At the Guggenheim a couple of years ago, I saw an exhibit that I can still see in my mind. It was a city, the size of a whole room, made up of plastic and concrete and metal. People standing in lonely windows, cabs driving on the streets. Broken lamplights and people holding hands. It was a real city, on the floor of a museum in Bilbao. When the artist was asked to explain what it was like to live in his city made of steel, an installation made of sharp corners and concave stories he replied – I don’t know. What is it like to live inside a poem?

It’s brought me to the thought that perhaps we are all living inside poems? These lyrical lines that rhyme (and sometimes don’t), are awkward and beautiful in their attempts at describing our lives. Sometimes they do so with romantic accuracy, pinning down our fears and our triumphs. Sometimes we find ourselves in the words we borrow from someone else. All these lines, strung together into the Greater prose that is this life,instinctively connecting us to one another. It all transcends barriers – the geographical ones we place between ourselves and the ones we set around ourselves. The fortress we build where we house our regrets and give shelter to our hopes and the things we hold dear. It all comes down to one question am I a poet, or a poem? (Brandon Wint)

Photo: The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, 2013. Fun fact: The Guggenheim was designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry and considered by many as a masterpiece of the twentieth century.