For Linzi, Akira and Tao

While much of Michael Wessels’s work on reading San oral literature, the politics of indigeneity and ecocriticism was acknowledged during his life, there is another dimension to his research that has been overlooked. Michael Wessels always had a deep love of poetry, and toward the end of his life, he had begun to focus more on his writing and to publish. In this article, I explore Wessels’s key long poem published as “Cannibal Time,” but subsequently changed to “Spots of Time” (as I will refer to it), in which he constructs an imaginative autobiography that includes travel writing, short prose and poetry. Drawing upon Wordsworth’s The Prelude, I employ both a critical and creative methodology to argue that the subject of Wessels’s poem is less ‘my life’ in a factual and historical sense, and rather more ‘the making of a poet’.

临淄、明、陶

虽然迈克尔·韦塞尔斯 (Michael Wessels) 在阅读桑族口述文学、土著政治和生态批评方面的大部分工作在他的一生中都得到了承认，但他的研究还有另一个方面被忽视了。迈克尔·韦塞尔斯 (Michael Wessels) 一直热爱诗歌，在他生命的尽头，他开始更多地专注于写作和出版。在这篇文章中，我探讨了 Wessels 的关键长诗，发表为“食人者的时间”，但后来改为“时间的点”（我将提到它），其中他构建了一部富有想象力的自传，其中包括旅行写作、短篇散文和诗歌。借鉴华兹华斯的前奏曲，我采用批判性和创造性的方法来论证韦塞尔斯诗歌的主题不是事实和历史意义上的“我的生活”，而是“诗人的创作”。