Someday I’ll write a
travel piece on the places I’ve slept or tried to sleep while on the
road, but who will believe it? A hotel under gunfire in Croatia, a
whorehouse in Mopti, one haunted Edinburgh flat. As much as these
nights are emblazoned in my memory, they are not the reason I keep
answering the allure of travel still whistling at my door.
Responding to this calling, opening
this blue door, sends me somewhere more complex than these adventures
imply. For me, the external journey of the traveler and the internal
mapping of the poet are different sides of one central desire: the
search for an extended worldview. Perhaps my poetry is a kind of
distilled reflection of my travels, often written years after returning
home. Almost a decade elapsed between when I completed my Peace Corps
service and began the first poems of living in the Republic of Niger. I
needed the passing of time in order to let go of the literal and move
into a more internal mapping of my experience.
The act of mapping seems right to me
in terms of exploration: the poet’s and the adventurer’s. The process
is ongoing; the constant questioning of which road or line break to
turn on and which one to privilege or revise altogether. The daily
accidents that bring the poet, the traveler, into unexplored territory
may offer new experiences that knock us off balance, literally and
figuratively so that we no longer know who we are or where we stand.
The poet-traveler rearranges the geological terrain with her own
nomadic coordinates. Who could ask for more?