To and From

G.E. Patterson

An extended bio from the author.

 

 

I’ve never known how to answer the question, “Where are you from?” It seems that people expect a simple and singular answer, and I’ve never had one to give.

For most of my life, each year has been spent in three or four places, in three or four states. Living by water is one constant in a life marked by continual movement. A childhood by a Southern pond, the Atlantic ocean, an iconic river and a great lake led to adult years near the Pacific ocean, a sound, and another iconic river. What I carried with me from place to place were books and shoes and an urge to plant and dig.

I went to Princeton and Stanford universities and studied modern languages, literature, and translation, but I’d been schooled in those subjects before then. My traveling library bridged the hemispheres. The shifting vernaculars of north and south and east and west were familiar. The code-shifting of a nomadic life was more natural than the sustained conversation in one idiom. So, perhaps it was predictable that my earlier book, Tug (Graywolf Press), presented a number of voices.

The poems in the new collection, To and From, are also the product of a nomadic life. Most were written while I was living in, and traveling to, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Washington states. A handful were written on fellowships in those five states and Vermont. In To and From, though, the focus is less on gathering the voices and rhythms of various places and more on recording moment-to-moment experience.

Focus on the present moment. That’s the refrain from years studying meditation and practicing yoga. That’s also hard work for someone raised on the notion of elsewhere, with place and language and time as changeable as moving water.

When I first began reading this work in public—at colleges and bookstores and a jazz/spoken-word festival—I would tell people to think of the poems as ambient music, not to worry if they lost the train of thought or narrative; if their minds wandered as I read, that was okay, they could come back to the poem after that wandering.

I suspect that may be the story of my life: wandering and return. I think that’s okay.

Isn’t that the foundational trope of so much literature? Either someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Who says the pilgrim and the stranger aren’t the same?

My work life hasn’t been more settled than my residence. I’ve worked as a dog trainer, a landscaper, a caterer, an artist’s assistant, a researcher and a teacher, as well as a freelance writer and editor.

Now, I’m trying to make a garden in St. Paul, Minnesota, but most of the names that I have for plants are not the common names here.

Like so many others, I find that my intentions are shaped by an empire. I am required to speak Latin.