But later, looking back, poets often realize that their bursts of creative inspiration were linked together under the surface by threads of continuity. They eventually arrange their poem-buildings in particular orders (streets), and into chapters (neighborhoods), and they discover that they all along were preparing a unified city. For me, this meant that when I compiled a decade’s worth of poems and divided them by theme, I realized I had accidentally written a book about architecture.
Just as bricks, beams, and buttresses are arranged in a certain order to make a building strong, lines, beats, and rhymes are what make metric verse “sticky”—like our favorite adolescent songs, they will stand solid in our heads for our whole lives. I once heard an elderly Alzheimer’s patient recite folk songs and classic poetry. In his mind were castles, I thought, structures of stone that stood strong long after memories of even his own family had faded away.
The boundaries of technology help us create new forms ecology-of-technology . We will continue to discover them
