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December 19, 2007
Poet to Poam: There and Back Again
After we are done with a poam, where does it go? It is like traveling. You’re never truly free from the places in which you travel. When you return home places do the traveling—poams move to us, approach us, wake us up, haunt and excite us, etc. The work lives on; it is enclosed within us and it takes on multiple forms and meanings while our situations change.
The poet creates his illumination into a product. He moves to it.
(Stanley Kunitz)
The Poem then travels.
When it does, it comes back to the poet. It does the traveling.
Summer Illuminations is a map of places I traveled to and of illuminations that took place at these destinations. Such illuminations were inspiration for poetry which I have enclosed in the larger poam.
This brings me to my second system of enclosure, the road. This road has two shapes, one is circular, which is the path I have illustrated above and also experienced as I began documenting my summer travels. The other, is a road which forks in many directions and even contains dead ends. These are the properties of this enclosure system.
Both enclosure systems, the seed and the road share the same property’s. So much belongs to both systems. The most important being illuminations that produced something and even those that reach a dead end and couldn’t travel any further. This doesn’t mean that the idea is motionless. It is possible that it embarks on a different system of enclosure, one that will allow it to move past the dead end—that is to say that all people relate to poetry in different ways. Words I find meaning in and things that move me may not have the same effect on others. This was confirmed a few weeks ago when we created illumination surveys. I found that people were illuminated by different things and each person was struck by different lines of the Nye poem I gave them to read. I also realized this when I began working on my mapping of Emily Dickinson’s “The Lightning is a Yellow Fork.” As one of my previous blog posts states, I understood the poem through the concept of supply and demand. My current mapping has evolved into this.
Posted by pbali at December 19, 2007 12:22 AM