“… Does a poem go on existing
even if it's not being read? Does its meter, let's say,
still measure? What really happens to a poem, while it
sits closed in the dark of a closed book? Do spirits
live there? Are there sperm-like, invisible strings
that stretch back from them to other poems from
hundreds or thousands of years ago that have been
lost, but which keep spawning poems?”
In these lines from his poem “Could Someone Tell Me Why” Kent Johnson touches on territory ‘Autobiography of a Book’ writhes around in, especially whether books can communicate with each other, whether one could see books as begetting other books (or poems). In Johnson’s talking about poems as entities, I also hear echoes of my ‘Fact’ series. Poems, stories, art as a new form of life. More discrete than the virus-like “meme,” a word coined to describe the transmission of ideas through human societies.
The full quote is a bit unwieldy for an epigraph, plus I’m not sure Book wouldn’t feel preempted. Anyway, it always interests me to see other people wandering around a world I’ve been lost in myself.
source:
All Because of Poetry I Have a Big House
by Kent Johnson
2020. Shearsman Books Ltd, Swindon UK
