I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence. The unsaid for me, exerts great power … the power of ruins. ¹ 

—Louise Glück 

Louise Glück argues that poems like ruins “inevita­bly allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: 2 another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied.” The ruin of the Parthenon, that testimony to grace and power—and surely a marvel when all the stones were in place—haunts in just this way. Our imaginations must fill in the missing pieces, reconstruct the whole building with only the ruins as a guide. Through the use of white space, poetry can use ruins to create meaning through implication, compression, and juxtaposi­tion. Such meaning is even more powerful for having been created out of mystery. 

Poems don’t have to be full of literal or two-dimensional white space to be full of ruins. A poet can move three dimen­sionally between the lines and words on the page, entering a kind of borderland realm and tapping into the power of ruins. There are two different roads to this borderland realm—two ways to write a “ruins poem.” The first road is the metaphor­ical use of white space where the poet leaves gaps of explana­tion that the reader’s imagination and intuition must fill. The second road is an exploration of the “shadow” poem.

To clarify our terms, consider the difference between two- and three-dimensional white space. Two-dimensional white space in poetry is like what visual artists call negative space. Think of the classical optical illusion of the vase versus the face. Depending on your focus, you see either a white vase bordered by black space, or two black face profiles bordered by white space. Artists learn that this borderland of nega­tive space has a dynamic presence vital to composition that shapes the subject and directs the eye across the canvas. What do you see first? Second? Third? 

Imagine looking at a two-dimensional plan of the Parthenon with its crumbling walls and arches. Where the missing pieces once stood, is negative or white space. From the remaining structure, you can infer the missing pieces, take a pencil, and fill in those pillars or walls. This is a two-di­mensional view of white space. Poets typically use the white space between words in this way, by leaving spaces between words, lines, and stanzas. Two-dimensional white space asks the reader to move through the poem at different paces, to consider with heightened awareness the words surrounded by the space. 

To understand how poets can use white space in a three-di­mensional way, let’s lift the picture from the flat page to the real world. Imagine you are in Rome walking around the Parthenon in all its ruined three-dimensional glory. As you walk among the crumbling walls and arches, the white or negative space flows around them. It also flows outward, touching whatever is near—a flower, a fence, other people. The ruins and everything near are connected through the border and realm of three-dimensional negative or white space. A poet can use this imaginative correspondence meta­phorically to create a ruins poem.

You can see how Brenda Hillman directs this flow of three-dimensional space. Her poem “A Feeling Right Before the Feeling” establishes in the title that something is missing: we are being pointed at the feeling like the pillar points to the roof, but we must fill in that roof for ourselves. The poem continues full of indicators and mystery: 

a life, the dazzler, the dark, 

the singing dust, it turned

when you turned, it orpheus-knew

what you forgot when you took the bowl 

of burning time across the room— 3

Hillman tells the reader that the singing dust of a life knows what you forgot, but you do not. The ruins let us know that life both dazzles and is dark, that it knows the way Orpheus, who watched his beloved turn back to the underworld, knows what you forgot. And in these lines full of ruins, we are given the privilege of figuring it out too.

Opening doors with ruins is a powerful poetic tool. Consider a few lines from Arthur Sze’s poem “Sight Lines.” He writes:

salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—

the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already 

dwindled before spring— 4

Is he making a causal connection: this rise caused this dwindling? Is it an associative connection?: X is to Y as A is to B? Is he asking the reader to hold the two together, i.e., destruction is happening both low and high? So many possi­bilities in this associative leap. So much hidden power in the ruins.

Road One

One way to make a ruins poem is to randomly pile lines together and see what happens. That’s what Jericho Brown did for his new form, the duplex. He printed out every line he’d written from 2005–2018, cut them up, and laid them all over the house. Then using a syllable count as his guide, he started picking up lines and leaning them against each other.

Brown has a key point about how ruins make poems pow­erful:

I should remind everyone who knows me that I do not believe that poems are made of our beliefs. Instead, I believe poems lead us to and tell us what we reallybelieve. I think poems—working with language and seeing where it may lead us, seeing what kinds of choices we make when we have to find a rhyme or a syllable—tell us things about our individual and collective subconscious minds. 5

So, Brown let the music and his unconscious make the choic­es. The randomization and puzzle making aspect of the pro­cess let his hind brain wake up and do the work, making fan­tastical leaps our thinking brain doesn’t. As he says, “The ear­liest drafts of the duplex were composed of couplets formed simply because the juxtaposition of two lines woke me up.” 6

Debby Bacharach has a very similar process to create a poem made of ruins although she uses search/find on the computer instead of wandering around scraps of paper. 

Here is Debby’s process.

1. Freewrite.

2. Let the notebooks cool off (sometimes for years), then reread with a highlighter to find the gold in the dross. 

3. Go back through those culled journals and type the highlighted lines or images into a file called “Notes from Journals.” 

4. Search the file.

Debby has a big file now, about 160 pages, a secret stash of poetic building blocks. Maybe she’s writing a poem where the word “cake” shows up. So, she does a search/find in the notes file for the word “cake.” She moves all those lines into the new poem to see if something surprising happens. 

Or she might alphabetize the file and see what happens with anaphora. When she searched with the words “at the” almost 900 words popped up. Suddenly, she has

At the zoo the springboks graze by the hippo pool. 

At the peace concert the old hippies and dead heads look washed out. 

At the basketball hall of fame, I let my lover tame me. 

Perhaps there’s a relationship between the zoo and the peace concerts, a powerful leap that she would not have found without this process.

Road Two

To explore our second road to the ruins poem, let’s return to the Parthenon. On your walk, to get out of the hot sun, you can move into the shadows lurking behind the pillars and half walls. The dynamic, lurking presence of white space is a borderland the poet can enter to discover a hidden shadow poem, Gluck’s “larger contexts.” From a Jungian or Depth Psychology perspective, the white space poem could be seen as the shadow voice of the original “finished” poem rising out of the unconscious part of the psyche. “Shadow” simply refers to the unknown, not necessarily the negative or repressed. New ideas, images, poems, and works of art all rise from the unconscious. This is the repository of the not-yet-said because it is not-yet-known. Because the psyche speaks in the language of images, the shadow holds powerful and original images—think of dreams. As human consciousness evolved, we recognized the image of a tree long before we developed language that cre­ated the word for tree. What emerges from the shadow is transrational. The raw shadow voice leaps, twirls, back­tracks, and plung­es—all extraordi­narily useful antics for a poet trying to make a poem more dynamic.

How does a poet enter the white space border­land to court the dynamic shadow voice? First, take the poem-in-process and add an extra space between each line. Read the first line, close your eyes, and try to hear the shadow voice speaking in the white space between the lines. Scribble what comes, unedited, unfiltered. Don’t be surprised if it takes time to sink into this process. Some white spaces in a poem will have more to say than others. Sometimes the shadow voice will erupt midline. 

After working this way through the entire poem-in-process, the poet will find the shadow poem voice has sung in dynam­ic chaos. In some places it may amplify the existing lines, in others contradict or oppose. It may become a dialectic, counterpoint, chord change. The poet can use this material to improve the original poem or begin a new poem. We experi­mented with this method with startling results. 

Here is an example from Debby. The original poem lines are in Roman type. 

I could do this. I could take 

all the colors and mix them with my fists.

These are the shadow lines where Debby listened to the voice in the white space, writing in italics what she heard between the lines.

I could do this. 

Or I could not because I am afraid I don’t really exist unless I am in pain I could take I am afraid to reach out my hand to the daisy in the field the dandelion in the sidewalk crack. You’ve seen me. You know what I am weak, alone, unwept

all the colors and mix them with my fists.

I am a fist. 7

This is how Debby crafted the new and old material into these final lines for her poem “My Inner Punk Rock Skate­boarder Stands in Front of Rothko”::

In the crack

I exist. You’ve seen me.

I am a fist.7

Debby found the new version more powerful, more surpris­ing, more full of ruins that created space for the reader to engage.

Here is an example of the same process from Dia Calhoun’s poem: 

The Once and Future Story Teller

A few original lines:

Five and fed by sunlight

I slept in summer grass, boneless

never feeling the hard ground

never knowing myself animal

dreaming above.

Tonight a memory mattress

won’t let me forget aching bones.

Here are raw excerpts from the voice in the white space—the italics.

I slept in summer grass, offering to the sun, boneless 

boneless is painless, marrow soft

won’t let me forget aching bones. 

Below me a thousand mattresses of a thousand nights—

let’s see Scheherazade make a story of this one—

moonlight fills my cratered face. 

waning light, I am relieved of the memories of the sun.

Here are two stanzas from the final version of the poem, incorporating the shadow lines:

When I was five and a tale of sunlight

I slept in summer grass, boneless,

mouth strawberry blurred.

I never felt the hard ground

never knew myself animal

scribbled on a blowing page.

Now I am old and a spell of midnight

a thousand nights on a thousand mattresses

don’t quiet the fire in the bones. 

I abandon old tales too small to keep me alive now

like Scheherazade ripened

into an old princess who always has to pee,

relieved of the narratives of the sun. 8

....

A ruins poem using the three-dimensional dynamic pres­ence of the white space asks for trust from both the reader and the writer. The poet is trusting readers to fill in the gaps with their own imaginations. And without question, it takes experimentation for the poet to figure out what can be left out successfully and what will make the whole poem collapse. To write the poem that lurks in the shadows also requires the poet to trust herself and her unconscious. 

By taking these two roads to create the ruins poem, the techniques of working with three-dimensional space white space metaphorically and as a repository for the shadow poem, the poet may create a new Parthenon. This will have its own towers and arches that point the reader to a mystery never seen before. Considered this way, perhaps the ruins of Stonehenge would be a more fitting metaphor. Built to be a pointer to the borderland realm of the stars, Stonehenge points us to an unknown elsewhere. The same is true of the best poetry. The new ruins poem the poet has created will then have its own mysterious white space to explore. Imagine writing a series of three-dimensional white space poems, each jumping off from the white space in the one before … and the poet is off to find the voice singing in the ruins.  

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake and Tremor and After I Stop Lying. She has been published in Vallum, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Southampton Review among many other journals. She is an editor, teacher, and tutor in Seattle. DeborahBacharach.com.

Dia Calhoun is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm. She won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Her poems have been published in The EcoTheo Review; MORIA Literary Magazine; and And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine. diacalhoun.com.

Notes

1. Louise Glück. Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1994), p. 73.

2. Ibid.

3. Brenda Hillman. “A Feeling Right Before the Feeling,” PoetryNow, Poetry Foundation, 2018. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147989/a-feeling-right-before-the-feeling

4. Arthur Sze. “Sight Lines.” In Sight Lines (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2019), 53.

p. 

5. Jericho Brown, “From the Archive: Pulitzer Prize Winner Jericho Brown’s ‘Invention,’” In Poetry Foundation, 15 May, 2020 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2020/05/invention

6. Ibid.

7. Deborah Bacharach. “My Inner Punk Rock Skateboarder Stands in Front of Rothko,” The 2River View, 2021. https://www.2river.org/2R­View/261/poems/bacharach.html

8. Dia Calhoun. “The Once and Future Storyteller,” MORIA Literary Magazine, 5 December, 2022. “The Once and Future Storyteller” by Dia Calhoun — MORIA (moriaonline.com)