department at Nihon University from 1997-2011. British-born, he previously taught at the University of Kent, UK. His creative work includes Japan Textures: Sight and Word, with Mark Gresham (2007), Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line (2011), and the verse collections Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012) and Portrait and Landscape: Further Geographies (2013). Among his academic publications are Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004, and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010). Currently he lives in Murcia, Spain.

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