Tag arts

* stitching along with valerie wallace

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

I came across this week’s poem – “Winged” by Valerie Wallace – reading through the latest issue of Rust + Moth.

I was taken in by the Auden reference to the “old masters” from his poem Musee des Beaux Arts. I find the reference suiting since the impetus for Wallace’s poem comes from Alexander McQueen, whom I don’t know too much about except that his singular designs had him working with Bjork and Lady Gaga as well as designing Kate Middleton’s wedding dress (more to the point: Alexander McQueen the person didn’t design Middleton’s wedding dress – because he was dead. His label did – more specifically Sarah Burton, the creative director since his death).

In Wallace’s poem, the corset in question is taken on both conceptually as well as visually in the structure of the poem. The couplets themselves work down the poem like stitches as the speaker goes further into breaking and fraying as much meaning from each word “Be/hold balsa ribbons” is an especially powerful revelatory reading moment.

Enjoy the poem below and check out the rest of the issue of Rust + Moth here.

* mid-flight *

* mid-flight *

Winged – Valerie Wallace

—Corset from the Alexander McQueen collection No. 13, spring/summer 1999

The old masters
got them wrong,

their locations, at
least. Not pinned

at the spine like a moth
or the bone blade spurt.

From the tiny bloom
of sternum I swept

over shoulders, fanned,
arc’d. Slit for heavy arms.

How on earth do you
expect to walk in them? Ha.

Be/hold balsa ribbons
planed, laced, bindings,

not for flight but descent.
How will you care for me,

keep me from fire.
It sings, you know,

Consecration.
Consolation,

a promise to be ever
sewn into the sun.

***

Happy sunning!

Jose

p.s. For more info on the McQueen piece go here.

And for more poems from Wallace’s Be/spoke project, go here.

* weathering with sandra cisneros & sleater-kinney

José Angel Araguz 4 Comments

Sometimes the books find you.

I remember Sandra Cisneros’ Loose Woman as one of the first books of poems I carried around with me, young and possessed of that particular hubris termed a calling to poetry (Even the phrasing of that reeks of hubris, no?).

I remember being in high school and even then struggling with how to deal with culture and words, how to balance a love of Yeats (wherever Innisfree was, it sounded dope and fancy) as well as for Juan Gabriel (try listening to “Querida” and not feeling something!).

What I was moved by most in reading Cisneros is her ability to bring such worlds together. She was the first writer I read to bring together worlds I knew – Texas, books, and, yes, heartbreak (highschool amiright?) – and show how they can coexist through the tension of words.

In the spirit of this “world-togethering,” I’ve decided to pair up this week’s poem with the video for Sleater-Kinney’s new song, “No Cities to Love.” The chorus of the song (There are no cities, no cities to love/It’s not the city, it’s the weather we love!) brought me back to Cisneros and her poems which taught me how to take note of weather.

Bay Poem from Berkeley – Sandra Cisneros

Mornings I still
reach for you before
opening my eyes.

An antique habit from
last summer when we pulled
each other into the heat of groin
and belly, slept with an arm
around the other.

The Texas sun was like that.
Like a body asleep beside you.

But when I open my eyes
to the flannel and down,
mist at the window and blue
light from the bay, I remember
where I am.

This weight
on the other side of the bed
is only books, not you. What
I said I loved more than you.
True.

Though these mornings
I wish books loved back.

***

Happy weathering!

Jose