How does landscape affect place?

Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms, water bodies such as rivers, lakes and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions.

ASSIGNMENT: Take a look at the landscape that you drew and write two different pieces: superficial and beyond superficial. Here are to examples, the first is a superficial writing and the second is an example of beyond superficial. Post to blog.


from “American Gothic—Farm” by David Hamilton

But we were a farm family, almost, the town being half of what I knew. My father and uncle farmed together in the river bottoms north and west of us. Floods were frequent enough to discourage homebuilding out there, so we lived in town and commuted. A rectangle of land, a mile and a half by a half mile, my father and uncle having cleared most of it, the farm was a patchwork of fields, the front field, the new field, the middle field, the house field, the long, narrow field, and the north field. An eminence there was really little higher than a hog’s haunch, unless it was the remnant of an old levee, and there was no house in the house field, only a stack of rough-milled boards, that had been one. We played on an abandoned combine, left for its value in odd parts.
The north field was heavy with gumbo, and in late summer usually well cracked; the front field had sand loam. Half circles of timber, with cottonwoods soaring tallest, stood east in the middle and west in the long, narrow fields. Drainage ditches ran west to east at several places; one of those, bordering the middle field opened on a marsh with cattails, willows, and redwing blackbirds. A dogwood patch rose out of it onto higher ground, curving back into the middle field. I don’t remember any dogwoods, but it was a patch my father and uncle well remembered clearing. Then they left a strip of woods, about the width of a field, between the front and new fields, a reminder to my brother, my two cousins, and me of what the farm had been. Thick with cottonwood, wild plum, mulberry, box elder, and soft maple, it suffered our paths, our hideouts, our approaches to a raccoon’s tree or the fox’s den.


"Gravely Run" by AR Ammons

I don't know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:

the swamp's slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:

holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars' gothic-clustered
spires could make
green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air's glass
jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:
I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.