Introduction
I first set out to compile this anthology with but two poems, Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You”, and Mark Leidner’s “Having “Having a Coke with You” with You”, and a strong feeling of love for people and poetry. I knew I wanted to write some of my own poetry following from these two wonderful pieces in the character of my own experiences, and wasn’t sure how I was to go about finding several other similar poems that addressed the question of how we experience the experiencing of art with others.
In lieu of knowing where to look, I penned out a poem of my own about my experience sharing poetry, including the duo of aforementioned poems, with the first person I’d ever truly loved. It’s called “Having “Having “Having a Coke with You” with You” with You” (I know, only so many more such poems can be written before the title becomes intractable!) and is included in this anthology as one of my own attempts to process people and art I am awfully attached to. The subject of this poem, Rachel, is in a way where all of this started–without the warm love and ensuing heartbreak she gifted me, I’m not sure when, if ever, I would have been emotionally vulnerable enough to dive headfirst into poetry, browsing poems upon poems on Instagram and sharing the ones that nicked me with friends, the ones that sliced me clean open with her.
It should come as no surprise then, that in the spirit of Amy Schmidt’s “Abundance”, soon after writing “Having “Having “Having a Coke with You” with You” with You” I began flipping through all of the poems I’d shared and saved over the past year and realized that everything I needed to compose this anthology, I already had. Moreover, that this attachment to the idea of sharing art and trying to reflect upon how we come to love both art in itself as well as the people beside it had a basis, albeit largely subconscious, in art I’d experienced before. I view this as one of art’s strongest suits: the ability to change how we look at things, even and especially if it does so rather subconsciously. I think this is true not just of art, but really anything we love, definitely including people. As Rhiannon McGavin put it, I am wearing one of your socks–of course I love you. I touch upon this theme to some extent in “A Sonnet to Structure” and “a plague upon my brain” and it is evident in many poems stemming from other well-known works, including the reverberations of the striking final line of Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” in later poets’ works and the presence of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in Brian Patten’s “A Blade of Grass”. An influence in choosing this topic was actually present a few years ago in the 4-book series The Hyperion Cantos in which Dan Simmons pulls inspiration from myriad art sources including poet John Keats’ epic “Hyperion” and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
It seems that generally, in order to experience significance in the act of sharing art with others, we must be able to individually experience significance in art too. What generates the impulse to share art with others otherwise? As such, I’ve loosely divided the poems in this anthology, as well as my own, into two categories that often intersect: the loving of art, and the sharing of art. Beyond these two classifications of content, each and every one of these poems plays a dual role of sorts in that the creation and “publication” of art is inherently an act of sharing art too: both that which we have experienced and loved as well as our own. Some of these poems focus in on the process of writing itself, creating a third sort of category.
I now pose the central question of this anthology: how do we experience the experiencing of art, alone and with others, and with this in mind, how do we go about creating further art to share these experiences?
I want to pause for a moment to mention five of the more common ways that poems hold art. First, there is the inert passing off of art as an object. Here, art becomes a sort of prop in the larger work. Second, there is the ekphrastic, in which the poet tries to recapitulate the emotional experience of the art, as done famously in “The Archaic Torso of Apollo”. Some poems instead describe experiencing the art without attempting to mimic it, such as “Not to Know How to Live”. Others intertwine the art itself with the poet, as in Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry”, an effect with elements of both the ekphrastic and the art as an object. And lastly, in keeping with the aforementioned meta-idea that poems are also a form of sharing art themselves, there are poems that focus on the act of writing and the poem itself.
One or more of these methods are present in most all of the poems I present you with, and will be pointed out to the best of my ability (particularly, look at the “Tags” section). One of the beauties of using a website as medium for this anthology is that it’s incredibly easy for me to point to as many references as I can think of, which is difficult to do when reading in paper or other physical media. This will go alongside the more standard poetry analysis since this is, after all, a class project. When I turn to my own poems, I shall try to note some of the ways in which other poems and works of art (several contained here) have explicitly or implicitly influenced my art, in case it should be at all informative. For a particularly prolific example, see “a plague upon my brain”. There, as elsewhere, I most certainly fall short.
Having gotten that out of the way, let us go forth toward the art without further ado–
In spirit of Frank O’Hara, it seems you’ve been cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it!!