“A Poem is a Speculative Ceremony, a Strange Choreography,” Stella Corso

Summer 2026

To mention a turn of phrase indicates that something has been said in an original way, without the trappings of ordinary speech or in the ready-made style of cliché. Just as children take pleasure in turning over rocks to see what might be hiding underneath, a poet’s work is to flip, rotate, and spin words, polishing them with our mind’s tongue. The necessity of treating words as ceremonial objects, as well as placing objects inside the poem so that they may be fondled or made strange by their new environment, becomes increasingly important in the digital age, which seeks to flatten the image into a lazy copy and thus threatens to flatten our imaginations and haptic sense of space. Drawing wisdom from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, this essay inspects the thickness of the world in relation to the intimate room of a poem and traces utterances of ceremony and choreography through the work of several modernist and contemporary poets.