Ghost poems

If you read this blog via RSS or email, don’t miss the comment thread to yesterday’s poem about ghosts. Luisa Igloria and Dale Favier responded with some ghost poetry of their own, so I put out a call on Facebook and Google+ for more, and as a result we have a growing and varied collection of ghost poems. Feel free to add your own to the mix. If you’re a blogger yourself, you could make it your post of the day and duplicate your poem at your own site.

Thinking about the intersection between this world and the world of the dead really seems to put the imagination into overdrive. It occurs to me that ghost stories have a lot in common with the telling of dreams: they are one kind of narrative where surrealism is not only tolerated but actively welcomed by non-literary folks. For this reason, I think they are excellent Trojan horses for smuggling a bit more poetry into everyday life. Lyric poetry proper, though, can do something a straight narrative generally will not: make us pay close attention to the sound and flavor of our thoughts. What would ghosts be like? What could it mean to be in the world but not of it? And have we modern humans so cut ourselves off from the natural world now that we are closer to the realm of ghosts than to embodied reality?