Poets can’t seem to stop talking about poetry. And can’t seem to stop writing it. Sometimes the sheer quantity of “poems” made while playing around with words can be surprising. Maybe they aren’t all poems… Maybe they aren’t all good poems… Maybe they are poems just waiting around for the right context, the right time to be spoken or read.
And while poems or their fragments are waiting around for the right time, place, or edit, what do you do with them all?
Another Ars Poetica
Wouldn’t you like to hang them on the tree
like blown-clean, hand-painted eggshells,
each a stroke of wonder?
Ornamental from a distance,
so many, a typographic blizzard.
Up close: perfectly formed
but unreadable en masse,
because if you read each one
you might shatter,
shatter,
shatter.
Maybe this is the way Emily Dickinson felt when she instructed that after her death that her papers were to be burnt. Nonetheless, over 1800 poems survive her, thanks to those who ignored her instructions. As well, there are many letters she wrote to others, though many letters she had kept were burned.
Just imagine if she had lived in an internet age, where electrons last forever!
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