A Marina poet teams with an East Coast photographer to craft a ‘ghost residency,’ leading to a book.

Paul Manship’s Starfield is a bit like Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House, a place of artistic energy that supposedly stays in houses where poets, or – as in the case of Manship – the pioneers of American art deco sculptors used to reside.

Gloucester, on Cape Ann in Massachusetts, is not unlike Monterey County, with its fishing industry and cold waters. But it did not have Pacific Grove poet Marc Zegans.

A few years ago, Zegans was invited to trade coasts and take advantage of a residency program at Starfield in Gloucester, but the pandemic hit and he never made the trip. That led him to an idea of creating a virtual residency – a “ghost residency.” He proposed the project and the Manship Artists Residency accepted.

“It has been a container for creative energy for so many generations,” Zegans says about Starfield.

Later in life, being done with New York, Manship made Gloucester his home. He was not the only artist on Cape Ann, but certainly the most famous. Manship (1885-1966) didn’t die there so a common ghost was out of the question, but der geist, the spirit, the vibe, the legacy perhaps, could be there.

Looking for a kindred spirit, Zegans found a local photographer who lived down the street from Starfield, Tsar Fedorsky. The poet immediately reacted to her “ghostly, ephemeral” photos. He decided to write a photographic essay that can be seen as a visual poem.

“I viewed what we were doing together as an exercise in visual poetry,” he adds. “I wanted to ask the viewer, how could you imagine this project of yourself being a part of it, and your own relationship to the ephemeral?”

Making a place he has never been the center of his poetic imagination, and touching it only with the photographer’s unseen presence, the poet strives to think about using words in a new way. The narrator is not there, yet he can still tell the story of the space and make you see “rumpled sheets, an open book; a door previously ajar,” to quote from the book.

The book was released in a limited but luxurious edition. Zegans traveled to Gloucester only after the publication and toured “quiet streets, hearing in these empty winter corridors echoes of voices that seemed to rise from the past, conversations that I imagined would continue to eternity.”

Ghost Book with photographs by Tsar Fedorsky and text by Marc Zegans, published in a limited edition, is available for $250 at tsarphoto.com/ghost-residency.