Ownership and tenuriality of the Wissahickon ~ Malinda Words

Wissahickon Creek is a tributary of the Schuylkill River, flowing through the Montgomery and Philadelphia Counties of Pennsylvania. For Edgar Allen Poe, writing in the middle of the 19th Century, it was a river. Maybe it was, before development arrived, villages became townships, townships became cities and cities were turned into grand metropoles. In Poe’s time the name was Wissahiccon, but he may have misspelt.

Poe, astounded by the beauty, described it thus: ‘…Now the Wissahiccon is of so remarkable a loveliness that, were it flowing in England, it would be the theme of every bard, and the common topic of every tongue.’

The quote is from an article that is also known as ‘The Elk,’ because it was essentially a ‘plate piece’ or a work written specifically to accompany an engraving, in this instance one by John Gadsby Chapman depicting an elk.

Why England, though? Why would it have been different had the Wissahickon flowed through that country? Was it that the England of that time lacked idyllic landscapes replete with river, elk and greenery?

Weren’t there enough bards in the America of Poe’s time to theme the Wissahickon, apart from Poe himself (the essay is certainly lyrical) and Fanny Kemble who wrote ‘To the Wissahiccon’ in 1832? Was it some kind of post-colonial deference, considering that less than a century had passed since independence was declared?

‘A common topic of every tongue,’ in England, but why not in Poe’s America? Did not his fellow citizens appreciate the beauty of the landscape enough? Could they not?

The age of industry had arrived. The areas Poe wrote about would bear witness to the arrival of the automobile and the banning of the same which led to the most popular trail coming to be known as ‘Forbidden Drive.’ Perhaps, just as in England, there was anxiety over what might have at that time appeared to be the inevitable replacement of all things naturally beautiful with all things unnaturally mechanical.

Wissahickon didn’t remain the same. And yet, there’s enough of it to inspire poetry. This time, in the third decade of the 21st Century, there’s no reference to England, no post-colonial angst (not least of all because the United States of America has inherited or wrested that pernicious mantle?), no veiled lamentation over the lack of validation.

Joyce Hida, in a curious twist where she takes issue with the demand for a poem (probably about Wissahickon) in, paradoxically, a poem that denies itself and affirms that which requires not (as she points out) poetic affirmation.

Untitled and logically so, her note of objection is published in www.philadelphiastories.org:

I will not make a poem of this. Wissahickon will remain
imperially ours, not rendered impossible by a poet’s word.
And yet, there is something to be said for the impossible break

in the river. For the rock-strewn crossing that fades halfway, as if to say
there is no need for an end. For the way stones shoulder
the age of sentinel cliffs, and sap slows the progression of ants.

We spoke about it each morning, sliding down hillsides in too smooth
soles. Poems make a memory, history and I am keeping Wissahickon
for us. Besides, the woods are not metaphorically
beautiful — they burn in crimson and ochres and reject
asylum to fantasy. And still you are

insisting on the poem, as if we haven’t thought
to make love by the Devil’s Pool, as if our roots

don’t share soil with the ferns.

Joyce loves Philadelphia, according to the author-note following the poem. She’s probably a native of this city. I am a visitor. I don’t share roots, not with ferns, not with Joyce Hida nor with Edgar Allen Poe. We are all citizens in the Republic of Poetry, maybe, and, in that shared citizenship, can still walk through these woods, gaze upon a river, flip the decades several times over and, as I did this morning, let the Wissahickon tell its stories at its own pace and its native language and actually obtain a trace of that salience known so intimately to Joyce Hida and Edgar Allen Poe. Not imperially mine, no. Not colonially conceded either.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

25 July 2023

Ownership and tenuriality of the Wissahickon

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