“Where I Lived Was Far off as Many”: Poems and Photographs on Bicentennial Thoreau


Duarte, José, and Sara Henriques. ““Where I Lived Was Far off as Many”: 
Poems and Photographs on Bicentennial Thoreau”. Anglo Saxonica, No. 18, 
issue 1, art. 7, 2020, pp. 1–4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/as.38

CREATIVE WRITING

“Where I Lived Was Far off as Many”: Poems and 
Photographs on Bicentennial Thoreau
José Duarte and Sara Henriques
ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, PT
Corresponding authors: José Duarte (joseaoduarte@gmail.com); Sara Henriques (sarapaivahenriques@gmail.com)

Keywords: Erasure Poetry; Thoreau; Landscape; Nature; Photography

*Where (I)
consider every side of the landscape
summer and winter 

each tree my fingers
to speak the truth, to be 
generous

a poet of invisible attractions
protected by an interval between 
the hollow and the recollection of voyages

ready to carry on like Atlas,
the world on my shoulders,
free and uncommitted
round and round

I do not propose to write an ode
but to wake up. 

https://doi.org/10.5334/as.38
mailto:joseaoduarte@gmail.com
mailto:sarapaivahenriques@gmail.com


Duarte and Henriques: “Where I Lived Was Far off as Many”Art. 7, page 2 of 4

Where (II)
in the morning my imagination
retained the auroral character of the
airy and unplastered cabin

winds passed over ridges of mountains
bearing music

the poem of creation every where
passing from hand to hand
gone down the stream of time,
a sort suggestive atmosphere arose

I saw ghosts in every direction
both air and water tinged with blue

place and time changed, and I dwelt
nearer to those parts of the universe

where I lived was as far off as many
a region viewed nightly by astronomers

the day a perpetual morning

What (I)
I am awake and there is a dawn in me.
To be awake is to be alive.
I went to the woods because I know most men

error upon error
clout upon clout



Duarte and Henriques: “Where I Lived Was Far off as Many” Art. 7, page 3 of 4

life frittered away by detail
clouds and storms and quick-sands

Men should live and forge days and nights
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

What (II)
Sunday

music and poetry resound along the streets
we perceive that only great and worthy things

have any permanent and absolute existence – 
daily life is built on purely illusory foundations

let us spend one day as Nature
looking another way like Ulysses

Paris and London
New York and Boston 
and Concord

face to face

life 
death

eternity remains
the first letter of the alphabet

my hands rowing somewhere
and here I will begin to mine



Duarte and Henriques: “Where I Lived Was Far off as Many”Art. 7, page 4 of 4

*Poems to be read while listening to “Re:Stacks” by Bon Iver, included in the album For Emma, Forever Ago, 
which was inspired by Walden. 

These poems were written by erasing the chapter “Where I Lived, and I What Lived For” published in Walden. 
For that purpose, the following edition was used: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Walden; Or, 
Life in the Woods The Maine Woods Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau. New York: Library of American, 1989.

Poems by José Duarte.
Photographs by Sara Paiva Henriques.

Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.

How to cite this article: Duarte, José, and Sara Henriques. ““Where I Lived Was Far off as Many”: Poems and 
Photographs on Bicentennial Thoreau”. Anglo Saxonica, No. 18, issue 1, art. 7, 2020, pp. 1–4. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.5334/as.38

Submitted: 29 July 2020         Accepted: 29 July 2020         Published: 03 November 2020

Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons 
Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any 
medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Anglo Saxonica is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS 

https://doi.org/10.5334/as.38
https://doi.org/10.5334/as.38
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	*Where (I) 
	Where (II) 
	What (I) 
	What (II) 
	Competing Interests