an autobiographical poetry and Google Maps-based project
by Christian Patterson, made in 2017.
The map contains every place I have been to
that meets these criteria:
A) a company, chain, or any public business, AND
B) I can remember going to, for sure
With every location, there's several types of content.
The main type of content is a poem–
Some of the poems explicitly name the location
and the surrounding area,
while others are related to the location
based on association.
Some of the locations have text borrowed from other sources.
Some of the locations have images.
The places listed on this page are displayed by zip code.
On the Google Map, the places are listed chronologically
based on when I went there.
Please enjoy!
If you have questions, email christianpatterson91@gmail.com
-Christian Patterson
(and follow me on twitter: @christianizcool)
Writing about all of the common places I go, and have gone, necessarily leads to writing about everyday life. It is a form that can only have everyday content, while still ringing true. Wordsworth writes in the Preface to Lyricals Ballads (1800):
The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated
Wordsworth writes in the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (1798):
The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.
Frank O'Hara writes in 'Meditations in an Emergency':
One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass.
Paul de Man writes in 'Autobiography as De-facement':
Can there be autobiography before the 18th century or is it a specifically pre-romantic and romantic phenomenon? Generic historians tend to think so [...] Can autobiography be written in verse? Even some of the most recent theoreticians of autobiography categorically deny the possibility though without giving reasons why this is so. Thus it becomes irrelevant to consider Wordsworth's The Prelude within the content of a study of autobiography, an exclusion that anyone working in the English tradition will find hard to condone.
The autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substituion. The structure implies differentiation as well as similarity, [...] but this merely makes explicit the wider claim to authorship that takes place whenever a text is stated to be by someone.
The study of autobiography is caught in this double motion, the necessity to escape from the tropology of the subject and the equally inevitable reinscription of this necessity within a specular model of cognition.