It wasn’t something I read in history class, but rather from actual “being there” experience. I first read about an ancient practice called “beating the bounds” from a blogger based in London that I follow. It’s a longstanding tradition in which people walk the boundaries of their church parish or community every seven years. The idea is to maintain boundary lines and resist encroachment.
The practice carried over when the English colonized America. The surprise is that some states still require “beating the bounds” as a statutory requirement. It’s officially called “perambulation,” and it still exists on the law books in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It’s applied to towns, and it’s often not enforced, but it still is something of a regular practice in New Hampshire.
A 2017 poetry collection by Liz Ahl is entitled Beating the Bounds. Ahl lives in New Hampshire. The wonderful title poem is about perambulation. Not only does it frame the rest of the poems to follow in the volume, it also stuck in my head as I read two other collections by Ahl, a chapbook entitled A Stanza is a Place to Stand (2023) and A Case for Solace (2022). “You must walk the path you think you know again, / to see how, again, you don’t fully know it,” she writes.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Thursday Readings
“The Fish,” poem by Marianne Moore – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Poems from the Coffee Shop: Pine Needle Tea – L.L. Barkat at Every Day Poems.
An installation – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.
“The Cupbearer or the Baker?” and “Decisions” – poems by Paul Millan at Society of Classical Poets.
No comments:
Post a Comment