'Structure shapes and re-shapes itself'

In this uncertain moment, we are constantly looking for structures that ground us and make us feel secure. Planning feels odd, arbitrary, but we know we need to do it (even if we end up having to cancel that trip after all!). Poems can feel ethereal, weightless, groundless even - but some poems try to do the opposite: to assert themselves as foundations for the way we think about life and the way we live.

The blog post '9 Poems about Architecture' takes this idea even further, so that the structures of the everyday world play with the structures of the poems themselves. In Rema Mohan's 'A Work in Progress' we're not sure whether the structure that 'shapes and re-shapes itself' is the building work the poem describes, or the poem that is being built through its discussion of this same act of construction. Meanwhile, some of the other poems on the page are laid out like foundation stones, to evoke the act of building - and the hope that goes into constructing both building and poem.

J. D. Haigh responded to these poems in the present moment by thinking of other structures that have come to define and rule our lives - but which, nowadays, might be losing their power: diaries. Is there any use in filling a diary when not much is going on, and when the future is uncertain? But if we start to lose such structures, and start to lose our faith in them, what other structures might start crumbling around us?