The Poetics of Space: Intimate Immensities

Is it the poetics of space? Or a poetics of place? In The Poetics of Space Bachelard explores the concept of space, the houses we grew up in, yes, and also the houses/homes we continue to “make” for ourselves everywhere we go. These spaces can be rooms with four walls, actual rooms. Or imaginary spaces, circles in the grass, daydreams. Our spaces are places we go to write. And “places” we go to write. It’s hard to say which spaces are more intimate and which are more immense. Or it’s easy to say: both.

Thanks to all the poets and artists who shared their intimate immensities with us. And even though we couldn’t accept everything submitted to this issue and had to make some tough decisions, we’re happy to publish this group of talented poets and artists.

That said, the issue had to be “organized” in some way, which, of course, is like gathering a manuscript up out of the street after the wind has pulled it sheet by sheet from your hands. In the end, the poems we selected had everything to do with intimate immensity and also with Bachelard’s “Dialectics of Outside and Inside:”

  • roughly a third of the poems seem to move toward or back to a particular space,
  • a third seem written from inside a particular place or moment, and
  • a third address a space or spaces looking back from a distance, either by accident or by choice.

Some poems, of course, touch on all three or a combination of these three types of “movement.”

 

We invite you to explore the spaces within places in this issue and all their intimate immensities. Enjoy!

 

Linda Malnack
Co-editor, Switched-on Gutenberg


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