I still remember reading when I was very young the poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns. It was printed in some anthology, and it scared me.
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door...
That was an early encounter with a poetry ghost. Ghosts scared but also fascinated me, as they do for most kids, and many adults. They also have interested some poets. I found a group of poems about ghosts at poets.org. I wrote a ghost poem that grew into a piece of flash fiction.
"The Poor Ghost" by Christina Georgina Rossetti is a poem that depicts a dialogue between a man and the ghost of his lover.
"The Haunted Oak" by Paul Laurence Dunbar has a tree that bears witness to and is haunted by the lynching of an innocent man
"Unbidden" by Rae Armantrout explores the idea of ghosts swarming and speaking as one, each leaving something undone.
Do you need to believe in ghosts to write about them? Emily Berry's ghost poem begins with this epigraph: "A statistician would say: of all the millions of ghost stories ever told, what percentage would have to be true for ghosts to exist? The answer is that only one story would have to be true."
Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts: "I almost think we're all of us Ghosts ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light."
But before you start your own ghost poem, consider that not all ghosts are spectral visions. Some are not even nouns. It can be a trace or suggestion of something: "The ghost of a smile played on her lips". The ghost can be a persistent, unsettling presence or memory in the mind: "His past mistakes still ghosted him". Someone living can be a shadow or semblance of something -"He's just a ghost of his former self" now diminished in health, strength, or spirit. "He doesn't have a ghost of a chance" means only a faint chance or possibility:
And our newest usage is as a verb where it typically means to suddenly cut off all communication with someone without warning or explanation. For example, if you're texting someone and they abruptly stop responding, they might be said to have "ghosted" you.
It's often used in the context of dating or friendships, but it can apply to any situation where someone unexpectedly disappears, like a ghost.
Our May issue will be full of ghosts in various forms and visions.
Rae Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947, and was part of the first generation of Language poets on the West Coast.
She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Wobble (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015.
She is a professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she has taught writing for almost twenty years.
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