A blog of fragments.
DISPATCH 4
Note: There is no one else in the room with us.
There are so few ghosts around, nowadays. Some have been forgotten or exorcized but most have court dates, publicity engagements, tiresome summonings that leave them utterly depleted. It’s a lonely business, being alive, searching without recourse in or traction with talkative spirits. Hauntings are of the yesteryear--today, we have an emptying or simply--desolation. What kind of future can we face with only paltry spirits at our back?
I find that ghosts have fled my poetry. Even when I am pulled ghostward by expectations of a legible historical archive, I find that they have already left. Have I failed them in some way? I should be on my way, striding closer to them, but they recede from view. There is no mistaking a present absence with an absence. Just--nothing.
But nothing can be generative. In fact, most legible positive structures have, at their core, a kernel of negativity, a disarticulating nothingness that substance accretes around. Such is my poetry these days. Accretions around absence.
How to move, if not forward, laterally? Without trying to summon more exhausted ghosts? A poetics of ghostly reprieve. All I can do is continue to do the work, see what comes of it all. The question of ghosts is as open-ended as the matters of life.