Poetry
Artist Statement
I primarily studied poetry in college and heavily focused on ekphrasis. My senior honors project was a collection of over 20 ekphrastic poems exploring Sienese art. My earlier poetry played with themes of sanctity, apostasy, and awe. These days I’m mostly doing something a lot fucking weirder: playing with idiot-genius dichotomies and attempting to create a genre that’s something like post-magical realism. I’m attempting to play with arbitrary and absurd symbology (the kind you see in magical realism but also in contemporary sci-fi that explores quantum physics), ascribe my symbols a closer iconicity (correspondence between form and meaning) ex ante, and nod at the unreliable-narrator element of this process.
I think a lot about AI and believe it is going to dramatically shift how humans think about symbols, and I’m trying to anticipate what the shift in landscape might look like. This is leading me to experiment with concepts like polysemanticity, recursion, instrumental convergence, etc. in my poems.
I’m hoping I can write something more futuristic and compelling than the random thing a lot of writers are doing these days (an example is “Everything Everywhere All At Once” in which….”fuck-it-I-guess-even-hotdog-fingers-mean-something”). I think the resultant poems so far have been thought-provoking, a little bit funny, a little bit cringey, and flat out bizarre.
I’ll tag each of the poems below with information about which project they belong to (translations of barely-known ancient stories, post-magical realism, ekphrasis, or other).
(more developed of a statement coming soon and more poems up soon)
Maladaptation
post-magical realism
and they’re off
lapping past candida, vibrio natriegens, that hair
on your mole, your ex, new relationships, salps
energy—phylogenetic vie la vie via
phylogenetic monocle and probe:
thesisantithesissynth
esizers and incisors cutting
wits and your own bangs: bipedality balancing on
iteration, iteration, iteration, iteration, iteration
anxiety? uterus still bleeding and hot
neandrathalic pool boy mates and here again?
stuck molt.
like a fucking bug
On Rest on the Flight to Egypt by Gentileschi
Ekphrasis
Shawls and blankets whisked
around listless limbs
fold and unwind, unwind
a million times; they twine
against skin and sag there.
The details collect like weariness—
deeply shadowed cloth wraps
around the starkly simple family
with dry eyes and dusty beds:
Gentileschi favored draperies
over faces. He favors the knotted sack—
over which a close to comfortable
Joseph stretches and remedies his back.
He rests in blankets soiled by desert
sands and sweat. Tossing and
turning in elaborately painted blankets,
he folds and unwinds, unwinds
a million times; while beneath a heavy
shadow, his wife stabilizes
in her tempestuous clothing
and balances her center
between child, garments and air.
Between flights and feedings,
they fold and unwind, unwind
a million times.
Like the fleeing family, I wear
my emotions’ whirlwinds like sleeves
while my soul appears modest and slab atop
dense layers crinkled in shadow.
I’m simple in my intricate garments—
my wrinkled layers of refuge
and flight. There’s comfort in cotton
but coolness in nudity; I toss
and turn—fold and unwind, unwind
a million times, thinking Would
I be as as beautiful as Mary’s exposed
and radiant skin, if I made my vulnerabilities
visible in unfamiliar places? Would
I also be bright? I am shifting
like the light over bricks, hovering
like the dawning corner, and wondering,
in my shawls and blankets,
how much longer I must
fold and unwind,
unwind a million times.
Non-Deductive Symbology Cunt
post-magical realism
Stop trying to be smart.
Ventricular cavities engulfing
the airiness(technical term) in my airhead,
boobs
are a little small,
maybe 10000 AD Renaissance Men will anticorrelate
jug size with the capacities of a big throbbing brain.
Poetry is automatic
and propositional language is;
unclear whether Ishtar
was Goddess of Sexuality and War. It’s hard to write futuristic fiction without using chaotic and arbitrary symbols in an unlimited world and ex ante ascribe them meaning—
computers:
the magical realism wand of a blonde ovulating directedly
at Gilgamesh…if you say it was.
Post Malone is the sexiest man
cogito, ergo sum.
(Add more technical terms.)
On Annunciation by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi
Ekphrasis
I.
She will yes to the already gravestone,
water favorite, de-rooted flowers.
A euphoric orb hovers inches
from her mind: silence before, and in inches,
silence after. She begins reading
the tragedy her finger lodges between,
drawing the curtain of the murder scene;
she foresees. But with gold, and black bouquets,
it is an angel who approaches
in the birthing room, saying The child will live
for but a year if you allow him
a breath at all. One of his white palms curves down
and the other is thinner, but points up
towards a plump lily bud. Mary’s slit eyes
inhabit the sleeve between his split hands.
I know this angel. He comes to me
at the beginnings of Springs, beginnings
of desserts, of salts, vacations, and fires. And I hesitate
to accept heavens birthed in swaddling clothes,
but say yes for a brush of Gold against my chest,
for a Gold’s light resting within these arms.
II.
No, you do not know me closely enough,
you clad there in black,
you sweating at dusk
while still this museum dawns around you.
Wipe sweat from your eyes
and dare approach this golden permanence.
See my raiment’s just cascaded
upon hard ground much like
the marble floor you stand on,
and my wings, though pheasant, touch Heaven.
The child will live on,
I say, not Momento mori, not Grieve.
Your eyes have much to learn about blessings:
I’ve just begun to expand the orb
on Mary’s head past the silence.
Cease confining halos, and receive by
raising your dark head.