Tags: writing of art, imagery, metaphor, art as poet
This is a really nice, incoherent but somehow still cohesive piece. Note that “ars poetica” is usually used to refer to a poem that explains the “art of poetry” or meditates on poetry in some way. There are a number of famous examples at the aforementioned Poetry Foundation link.
Diary Entry #28: Ars Poetica
Diannely Antigua
I start where I am most afraid: an addiction to beauty
is a place to keep a loss. My father liked to sing love songs, his lips
elongating each vowel, his tongue breaking the center
of everything, and he—so tender to the sound it birthed.
I’m listening to jazz in the park again, crying
in rooms that don’t belong to me. It’s true—
the wrong music can be damaging and every photograph
is an elegy. I practice posing in bathroom stalls to feel
effortless. All flowers want to be looked at, and chasing the moon
is a chronic condition. How can I translate where my finger
lands into language? In conversation, I drop a little French
like a baby out the window. On TV, anyone can be dead
and look like art. A long life is avant-garde—I place mine
on the open shelf, on the edge.
The way I read this poem, Antigua starts out as if to tell us how she begins to write poetry: she starts where she is most afraid, and allows a poem to develop around that. In this case, she is considering an addiction to beauty as a place to keep loss. Each progressive sentence in the poem describes something beautiful, but hidden behind is some implicit story of loss: a lost father referred to in the past tense (“liked”), some unnamed loss that causes crying, photographs as elegies because they hold people or things that are gone (literally or effectively), flowers which must soon wilt despite their beauty, a baby out of a window, and so on. Towards the end of the poem Antigua transitions to considering how beauty and loss ought to go together and relate to poetry, asking questions that more or less ask how to express loss, beauty in words, and how loss and death can indeed be art when in real life (not TV). We end with an answer of sorts, declaring life avant-garde (experimental, radical) and resolving to be vulnerable, sit on edge. On a similar note to Jim Moore’s “Not to Know How to Live”, Antigua puts an emphasis on writing largely being about the experiencing first and foremost, implying that the writing follows. I think the way this hodgepodge bunch of objects are weirdly stitched together, each a strong image, does a quite nice job depicting the writing process and all that goes behind it and comes with it.