Yes! Invisible Cities is GOAT-tier wanderers-library flavour, and more people should read it!
I can see the sentiment erupting here and there in little pieces — and I think there is a wellspring of sensitivity here waiting to erupt. "They say the softest love is that of years. The city should know." "I worry for the paths to be hard to tread, / for the stones to dissolve to dirt, the easy dead of the past turned to implacable life."… all great stuff. The urban processes of agglomeration and sedimentation parallel how relationships accumulate, are tread over, reworn, aged.
What i'm looking for more of, however, is exploring the depth of each of those sentiments a little more patiently. At times, it seems as if each stanza is looking for a different metaphor, a different way to probe the relationship between the poet/the 'you'/the city, that it doesn't stop to dwell further on what that connection entails for relationality, what is the depth of the past you're exploring. Threads are picked up but dropped at the end of each stanza. As a result, this feels like a very horizontal poem; the ending is a confession, a relief, but not a release of anything built-up.
i would like to focus on a particular thread and pull it through more keenly — sedimentation, for example, or the tangle of streets as knots. Each of these things implies a different logic of exploring, of pulling through a relationship; each of those things can lead to very interesting ends.
also, (this is probably just my urban studies major talking) i'm not convinced by the variety of cities you invoke to plead your case — there might be a common 'stuff' to cities, in their tendency to agglomerate and tangle all sorts of materials and people and things, but the beauty of Calvino's work is to insist on their particularity, their local logics, their private dreams. Yes, Marco Polo realises that we tell a little bit of us in the cities we've been to; but I think this piece can forget that each city desperately wants to tell itself, too. Drifting from Xi'An to London and Berlin produces for me the opposite of the grounded, emplaced love that the poem wants to imply. Instead, it produces a kind of placeless romanticised longing for the idea of cities, which will necessarily be so much more reductive than their truth.
please don't take this as a complete dismissal! you're one of the more interesting voices playing with the speculative here, and i'm keen to see what new things you can produce in the future. lmao ok this comes across as way too patronising, i deadass love your work and thinking back on it im pretty sure all of these issues are because of Jamcon first draft energy, good shit
