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“Ars Poetica” from the body begins with a sense by T Links under the cut Keep reading

“Ars Poetica” from the body begins with a sense by T

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This is an erasure of “The Body Begins with a Sense.” I knew that I wanted to do at least one erasure for this collection, but it didn’t occur to me until recently that the obvious candidate is that poem. And it turned out fairly well, I think. It gets at the root of what I am trying to say and ends on a hopeful note - though I did struggle to believe in that hope.

“Reprise” from the body begins with a sense by T

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A love poem for my friends. The last stanza wasn’t originally intended to be the ending line, but I found that, once it was written, it was difficult to think of anything that could come after. So I just left it like this. I’m very fond of this one.

This is the most recently written poem.

“Memento” from the body begins with a sense by T

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It wasn’t until after I wrote this poem that I realized it basically embodies the Kristin Chang quote: “Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed.” Because yes, the begging in the car is a true story, and I was begging to be believed by my mother.

 The story about the Buddha necklace snapping right before she visited her Christian friend is true, too, and it’s one of those stories that you can scarcely believe unless you were there. And I was. It’s one of my earliest memories. Honestly, it may be one of the main reasons I still believe in Buddha at all. 

But my mother has converted now; she’s crossed that threshold into something else. I think that’s a story for another poem, though.

“i will never again know a love like my Mother’s” from the body begins with a sense by T

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This poem is about one of my deepest shames. I thought that, if I wrote about it, it would lighten. But it only got heavier. 

“Desire dies, lines the streets” is probably one of the core lines that survived multiple rounds of edits; I like it because it feels so true. Poetry is often a way of talking around something or trying to articulate something that cannot be articulated, but very rarely, I’m able to nail something exactly with just language. This is one of those cases.

“Contagion” from the body begins with a sense by T

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This was one of those poems that buzz under the skin and come fast and sure as rain dashing the ground. I wanted to write about addiction, and though the final product came out more sympathetic than I was intending, I’m pretty happy with the result. 

“the science of addiction” from the body begins with a sense by T

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Everything in this poem is true, or based on a true experience. The poem I was thinking about as I stumbled upon the dead snake was “Snake-Light” by Natalie Diaz. 

I wrote this to soothe myself. Poems can be decent company, especially when there isn’t much else.

“All Creation is a Kind of Distraction” from the body begins with a sense by T

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After Bone, comes Rot. This next section is all about how the past dies countless deaths in the present and into the future. How it festers.

II. ROT from the body begins with a sense by T

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I wrote this poem at a particularly low point this year, when the poets I keep up with were no longer writing and/or taking breaks from social media, and I was feeling my own creative resources swing shut. It was a time of acute despair and depersonalization for me and countless others on the planet.

“I don’t know when I’ll find me again” is truly the last thing I wrote in my journal for a long while, so I thought it good to spin a poem out of it. And I think it’s a good place, albeit a depressing one, to leave this first section.

“the end of poetry” from the body begins with a sense by T

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Like I write in the “Notes” section of the collection, this poem takes its first line from “Pocomania” from Safiya Sinclair’s debut poetry collection, Cannibal, which has been a recent favorite of mine. Her poem is a repetitive prayer, of sorts, on the speaker’s “Father” - all of his failings and contradictions. This poem is of a similar breed, only it is about the concept of “Memory.”

“Ouroboros, Sepulcher. Cannibal, this memory” - I want to get across how memory is circular. It eats at me just as I eat at it. We are the same species; this makes us both cannibals. Memory dies inside of me and I go to die inside of it. But it holds me as it does. It is heat and devastation and it marks my flesh, but to be buried by it is to be kept safe and still by something that knows all versions of me and loves me anyway.

“Meditations” from the body begins with a sense by T

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I think this poem is the oldest one in this collection, written over a year ago as an exercise in form. I adore the Duplex  - it is deceptively simple. How to repeat lines while saying something new? How to juxtapose the lines that face outwards, between the couplets, and how to juxtapose the lines that face inward - within the couplets? And how to create a cohesive story in just 14 lines?

 I like my attempt here. I am quite proud of the narrative and the risks I took. I hope you enjoyed it, too.

“Duplex: Circles” from the body begins with a sense by T

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This is the first time I have ever dedicated to paper the experience outlined in this poem. No one outside of me, my therapist, and everyone who has read this poem knows - not even my mother knows that I know.

This poem is about mania, obsession, and the endurance of certain experiences. How they continue to live in the body long after they have come to pass. It is also very subtly about trich/dermotillomania, which manifested in me after a separate experience from the molestation, but I tie the two together here as part of the larger point that some hurts never die - only transform. 

“Original” from the body begins with a sense by T

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The title comes from something I learned a long time ago - that certain prairies are actually endangered because their next ecological successions, forests, are encroaching on them all across the country. I’m not sure if that’s true anymore, but it’s one of those random facts that stay with you long into the afterwards, for no reason you can name.

This poem is about a lot of relationships I’ve had in my life and how I tried to leave them/haven’t left them yet/can never bear to leave them. It’s about how pain and pleasure are often indistinguishable to my body because of how far I am from it. 

I love the line: “all intrusion becomes homecoming if it / happens enough.” I originally wrote it to mean intrusive thoughts - at what point do they stop being intruders and start living inside full-time? - but I think the idea is generalizable. True, with enough pain coming in, the body becomes it, becomes its own destruction. But the same is true for pleasure, too - with enough of it, the body can feel good again. Be good again. 

But it will never fully leave that prairie. Some part of it will always be yielding.

“Endanger” from the body begins with a sense by T

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This poem was largely a happy accident. It happens rarely: I mean to write about one thing, only to find something else surfacing, and an improbable connection between the two.

Discipline was a common refrain from my mother, in my youth. Though I was a child, she expected it of me in everything, and I was rarely up to the task. In this poem, I stumbled across the connection between discipline, hunger, and the voice. 

Disciplining hungry to be as small as possible, disciplining the voice to do the same; when I was young, there were long periods in which I tried very hard to become mute, thinking if I no longer spoke, my mother would no longer have anything to turn against me. My body and my words felt like crimes and I wanted so badly to discipline my transgressions.

I didn’t work. It never would have. I wanted to believe, anyway.

“those were years that left residue” from the body begins with a sense by T

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This is a true story. I wrote this poem almost immediately after it happened because it was such a potent, meaningful experience. It had never occurred to me that it was possible to live without shame.

“Shame” from the body begins with a sense by T

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This quote...cuts deep. It’s the introduction I imagined for this first half of the collection, which speaks to the body’s core, its most distilled and primitive form: childhood.

I. BONE from the body begins with a sense 

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I love this poem. It is the backbone of the entire work. It is the thesis. Here, I meditate on the core idea that the “body” - whether that means an abstract form or a collection of senses or an assemblage of memories and turns of phrases or poems - is its most “real” when something is disturbing it. When there is a “sense,” physical or metaphorical or something else entirely. And by disturb, I don’t mean a purely negative sense of the word. Sometimes, the sense is good, which in turn makes the body good. Feel good. 

But also, as I indicate in the poem, the body ends with a sense as well. Perhaps a sense of something wrong? Or a sense of the end itself coming.

The lobster in the pot metaphor really came to me in the eleventh hour of editing his poem. It reflects a kind of desperation for salvation that only comes after mind-numbing pain, the kind that destroys the senses altogether, and how that desperation can lead to the wrong exits. The wrong reliefs. It’s a good transition to the first half of this collection.

“The Body Begins with a Sense” from the body begins with a sense by T

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