A friend once texted me, asking how I understood the relationship between form and meaning in poetry. He later confessed that he had Googled this question. It was a timely prompt, however, as I had been thinking about writing something based on the language of art gallery labels for a while. His facetiousness gave me the start I needed.
The content, however, comes from an experience I often have when falling asleep. I am suddenly vaguely cognisant of the most profound insights that vanish as soon as I become aware of them. Some of these hypnagogic teases are so powerful, I am convinced that, if only I could remember them, my poetry, my life, the world would never be the same again. But I never do.
Form/Meaning
I had this insight once
that vanished whole,
but left a space of empty form
in my mental architecture,
the thing itself completely gone.
Straightway another insight came,
to find the thing by mapping out
the contours of the void it left:
forensic reconstruction
of the object of a theft.
And so I went to work
on pouring in the plaster
like Fiorelli in Pompeii,
creating the likeness of the dead
from the hollows where they lay.
Or those introverted solid forms
of sculptor Rachel Whiteread,
isolated and discrete
monuments to lonely absence
in poured blank concrete.
And what’s revealed is this:
some rudiments of form and rhyme,
tonal shifts and metric feet,
all lines in space and substanceless,
in negative, complete.