n The Triggering Town^[1] (1979), Richard Hugo writes, “The initiating subject [for a poem] should trigger the imagination as well as the poem.” Hugo’s subject of choice is “a small town that has seen better days.” My “town” is a museum. Any museum will do, whether it contains art or dinosaur bones. Museums force us to slow down, and they are filled with images. They share these qualities with poetry.

I love museums. I love the idea of museums: places where objects are stored simply for us to look at. Moving slowly from display to display, looking at a painting, sculpture, installation or diorama from different angles, eventually reading the little card that accompanies the piece, is a form of walking meditation. As I move through rooms staged and lit for specific effects, I notice how a painting, surrounded by the white space of the wall, is like a poem, surrounded by the white space of the page. This observation, which I’ve made countless times, helps focus my mind, and invites creativity.

Auden wrote that poetry makes nothing happen. Neither do museums. Museums, like poems, are repositories, the results of forces that have acted upon them. When art confronts itself — for example, when the poet visits an art museum — things happen. When we look at a museum piece, our gaze has been anticipated; even so, our experience is still genuine, for our interpretations are always individual. In a similar way, when we read a poem, we feel it stimulate various parts of our brains. The effect on our imaginations is unpredictable, but we know for certain that although we may start this process with a poem or art object, we soon move away from this point into unfamiliar territory, where true creativity begins.

Museums, like poems, are repositories, the results of forces that have acted upon them. When art confronts itself — for example, when the poet visits an art museum — things happen.

Hugo’s concern with the problem of the familiar — he writes, “the stable set of knowns that the poem needs to anchor on is less stable at home than in the town you’ve just seen for the first time” — expands his idea that as a poet goes deeper into the process of writing, the subject of the poem begins to fade. Emotional investment in the subject weakens the feelings the writer has available to put into words; conversely, detachment from the subject gives the words of a poem more power. The ostensible subject of a poem is rarely its true theme – to discover this, the poet must keep moving. In a museum, filled with possible subjects for poetry, I find it a relatively easy task to find — and lose — those personal associations that interfere with writing.

Berliner Straßenszene, 1888
(Oil on wood, 22.1 x 13.4 cm)
BY Lesser Ury

Museums in specific towns and countries often explore the most painful, tragic episodes of their history. The majority of museums in the present-day Germany, for instance, display various aspects of World War II, as part of an effort to heal, recover or “rehabilitate” their collective identity and social consciousness. This is especially the case for museums in Berlin, the last German city that collapsed with Hitler’s death, and the city whose people had lived between a wall until 1989. For a poet, such sites of memory deliver revelations about the human spirit. The new wing of the Jewish Museum in the former East Berlin (opened on September 11, 2001) is designed to create the most unsettling experience possible. Hallways narrow into dark spaces. A set of stairs leads to a blank wall of concrete. Display cases hold battered suitcases, letters written in faded brown ink, articles of clothing, photographs, even pots and pans. The Garden of Exile is an outdoor space consisting of enormous pillars arranged in corridors; walking between these pillars, I soon became lost, unsure of how to get out, and separated from my family. The feelings of fear and vulnerability stayed with me for a long time.

After I left the Jewish Museum and the blur of images began to settle, the overriding impression I received was the human need to communicate. Not only did the museum show me something profound, the voices of the long-dead seemed to be murmuring to each other, and to me. Here was a place filled with triggers — multiple places to begin the search for a deeper meaning.

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.