Walking: a footnote

I just finished “Traversals: A Folio on Walking,” guest-edited by Anna Maria Hong and Christine Hume for the summer 2023 issue of The Hopkins Review. Walking and poetry have so many intersections: they foster observation, thinking, feeling, and talking; prompt unexpected encounters; depend on rhythm; and sometimes resemble each other even structurally, because meditation and meandering are associative as well as linear. When I give poetry students a walking-based writing prompt, their work often gets better. But I’ve hit pause on that assignment for a while because taking a thoughtful ramble isn’t safe or possible for everyone, and I’m pondering how I can reframe it.

This folio opens the field brilliantly. (Speaking of prompts, the co-editors offer amazing ones here, and excerpts from the folio are here.) “Traversals” contains a wide variety of poems and essays that riff on pilgrim, flâneur, and man-in-wilderness clichés, often exploring walkers’ vulnerabilities. Rahne Alexander writes about walking in recovery from a vaginoplasty. Petra Kuppers, a disability activist as well as artist, discusses how she “gets more jeers when walking upright than when whizzing along” on a scooter. The title alone of Willa Zhang’s essay “Young, Asian, Female, Alone” defines powerful parameters. Other pieces trace paths informed by grief or trauma.

Even when the landscapes they lay out are not like mine, I recognize some of their contours. When Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí writes “to walk with legs is poverty,” I think of my mother’s phrase “shanks’ pony” in relation to endless tales of getting around Liverpool without bus fare, including her sixteen-year-old self walking home from a party and finding a dead man in the gutter, and her mother moving furniture across town in a wheelbarrow after their street was bombed. When her father stole eggs from the docks during post-World War II rationing and walked miles home, they broke in his pockets and he eventually stumbled in laughing, his clothes dried “stiff as meringue,” as I put it in a poem once. Walking is connected with privation and choice, in the pieces Hong and Hume have collected (and in my life, and my mother’s life). Loss and joy. Reading them, I remember amazing walks I’ve taken, hours I felt free and strong and lucky; misery about being unable to walk because of injury and illness; and all the times I was catcalled, shadowed, and otherwise made afraid while walking. Fear narrows a life.

One striking detail: a lot of these essays use footnotes in creative as well as the usual ways. Is that a kind of stylistic bipedalism? Pursuit of an irresistible pun? My essay in this folio, “Ghost Tour,” is a meditation on walking around my southern small town as I read and teach poetry–above a footnoted underworld of suppressed histories and personal secrets. “Ghost Tour” isn’t one of the pieces excerpted online, so I’ve given you an example page below. The whole issue is available through Project Muse, too, if you have access.

Footnote: as I write, my legs and feet are aching from a high-step-count weekend. We just returned from an overnight trip to White Sulphur Springs and Lewisburg, West Virginia, where, after following a trail around a golf course–a surreal walk in its own way–we toured the infamous bunker under the extremely posh Greenbrier Hotel. Really a fallout shelter, it was meant to house members of Congress, their families, and all the people who would cook, clean, doctor, and clerically support their work for 40-60 days after a nuclear bomb hit. For decades, few knew the so-called bunker was even there–a necessary secret, because it was built for nuclear aftermath, not for surviving a direct hit. Workers installed the bunker under cover of constructing a new hotel wing, often laboring at night. The people who maintained it in readiness had double lives: hotel TV repairmen were also communications array experts, for example. Talk about secretive underworlds… and the bunker still is one, despite the tourists, because parts of that high-security resort are now ultra-protected IP data storage. You can’t bring your cell phone on the tour, and security cameras eyeball you as you goggle at the retro-aqua metal seats of an auditorium where Congress would have met.

We’re surrounded by other worlds, and other ways of knowing the world, often without insight or security clearance to essay across the invisible border. Poems and essays can be keys and maps. They don’t make me feel safer, but they do help me understand some very uneven terrain.