Author: Nick Anastasia

These are the last days of my childhood, and since I’m 22, that’s a weird statement to type.

I’ve been a student since I was six years old, which makes it one of my longest standing identities, but as of this Saturday, that’s about to change. Graduation is coming, and with it shatters the protective barrier that academia has provided between me and the real world. I feel like Superman being shot off of my home planet into a strange new world, only instead of being granted super powers I’m left only with the thought that I should’ve learned something. My uncle asked me the other day what skills I’d actually learned from my time at U of M, and since I’m graduating with a double major in English and Creative Writing, I told him that what I know is how to bullshit in spoken word and in written (and if you’ve been reading my poems on here than you know all about that ((or do you, who knows, now I can’t be trusted muwahaha (((are there better things in life to aspire to than being an unreliable narrator?)))))).

I’m not proud of what I just did with those parentheses.

What does any of that have to do with art though? That’s a great question, one that I’m hopefully weaving my way towards an answer to at the same rate that you’re reading along with this post. I guess the thing about being a student that really matters is not what you learn from your classes or writing essays, but what you learn about what it means to be a student. I’m not talking about figuring out how to calculate how many espresso shots it’s going to take to write that last 8-9 page essay that’s standing between you and a cap and gown, but what being a student really is–and I’m going to assert that it’s not as much an identity as a mindset.

Being a student isn’t about what you learn, it’s about being a seeker of truth who is open to knowledge from all sorts of sources. Sure I might be leaving the university world of burritos and books written about articles written about things that were written about people who died a long, long time ago, but why in the hell would that mean I’m no longer a student? Sure it’s cheesy, but what’s wrong with being a student of life?

Nevertheless, where does the art come in? And I guess my only answer to that question is how should I know?

Okay, that’s not exactly true because my other answer is this: if art is the process of gathering up all these crazy things that appear to be separate and then putting them all together (be it on canvas, a marble slab, a sheet of paper, etc…) in such a way as to reveal that they’re not actually separate at all, then art is absolutely about learning. When we look at art, we are students to a lesson in perspective shifting the way tectonic plates form new landmasses, only these continents are cranial and the eruptions are expressions of a soul that everybody shares! Art is about beauty and about passion, but it’s the learning of these that allows for their celebration and understanding only ever fleeting at the periphery of perception, consciousness only ever condescending for a moment to lower itself into the stars of the cosmos.

That’s what I’m going to follow, or at least to try–those split second snapshots of reality through the constant illusions of my own limited perception. Because that’s what art is about (or what I’m choosing for it to be about for me) and what life is about (same disclaimer) and what being a student is about (no qualifier this time, deal with it). So these might be the last days of my childhood, but I’ll spend all the rest of the ones allotted to me as a student.

Midnight
moonlight
howling in the waves
footprints
card tricks
no one left to save

The fool sets one step a time a journey
sets a journey a time one step

The fool sets a time

Meeting moon
devil’s croon
but his chains are too loose
lovers’ dare
strength is here
foot hanging from a noose

Spin the wheel of fortune
see what you might find
sun and stars or hermit
all is found behind

High priestess lays with hierophant
sleeping side by side
but emperor and empress
are not content to hide
with justice in their chariot
they ride and ride and ride

Will you seek magician’s truth
strike the tower at its base?

Can you find the world inside
of death’s solemn embrace?

Temperance tips the scales and then
your judgement, your new face

Will you walk the way,
will you walk the way?

So it’s that time of year again. Better prep your Facebook newsfeed and inboxes for a flood of poetically inspired cascades of consonance and artfully articulated alliteration. That’s right, 30/30 has come again and the poet folk raise their collective heads to force out a manifestation of madness for the thirty days of April.

As any poet will tell you, it’s a grueling process (I’m already three days/poems behind). Still, there’s something very rewarding and uplifting to see the community of poets step into the light of spring just as the cold of winter is being shaken off. Perhaps the illuminating warmth of poetry is enough to counteract the eternal winter brought about by so many people singing Frozen’s “Let It Go” (we all know that’s the reason this winter has gone on so long, don’t even lie).

Of course, there have always been a lot of questions about “what is poetry anyways?” I’m somehow certain that there have been more answers given to that question than times that the question has actually been asked. It’s not our fault, really, poets love poetry! I remember when I met Pulitzer Prize Winning poet Galway Kinnell, and he described a poem as “a soft and loving thing.” Of course, I’ve written many poems that I would never in a million years describe as being soft or loving, but I think that perhaps he meant that poems have an ability to curl up inside of people–even angry poems–and touch them. Poetry can be a gentle light cuddling up inside your heart, even if it’s topic is intense or full of rage and despair. I think that this is because poems allow for a connection of thoughts from writer to poem to reader in a stream of consciousness way that prose doesn’t always necessarily convey.

Kinnell went on to give his own definition of poetry: “touching a part of your consciousness that was previously untouched; going farther into yourself.” Poetry as a sort of self-focus and self-reflective examination of the writer’s consciousness is fascinating. The poem, in this sense, is not for the reader but for the poet. However, what I’ve often found is that when it comes to writing poetry, the more specificity that the writer puts in from their own life and experience, the more relatable the poem becomes to readers. Readers can tap into that intimacy between writer and poem, which exists more strongly if the writer has experience and passion towards the topic.

Honestly,  I never really thought that I’d ever accept something as constraining as a definition for poetry–or art in general really! Something I’ve come to cherish as a writer is that writers set out to break rules. In fact, what seems to make poetry distinct from prose is that poetry breaks the normal rules of syntax and grammar in order to transform a page into a canvas for word art. Poetry operates on a visual level, a content level, and an auditory level! With so much going on, how could you possibly constrain it to a definition? But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way we see the world as defined and separated by the idea of internal versus external. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve begun to see that there is no binary there, as there is no external reality. Everything is internal (and not necessarily just in that everything is based on perception which is internal but that perhaps we are far bigger than we give ourselves credit and to say that everything is inside of me implies that “Me” is something large enough to incorporate all things). In this way, the separation between ourselves and all the people and things around us is revealed as an illusion. However, since the world we live in seems to depend on that illusion it can be hard to break out of that perception. Hence poetry and art in general.

Poetry (in my tentative, tenuous, fluid, and ever-changing definition) is the utilization of the perception of separateness in order to promote the perception and simultaneously make manifest the unity that exists amongst all things.

All goes as
all is as all was
but now is gone

What will be
not yet
only now is
gone all the rest

And lines of poetry
shouldn’t start with “and”

There isn’t should’ve
only could’ve but
didn’t didn’t
and won’t won’t

You are not in the Void
The Void is in you

My name is–
I am–
But who?

I am street lamps and starlight
Twining silver round your finger
Threading lunar white tresses
Blackening moth wings
In the eye of dawn
Blackening moth wings
Threading lunar white tresses
Twining silver round your finger
I am street lamps and starlight

But who?
I am–
My name is–

Padre Noche

Have you ever had the night
silver fishes lining veins
cool and scales flashing against
blood vessels bursting dreams
slip through veins arteries and
stories tumble rainwater wells down
the inside of tearducts not reaching
faces but voices throat swelling lungs
filling not drowning out except in
gills and dreams and clear cloud desires,

have you ever had the night