Dwelling

Hello readers and welcome to the final installment of the 2020 Reading List. I am pivoting through genres (last time taking my second dramatic detour) and decided on a poetry collection for my final book. In this case Scott Edward Anderson’s 2018 collection Dwelling: An Ecopoem. As the subtitle indicates, this was much more than just a group of poems and I found a lot of philosophical and environmental considerations laced throughout the work.

Claiming to be “in conversation with” Martin Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” the first half is a series of connected poems that look at those concepts. As I am a complete ignoramus in the realm of poetry, I was blown away by the excellent uses of language and figurative imagery to conjure the many ways humans have taken ourselves out of “nature” despite being a part of it ourselves. Through long poetic ruminations on housing (“dwelling”) and what it means in the larger picture of life, Anderson shows us how we can find our way back. Many of the poems I had to ponder on my own about how it affected and contrasted my own work.

I found the second half (“Some Questions of Dwelling”) just as enjoyable, as through a bunch of short essays Anderson details his philosophical arguments, both about Heidegger’s questionable history but also how his concept of “dwelling” fits in with our own modern age. There was a ton to ponder on how the urban landscape could change, and I found the entire section to be a refreshing look at how our cities and neighborhoods could adapt to the coming climate shifts. Anderson has a voluminous amount of works cited that sum up many of the influences of this book.

As a reader who is abominable when it comes to understanding poetry I am very glad I picked up this book. Poetry forces one to think in a much different way, and the way the sequence built into the multi-layered essays (as well as the definitions running along the bottom of each page) offered a viewpoint on a new way of being and thinking toward nature and the environment. I would recommend this collection for anyone interested in the future of humanity and how it might reincorporate with the planet.

Thank you for joining me on another reading adventure as we navigated this horrendous year. As promised I will continue the varied genres into the new year, starting with a collection my wife has wanted me to read for years: Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Thanks as always for reading, and here’s hoping 2021 is (slightly?) better.