Observing how people act in museums can also lead to insights. At the tiny history museum in the California Gold Rush town of Columbia, I watched a group of school-aged girls and boys. In the manner typical for ten-year-olds, the children grouped themselves by gender. The girls laughed at a collection of old photographs showing rigidly posed families — heavily moustached fathers, sad-eyed mothers, and unsmiling children. The boys gathered in front of a collection of old weapons, whispering excitedly and pointing at the rusted flintlocks and grimy pistols.

Why do certain objects and experiences contain significance for some of us, but not for others? No one can adequately explain why. Except, perhaps, in poetry.

It appears self-evident that this was a glimpse into how different boys and girls are, no matter the attempts at social conditioning; however, what struck me most was how invisible the guns were to the girls and the photographs to the boys. The girls walked past the weapons display as if it were not there, while the boys hardly glanced at the old photographs. Here is a mystery that has occupied the best minds of the current and many past generations, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg. Why do certain objects and experiences contain significance for some of us, but not for others? No one can adequately explain why. Except, perhaps, in poetry.

The significance of certain objects over others reveals itself in the fact that people seldom walk through a museum in a proscribed way. Even if tethered to a recorded tour guide of the exhibition, one that states, “Now look in front of you for the entrance to the Ishtar Gate,” people tend to move about museums in a distinctly random manner. Readers often approach books of poetry in the same manner. Many of us read the first poem, flip a few pages, read the next three, and skip to the end, rather than reading the book from beginning to end. Unlike a work of prose, there is nothing about a book of poems that forces sequential reading, just as there is nothing about an exhibition at a museum that indicates only one path to viewing.

What the poet intended initially as subject matter may or may not have significance for an arbitrary reader, who might find a chronological path through the book that has nothing to do with the order of the poems. In a museum, images repeated in various works of art capture a visitor’s attention, but what exactly these images are is unique for every person. Neither the artist, the curator, the poet, nor the editor can predict or define this.

The very order of a museum or a book of poems seems to invite disobedience. A natural history room might be set up so that the proper way to move through it is chronological, from the ancient times to the modern days; someone will always start at the end, and end at the beginning. A poet may have spent hours carefully arranging the poems in a volume only to have readers ignore this order. Wandering through a museum or flipping through a book in this desultory way may destroy the relationships between objects or poems, but it allows possibilities for new, unexpected ones to emerge. Readers of poetry books discover their own themes, perhaps unconsciously, as they browse the table of contents, selecting a few titles that seem appealing. What the poet intended initially as subject matter may or may not have significance for an arbitrary reader, who might find a chronological path through the book that has nothing to do with the order of the poems. In a museum, images repeated in various works of art capture a visitor’s attention, but what exactly these images are is unique for every person. Neither the artist, the curator, the poet, nor the editor can predict or define this.

In The Life of Poetry^[2] (1949), Muriel Rukeyser states “exchange is creation. In poetry, the exchange is one of energy.” Energy flows from the poet, through the poem and to the reader. Rukeyser also points out the differences between art and poetry: “An image in a poem is not at all like an image in a painting,” because the poem is a process, and the reading of it exists as motion in time. However, objects in a museum are not static. Each one contains an undeniable, compressed energy. We feel this energy radiating from sculptures and paintings as surely as we hear it in music, or watch it in performance. The impact of this energy is its effect on the imagination. The stimulation comes, quite often, more from the juxtaposition of objects than from the objects themselves. In another vein, creativity arises as much as from what is excluded from a museum as from what is included.

“What excites the imagination may be found in any number of experiences (or lack of them),” states Hugo in his introduction to The Triggering Town. “Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words. When you are honest to your feelings, that triggering town chooses you.” In other words, there are altered universes all around us, places our imaginations can visit, places with “no keys in the doors,” to quote from Milosz’s “Ars Poetica?” These places are museums, large and small, waiting for appreciation, recognition, and discovery.