Buildings Built for Ghosts

In my quest to lead my poetry to water, I’ve been reading Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry by Dana Gioia (Editor), David Mason (Editor), Meg Schoerke (Editor). I first came across this work at the Powow Poets workshop: an essay by Rhina is featured in the book. I perused the table of contents and was intrigued by its breadth and scope. So I purchased it. Warning: I might be commenting on some of the essays as I read them, not in any manner of analytical review but merely in a note-taking and questioning way.

Robert Creeley in ‘Poems are a Complex’:

I think I first felt a poem to be what might exist in words as primarily the fact of its own activity. Later, of course, I did see that poems might comment on many things, and reveal many attitudes and qualifications. Still, it was never what they said about things that interested me. I wanted the poem itself to exist and that could never be possible as long as some subject significantly elsewhere was resolved. There had to be an independence derived from the very fact that words are things too. (p279)

I guess this is the fork in the road. The poem no longer is an extension of human communication, no longer attempts to sing in words what cannot be said in words. It is now an object first and foremost created from things. Comments (not communications) are secondary. Architecture has it lucky. No matter how modern or postmodern it needs to get, people still have to inhabit the building in some fashion.