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A little piece of my heart always withers when someone I respect and admire talks about ghosts like they're a real thing. So last night, as Dorothea Lasky began delivering the very first entry in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry for Seattle Arts and Lectures, my heart fell a little bit. Lasky opened with a passage culminating in the phrase "when people tell me ghosts don't exist, I just get bored." I thought that perhaps we were in for some rough sailing, but Lasky recovered nicely as she continued her lecture, an eight-part investigation titled "On the Materiality of the Imagination." Lasky did recount some "true stories" of her encounters with ghosts, but she also used ghosts as a device, haunting the world with meaning. Orgasms, she explained, were like momentary ghostly possessions, haunting the body with an otherworldly feeling and a shudder, before fading into the ether.

Lasky scooped up examples everywhere, from poems by H.D., Emily Dickinson, Alice Notley, and D.H. Lawrence to The Shining, to hiphop. ("I've always loved Biggie," Lasky enthused in the post-reading Q&A.) She discussed color and sound. She talked about how people used to cover portraits of people in their homes because it was believed that even in inanimate objects, "the act of seeing is bi-directional." To expand on that idea, she said "the visual has viscera."

The point that Lasky was making was about "shared imagination," how a poet writes some words and a reader reads some words and the two consciousnesses meet in a zone outside of time and space. All the ghostly talk ascended to a smarter, grander point about immortality and ephemerality and the ways that you agree to meet an author's brain outside yourself, for a stroll outside your life. Lasky's lecture was one of those moments, when dozens of brains find some level of extra-contemporaneous agreement in wondering at the complexity and beauty of the world.