“Sometimes she inhabits the spiring cities
architects project out of science fiction
dreams, but she illuminates them with different
voyages, visions…”
“Broceliande” by Marilyn Hacker, from Squares & Courtyards
In my city, we are always building something new. Along my avenue, four or five new developments are in various stages of construction. As I ride to work on the city bus, I watch them grow in stop motion, foundation to walls to brick facades. I am always struck by how empty they seem, how the brick looks too smooth and perfect, mazes of walls surrounding nothing inside.
I also watch the buildings slated for demolition, the ones that will be clear cut to make way for new condos. They also lay empty, their brick faded and crumbling, covered by crude graffiti. They were ignored. Then, suddenly, yellow stickers warning NO TRESSPASSING appear on the front doors. Days later, the buildings are gone. I never see them mid-demolition: opened wide, jagged bricks like crooked teeth. They simply disappear.
We believe we can construct our city as we want. We can excise abandoned buildings, cover empty lots with new ones. We can have modern amenities, pristine homes that no one has inhabited before. On unearthed foundations, we can construct our historyless lives. We can begin again.
In writing, new beginnings are impossible. Writers create upon the foundations of that which came before. We build on the successes of their predecessors and extend beyond. We construct our narratives and images on the forgotten and abandoned, begin something rooted in and strengthened by our shared history.
I like to think of poems as structures of language, conscious constructions that must abide by linguistic guidelines, much as buildings must abide by the laws of physics. As poets, we can build whatever we want. However, most poets are informed by the choices of poets who came before. We study line breaks and rhyme schemes from older poems, then break our lines differently or the same and tie words together in both new and old combinations. When crafting a new poem, we are referencing the thousands of years of poetic history. We build on that history, like a crooked old house with hundreds of rooms.
This is the city I want to live in. A city littered with storied homes, cared for and added on to, as families drift in and out of the structures’ lives. This is the literature I want to create. Images and narratives that are both individual and shared, common and unique. I want the lived in and the loved, the familiar repetitions of sound and silence.