Hello.
I guess I wanted in some ways echo Matthew's words
and just give my thanks so much to you, Matthew.
And to Charlie, and Barb, and Ellen, and Heidi,
and Joshua for allowing me to be a part of this series.
It's been such a great gift to see poetry in a new way
and think about prose.
And so, I'm very excited to be here tonight.
I arranged things around a theme,
in that I have a lecture that's about the imagination.
But it's really also about ghosts.
So I thought I would read a few sections from that lecture,
and then we do some ghost poems from a new book
that I'm not sure is here tonight, but this one is.
I can sell it to you for a high price
if it is the only one here.
I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
And so, yeah.
So I will I'll start by just reading the first two
sections of this lecture.
And it's called "A Belief in Ghosts, Poetry, and the Shared
Imagination".
And it starts with a quotation from the great band, Hall
and Oates, from a song I just learned.
I mean, I knew in the past, but it's called Sara Smile.
Sara smile?
Yeah.
OK.
And it goes like this.
Baby hair with a woman's eyes.
I can feel you watching in the night.
All alone with me and we're waiting for the sunlight.
When I feel cold, you warm me.
And when I feel I can't go on, you come and hold me.
It's you and me forever.
One.
The materiality of the imagination.
Let's start first with a question.
What do you think about the imagination?
Is it a place that you go in your mind
to create new ideas freely?
Is it a place you fear?
Is it both?
People often talk of the imagination
as if it is one thing for everyone,
a place without context, a specific singular landscape
that we all go to on our own.
This kind of talk sometimes makes
people feel that if they don't have immediate access
to this single place, they can't engage
in imaginative thinking which disempowers
infinite possible new ways of seeing the world.
Everyone has their own imaginative landscapes
populated with very particular experiences.
And when people open the door and let us into those places
through poetry, other forms of art, and other new invention,
it helps each of us connect with our own imaginations.
It also helps us see the doors that
connect all of our imaginations together because the shared
imagination is both specific and universal, real and unreal,
profane and holy, a place of both rest and unrest that we
can go to and share with others when we make new things.
The shared imagination engages fully with the material world.
That's the other trick to it.
The imagination is a physical space
that one shares with other people in and through poetry.
And upon, we make a haunted land to mimic this haunted one
and we populate this land with physical reality
to connect this world to the next and to other ones.
When we read poems, what is important about reading them
is what we create within the brains of others.
This is what makes the possibility of a world
past this one possible.
A belief in a material shared imagination
is important to me as a poet because I
want not just to recreate this one through poetry.
I want a never ending generative universe
that poetry can help create.
One of my favorite poems by Alice Notley goes like this.
All my life since I was 10, I've been waiting to be in this hell
here with you.
All I've ever wanted and still do.
When I first heard the poem, it was because my friend Laura
Solomon had put it on a mixed CD she made for me from Paris when
I was living in Boston in 2005.
She put it right before a song by Amadou and Mariam
called Senegal Fast Food so that when
I listened to the whole CD, the Notley
poem was like an introduction to the song.
Which, not knowing French, seemed to me
to be about a late night eating fast food in Senegal.
But upon reading the translation of the lyrics to the song,
I later learned was about falling in love
and getting married in a rush, asking the question over
and over what time is it in paradise.
Rushing into the question of timelessness.
In my mind when I heard Notley reading the poem in the 1987
recording, I saw her at the St. Mark's Poetry Project
reading it to a room full of people,
telling them all I have waited to be here with you,
this chamber of poets and singers.
This hell that now I am a part of forever.
And by the way, it is a hell after all.
All this gossip and dark living.
I think I saw her in this place because
in a recording of my favorite poem
by her late husband, Ted Bergen, called Redshift,
he is reading this poem in the Poetry Project.
In my mind, the two conflate timelessly almost
at the same reading.
But later, I learned, too, that Notley
was reading her poem "All My Life"
in a real city called Buffalo, a place very charged
for me with emotions.
But that is, for many people, its own kind of hell.
Much of my belief in a shared material imagination
has to do with my belief in ghosts and a hope in horror
that they really do exist.
Even though I know what Notley speaks her poem whenever
she does to a room full of poets telling them
that she has waited to be with them
and now she is reading her poem at a real poetry reading,
I think she is also telling them here
I am in the space of the imagination where you are too.
Poems are special because they make a space, a real space,
where we all can go.
This place is a city called the imagination.
It is whatever you want it to be.
Half hell, half dream world, half paradise, half light
and ashes.
But poems are the special things that make it real forever.
Let me ask you another question.
Have you ever been there?
Two.
A belief in ghosts.
My whole life, I have had an inkling
that there were things like ghosts
and that maybe some people were able to actually see them.
But up until a few summers ago, I
had never actually seen a ghost.
For two summers, I slept in a haunted house
while teaching poetry through a writing program.
The teachers and I had all sorts of encounters
with the spirits in the house.
But for me, seeing the ghost during my first summer
there was the most important event.
Nothing other than seeing a ghost
has been as instrumental in my thinking
about the materiality of the shared imagination
and its importance in poetry.
The house had a long history of ghosts.
Legend has it that a girl's shoe was found in the wall.
A guard had quit years ago after so many sightings
of a tiny girl screaming for help that he
could no longer bear it.
Well, I stayed in the house with other teachers and friends.
We all heard children running through the ceiling
of the abandoned rooms upstairs.
Screams and voices.
Computers charged for no reason.
Locked windows that blew open.
Hidden pills, broken cabinets, and misplaced necklaces.
One teacher channeled an angry spirit in her writing
who simply stated, I am stuck here.
All of these experiences are things
that could be explained away.
But with several people experiencing them,
we started to talk about them freely.
While some visiting artists came to stay
at the house for a few days when summer,
we shared the stories with them to.
Most people I choose to tell about my belief in ghosts
are believers, or at the very least susceptible to the idea.
I am careful not to tell people who
are going to laugh it off or call me crazy.
As a poet, I have learned to be OK with what my imagination
might bring to me.
When people call other people crazy, I don't get mad.
I get bored.
When people tell me ghosts don't exist, I just get bored.
Laura Kelly Leuter, a famed devil hunter
who has devoted her life to looking
for the physical evidence of a being lovingly
called the Jersey Devil has written of non-believers
and her plight.
Until someone proves that there isn't something out there,
I will continue to believe that there is.
And I will also continue my efforts
to find proof that the Jersey Devil does in fact exist.
So there.
When these visitors were at the house, a few of us
told them about the ghost.
It felt natural enough.
I didn't think so much to censor myself because the ghosts just
seemed real.
I have long believed and longed to believe
what Pablo Picasso told me.
Everything you can imagine is real.
One night, a teacher and I arrived home late from dinner.
We heard someone or something calling to us
from the fruit garden right outside the house.
I thought I had heard, "Dottie, come here."
We got very scared and ran in the house,
clutching our fashion-forward neon leather
purses to our chests.
We talked each other into going back and seeing who was there.
"Who is there?
Who is there?"
My friend shrieked.
We heard, "It is Adeline."
Adeline was an old owner of the house.
We walked into the garden with shaky knees,
only to find not the apparition of Adeline, but the visiting
artists, laughing at us.
I didn't find it funny.
One of the visitors, let's call him demon from now on,
proceeded to tell me I needed to see a psychiatrist.
After about two minutes, I realized
I wasn't going to be able to control
my anger in any good way.
So I went inside, happy to be in the arms of the real ghosts
in my room, not among the placid thoughts of living demons.
Samuel Johnson has said of ghosts, "It is wonderful
that 5,000 years have now elapsed
since the creation of the world.
And still it is undecided whether or not
there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person
appearing after death.
All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.
All arguments, logical and steeped
in what we know of science can easily
refute any belief in ghosts.
The most salient argument that ghosts believers
have is that they have, quote unquote, "Seen one."
And the imaginative space of a being having seen something,
let alone a dead spirit is not something
that we ever fully believe in.
But why not?
As a poet, I think a lot about belief,
and in the belief of what my mind might bring to me.
There are a lot of things that enter my mind that I choose
to translate into language.
All poems contain images, and these images
have been in the poet's brain.
And hang in the balance, always to be given to the reader
upon reading.
And in a poem, images have weight,
so that you cannot help but believe in them.
Emily Dickinson has set of beliefs.
On the subjects of which we know nothing,
we both believe and disbelieve 100 times an hour,
which keeps believing nimble.
The thing about ghosts is that once they
have entered your imaginative space,
there is no way not to believe in them.
As I mentioned, I once actually saw a ghost.
And I'll let you read the rest when the book is ready.
And I thought I would just share a few poems about ghosts,
very creatively titled.
The First one is called The Ghost.
It's not the same ghost.
That away?
The Ghost.
I saw him, his body, a very pale sea, almost green,
soaring above me in a different sphere with gold wings.
He had a blissful expression, one maybe he never had.
Certainly, he was always smiling somewhere.
When he died, I had just gotten betrayed
by a friend I thought was mine.
I forgave him, was more just said,
you live through any of it.
But what is the red shoulder we long to see?
I thought that I too would reach a great canyon,
my arms and legs blissed out.
Instead, I blossomed inside.
Oh, I loved his wife and children,
but they were still here with me.
When my father died, he went straight up to heaven.
When the ghost died, he stayed with us for a while.
I forgot to mention that the wings were gold and green
and the winds were heavy.
They held his body afloat in air as if in the ocean.
I forgot to say that when it was summer,
I too measured the red bell heads.
I said, the hell with it, all of it heavy.
Heavy air, will you hold me, suspended in the ocean of time,
where I will never see you again?
My skin, gold and green.
Sweet King, You left us, I know it.
Dark is dark, The darkness, darnit.
It surrounds with heavy air, arms and legs suspended,
the head.
And this next poem is called, "The Ghost."
Again, I don't know where I come up with these titles.
It just, it's a very hard process.
And Sexton's ghost just said, "I'm watching you,"
then sent me to her book of beasts.
What is a ghost?
A light peppery air being or a solid jelly thing?
The book.
I've died before but no one believed me.
And I came back here to haunt my beloved, then breathing.
And we washed in words, now dead again.
Now, back again, I am no longer jelly.
I'm water, a peachy lilac color, both born into blue.
For someone or something could be watching.
Some are watching as I write this.
The ghostly comediennes I share this speech.
Or you know that hum that goes and flows,
that's ghosts, who will be reborn eventually.
The trick is to make friends with all of them.
The trick is to let the darkness out into the moonscape,
and funnel the light into one strong song.
Only I can hear the sounds of my ancestors, but you can too.
What is a ghost?
A ghost is a mountain.
It's green, it's frightful, it's written in Latin.
But not the kind we read anymore.
What is a ghost?
It's a flower, big and weeping with purple colors.
A weeping world not empty.
What is a ghost?
It is my father.
It is my dog, it is a dream.
I dream of people.
Do they or do they not exist?
If you think this world exists, then I think you do too.
If I think you are breathing now,
then I promise the ghost breathe down upon your neck.
What is a life if it's longing then fuck it.
Sister, take me back to the beach.
Let's watch the sunset and then the moon.
If it's only this, then put on my mask
and send me wheeling down the halls.
I'll spend the rest of the days talking only to the children.
If children are ghosts, then put the capes upon them
and paint their eyes with terracotta.
Then make them cakes all day long.
Then tie the brightly colored streamers.
If babies are ghosts, then have many of them,
then make the new again, if you were a ghost,
then let me kiss you and feel your faintest undertone.
If spring is ghostly, then take me in it.
Then leave me in the fields until I'm
eaten by bees and breads until I can come here again,
come here clean, again we all me down the halls.
I'm old, I'm old.
Give mercy to my sisters the bees.
But not to me.
I'm not old.
I'm young, always young.
Oh, youth, won't you go already?
Same drone from here to never ending, bathing spirits
submerged in blue light.
Acid lake, all sinking and hot pink
outlines, no, behold the wooden lake.
I'll sink in again.
Thank you very much.