Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Mark Halliday’s "Location" explores the poet’s struggle with setting and authenticity in poetry. The speaker wrestles with the impulse to choose an evocative, literary location—whether Philadelphia in summer, Chicago in winter, or even a romanticized Europe—but ultimately resists escapism, instead committing to the unglamorous, immediate realities of the present. The poem operates as a meta-commentary on poetic conventions, questioning the tendency to craft atmospheric settings that might feel more prestigious, dramatic, or historically rich than the speaker’s actual lived experience.

The opening line—“You could begin by saying ‘This summer in Philadelphia…’”—suggests the beginning of a conventional narrative poem, yet it is immediately undercut by hesitation: “But then you might instantly feel a gush of weariness.” The speaker’s fatigue stems from the predictability of such a setting and his distaste for its unappealing, uninspiring details. He describes Philadelphia with an almost dismissive tone: “The thousands of men in sleeveless shirts who never bother to disturb your suspicion that they are all awesomely stupid.” This harsh generalization suggests frustration, boredom, or even a class-based disdain, yet the speaker does not present himself as morally superior—rather, he exposes his own prejudices as part of his larger ambivalence toward location itself.

Other images reinforce the sense of stagnation and sterility: “The teenage girls chewing green gum outside pizza joints. / Pavement so crudded yet seeming without history.” The details feel deliberately mundane, lacking the grandeur or depth that poets often seek in setting. The final image of “heat clotted on the skin of all the Phillies fans” captures the oppressive, almost suffocating quality of both the physical environment and the poet’s inability to find inspiration in it.

Dissatisfied, the speaker considers another option: “Winter? In Chicago?” This shift suggests an attempt to construct a more poetically appealing scene—something with “a cleanness of outline.” The descriptions of Chicago are sharper and more cinematic: “a crisp wind in off the lake, / great block boulders rimming the lake, deep blue of that chilled lake so far from here.” The language here is more polished, more poetic in a traditional sense. References to “Carl Sandburg, Saul Bellow, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells” place the city within a distinguished literary and cultural lineage, lending it a sense of weight and importance. Yet, despite its grandeur, the speaker remains unconvinced.

He acknowledges that “there is that option,” but immediately follows it with the realization that “it isn’t this, isn’t the mess on hand.” The phrase “mess on hand” suggests that the speaker feels an obligation to stay rooted in the present reality, no matter how uninspiring or chaotic. This marks a turning point in the poem, as the speaker explicitly rejects artificial, romanticized settings in favor of something rawer and more immediate.

The poem then shifts into a plea: “Lord let me not write poems whose little events or / non-events / seem to take place in Europe, indeed in some / quaintified Europe / of 1938 or 1928 or 1913.” Here, Halliday critiques the tendency of some poets to use historical European settings as a kind of aesthetic shorthand, conjuring up the streets and beverages of another era for the sake of atmosphere rather than necessity. The repetition of specific years—1938, 1928, 1913—suggests a pattern of nostalgic escapism, an easy way for poets to lend their work an air of sophistication or historical importance. The speaker’s rejection of this impulse—“I will fail in my ways but not so cheaply as that”—affirms his commitment to authenticity, even if he struggles to find beauty in the present.

The poem concludes by returning to Philadelphia, embracing the ordinary with a newfound sense of acceptance: “This summer in Philadelphia / people on their front stoops glanced up at a jet droning toward the airport (one more thing beyond their control) / and bent down to grasp today’s thumb-smudging / Inquirer.” The final image is a quiet, unremarkable moment: people reading the newspaper, barely noticing the jet overhead. Yet within its ordinariness lies a kind of truth—the recognition that daily life, however uninspiring, is still worthy of poetry. The detail of “one more thing beyond their control” subtly gestures toward broader themes of fate and powerlessness, reinforcing the idea that reality—no matter how banal—is more significant than any constructed poetic setting.

In "Location," Halliday critiques the artifice of poetic scene-setting while grappling with his own discontent with his surroundings. The poem embodies the tension between wanting to write something beautiful and feeling bound to the messy, uninspiring present. Ultimately, the speaker chooses honesty over grandeur, grounding his work in the immediate world rather than an idealized past or a more picturesque elsewhere. By doing so, Halliday affirms that poetry does not require dramatic locations or historical weight to be meaningful—it only requires attention to the world as it is.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...