I stumbled on Big Other through a link Kristen provided. I’m so glad I did. This post, in particular, struck a chord. These are wonderful musings. You’ve managed to put into beautiful context–better than I have been able to–some of my own thoughts.

I often put memories and even physical objects into my poems in order to salvage them in some kind of psychic museum (despite knowing that time will erase even these; I try to fool myself into thinking I can somehow save them). I wanted to be an archaeologist before I decided to become a poet, and I think there is a connection between these fields. An archaeologist uncovers artifacts, which find their way into a museum collection. A writer too, excavates, draws out artifacts, linguistically, and puts them on display. I think writing, and putting into one’s writing certain people, places, and objects is an act against personal dissolution. It IS collecting (one of the reasons I think the title of your own book, The Complete Collection of People, Places, and Things, is so brilliant). Margaret Atwood has an essay called “Negotiating with the Dead,” in which she claims all writers are motivated by a concern with death–that writers are conversing with the dead and, simultaneously, writing against death. I think all these ideas are intertwined.

There is a quote by poet Marianne Boruch that seems apropos: “A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.” (The American Poetry Review, 2006) One could easily replace poem with story, novel, painting, I think.

For me, it is simultaneously satisfying and painful (such a strange paradox) to know that, like Benjamin with his Arcades project, we can never fully recreate a life, our world.

I also collected Topps and Donruss baseball cards in the 80s. I never even watched baseball. I just liked collecting. I didn’t even know who most of the players were. I liked sorting and organizing them and trading with my brother. I remember a Don Mattingly card he was particularly desperate to take off my hands.

That conference looks interesting; I think I’ll try to make it out to NJ.

By the way, there will be conference on collecting next month at Rutgers:

http://cca.rutgers.edu/events/public/spring10/collecting.html

After writing Forecast, I flailed around a bit until deciding that what I thought I’d finished wasn’t done, but only by 1/3. So I wrote two more books along similar thematic lines and called it a trilogy. Likewise, when composing poems or shorter works, I find myself unsatisfied by the thought of writing a single poem. Rather, I must be “working on a series.” It’s this extensibility I seem to be after, not wanting the song to really end.