JSTOR presents: Spectres, Traces, Phantoms, and Sparks: A Poetry Séance by Dorothea Lasky

• Books & Literature

In this combination lecture/reading/séance, we will explore the idea of the unseen, the imperceptible and the ghostly in poetry.

By looking at the ghosts that haunt poems by Wallace Stevens, Bhanu Kapil, Anne Sexton, and others, we will consider imagination as a physical space that one shares with other people in and through poetry. In a poem 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 (to other ones).

A belief in a material imagination is important to me as a poet, because I want to not just recreate this one through poetry. I want a never-ending, generative universe that poetry can help create.