White Space Rivers

I recently read that the curves of white space that sometimes snake their way through the text in books and magazines are called rivers. Editors try to avoid this white space because the reader's eye is invariably drawn to the river. Rivers distract. Rivers split. Rivers take us somewhere else, and that is what the words should be doing. White space rivers steal purpose from text.

If those white spaces (which I have been distracted by - when I was younger I drew pencil lines in them) are rivers, then the letters that fall along the edges are the banks. Words and sentences climb away from the river into more stable land, into mountains. As I write, I realize that I have a clear picture in my mind of the Hudson River near the Catskill Mountains, a place in which I lived for one year (though this is hard to believe for some reason). Driving over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge was always an exhilaration. The river and its banks changed each time. They hid under fog or froze, turned red, brown, & orange and fell into each other. Sometimes the land on the east side rose brilliantly green over the water and rolled back for miles.

Hmm. Like I said, rivers distract. I was going to compare the notion of white space as river and text as land to Italo Calvino's expression of language as shifting sand dunes, but the river took me somewhere else.

And because this is called the Poetry Forum, a poem:

Body and Soul II
by Charles Wright
(for Coleman Hawkins) The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, Like the structure of music, seamless, invisible. Even the rain has larger sutures. What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together, Is faith, it appears--faith of the eye, faith of the ear. Nothing like that in language, However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms Blown by the wind. April, and anything's possible. Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang. A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India And back--on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on foot. Ten thousand miles it took him, from 29 to 645, Mountains and deserts, In search of the Truth, the heart of the heart of Reality, The Law that would help him escape it, And all its attendant and inescapable suffering. And he found it. These days, I look at things, not through them, And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get. The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral, The neighbor's back porch light bulbs glow like anemones. Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead. This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark, when everything starts to shine out, And aphorisms skulk in the trees, Their wings folded, their heads bowed. Every true poem is a spark, and aspires to the condition of the original fire Arising out of the emptiness. It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite. It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by. Shooting stars. April's identical, celestial, wordless, burning down. Its light is the light we commune by. Its destination's our own, its hope is the hope we live with. Wang Wei, on the other hand, Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains, and lived there, Off and on, for the rest of his life. He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it, A part of nature himself, he thought. And who would say no To someone so bound up in solitude, in failure, he thought, and suffering. Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge. Getting too old and lazy to write poems, I watch the snowfall From the apple trees. Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.