David W. Pritchard
“A ghost is wandering around Europe”
is how David Antin prefers to translate
“A specter is haunting all of Europe”
as we find it in the famous manifesto.
The ghost is of the same thing either way.
I would prefer to translate it as
the $900 million Warner Bros. owes
the author of a book about ghost hunters
if they can’t prove that ghosts are real.
They are. This transaction is a ghost
or has a ghost in it: two technical owners
of a single thing. Which is the truth
and which is the ghost. This is the problem
that cannot be solved by the poem. It points
at it as its outside, as in the Mall of America
every night where they lock the doors
they have to lock the doors at some point
which is the outside of the poem
that makes the poem.
This is the point. The point
is to change it.
David W. Pritchard is a poet and a scholar, but not a poet-scholar. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Ten Pages of Poetry (Dept. of Works in Public). Recent writings in verse and prose can be found in or are forthcoming from Paideuma, The Tiny, Blush Lit, jacket2, and elsewhere. David is the sole person culpable for Raw Materials, a semi-irregular experimental quasi-podcast and corresponding Substack newsletter of the same name. He lives in Holyoke.
