Excavation Poetics: Writing Through Language as Ruin

As part of our Poetry Craft series, Giulia Ottavia Frattini discusses the practise of excavation poetics and how to write through language as ruin.

Your course talks about poetry beginning where language fractures. How can a poet start writing from gaps, silences, or fragments?

Poems often embody the fleeting with such a resonant attunement that leaves them porous, permeable to what passes through them. They notice presences that are silent and expose moments that are, in a way, always imperfect as part of a larger constellation. This makes them tremendously seductive.

Poetry unveils the variance of experience each time from a particular angle, tracing and inhabiting those gaps that surround, shape, challenge, and reorient our understanding. I like to think of it as a fracture in time and sense, and a fracture is always an opening: it stretches across the interstices between the said and the unsaid.

A poet may begin by cultivating their field of vision, experimenting with the subtle and the disregarded within fragments of the everyday. From such seeing, language loosens, certainties are dismantled, and meaning begins precisely where it seems to falter. I believe that great poets are, first and foremost, acute observers.

What does it mean to treat poetry as an archaeological act – unearthing what is buried or overlooked in language?

If we pay close attention to words, we realise that a term is rarely bound to a single meaning. Its resonance emerges in relation – when it stands beside other words, when it rubs up against context, when it enters into a small chain of sense-making. In archaeology, an unearthed object hardly ever speaks on its own; it gains significance through the traces around it, through the layers it rests within.

Poetry works much the same way. A single verbal shard can open onto unpredicted terrains, leading a writer toward foreign paths within their own practice; these can be extremely fertile. Writing becomes a sort of excavation, a quest through strata of language, memory, experience, association, etc. To treat poetry as an archaeological act is, I guess, to let instants speak about forces that might go unnoticed.

The concept of “ruin” is central to the course. How can poets use the idea of what has crumbled, decayed, or been lost to generate new work?

I see ruins as sites of potential: the remnants of a thought, a half-remembered flicker, a form that never settled into clarity, an indefinite pairing of sentences. They are the bits that cling to us from a certain temporality, into the now. Decay uncovers neglected textures, loss sharpens our sense of what once mattered. A ruin is a method – it offers an oblique mode of moving through time.

When poets turn toward what is partial, they might be less concerned with filling it out than with finding reorientation. Crumbles can act as fault lines where language shifts and meanings surface in slant light. They form part of a landscape where a poem can remould itself differently, out of what endure and refuses to be whole.

How can fragments, residue, or incomplete thoughts create meaning in a poem, even without full narrative or closure?

We inhabit a societal landscape governed by systems that not only promise definitive solutions or but also discipline us into desiring them. These systems tend to enforce clarity and efficiency, and elevate legibility as a form of value, often at the expense of nuance, opacity, dissonance, and multiplicity. Poetic form inherently resists this pressure.

I believe we all live amidst residues and unfinished thoughts, particularities that are always a kind of “anomaly”, which is what makes them beautiful. Rendering these in words is an invitation into a space where significance becomes malleable. A poem becomes a threshold through which something is set in motion and where it can be left unresolved. It is much more about the process than a plot. Incompleteness is in itself a mode of possibility and tension: a chance that meaning is still unfolding, just beyond the edges of the text.

Poets like Anne Carson, Etel Adnan, and Susan Howe work with layered, porous, or material forms. What can students learn from reading and experimenting with their techniques?

Reading such voices teaches us that poetic form is an active field of meaning-making rather than an aesthetic container for signification. Their work is never at rest; it constantly negotiates language and thought. As Anne Carson puts it: “… it’s really important to get somehow into the mind and make it move somewhere it has never moved before. That happens partly because the material is mysterious or unknown but mostly because of the way you push the material around from word to word in a sentence.”¹

All the authors I propose to read show how a poem can operate on multiple registers at once. Poetic language is unstable and unruly; it can break, fold, extend, interrupt, unsettle, reconfigure, among other things. Poetry enables. It dwells in what happens in the act of writing or reading, rather than in a message it may eventually leave behind.

Finally, what’s one practical prompt or exercise you’d suggest for writers who want to start exploring language as ruin in their own poetry?

I’d suggest returning to a poem you discarded – something that lingers in your archive as the ruin of a thought. Ask yourself why it vacillated, where it resisted continuation, or refused to take shape. Then begin from those very moments of failure and try to embed them in a new draft, to enter into dialogue with them. These “failures”, if we may call them that, hold their own significance. So instead of treating them as obstacles, consider them the raw materials of your practice. Move around the gaps, the cracks, the uncertainties, the flaws; let the poem collide and emerge from what seemed its own limit. It is an exercise in persistence.

Giulia is running her course Excavation Poetics: Language as Ruin Studio with us this Spring, starting on 23 February 2026. To find out more and book your place please visit this page.

Giulia Ottavia Frattini is a poet, writer, and independent researcher based in Berlin. Her practice interweaves writing, visual culture, and critical theory, with a focus on meaning-making processes. She experiments with exophonic writing and anti-narrative forms, focusing on the tension between perception and self-determination. Her work spans poetry publications, curatorial projects, public readings, and a range of contributions – including essays, interviews, and commissioned writing – to international platforms, often engaging with hybrid forms. In 2023, she was a Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. In 2025, she joined the Poetry School as a tutor and became a lecturer at HBK – Braunschweig University of Art. 

1. from “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson,” by Sam Anderson , New York Times Magazine, March 17, 2013 ↩︎