Todd (Ryan) Boss (born December 6, 1968) is an American poet, installation artist, and film producer.
He has published several notable collections of poetry, besides many contributions to literary journals, and has also produced a large body of poetry intended for musical setting, most frequently in collaboration with the composer Jake Runestad.
Boss’s pared-down, idea-driven poems are propelled by internal rhyme and balance clarity with a nuanced attention to sound. “I think of poems as pieces of music, or a work of architecture,” he told the Utne Reader in 2009. “The poem is a space that you’re inviting someone into for a time. I think a lot about how to build it, how they feel when they’re there, and how they will exit.”
Tell us more about this poem and how it relates to museums and churches. “My favorite services are Taize services, in which no one preaches or interprets. The goal, achieved simply through song and silence, preferably by candlelight, is to create an environment for the encounter with God.”
IT IS ENOUGH TO ENTER
Todd Boss
the templar
halls of museums, for
example, or
the chambers of churches,
and admire
no more than the beauty
there, or
remember the graveness
of stone, of
whatever. You don’t
have to do any
better. You don’t have to
understand
the liturgy or know history
to feel holy
in a gallery or presbytery.
It is enough
to have come just so far.
You need
not be opened any more
than does
a door, standing ajar.
=============
NOCTURNE
Todd Boss
We tend
to sleep better
when the clock
is wound
than we do
when it’s all
wound down.
I don’t know
why we settle
to the sound.
Somehow
the regular
click and chime
of passing time,
like water, turns
a water wheel
that turns a gear
that turns a stone
that turns upon
another stone
and fine
and finer in between
our dreams like grain
are ground.