Felicia Zamora
My Ph.D. poetry workshop this fall focuses on communion—who, what, when, where is communing with the artist and their poetry. I asked all artists to create Content Maps for each of the books we read this semester. (Content Map is my funny way of saying lesson plan. We intermesh artistry with pedagogy in this workshop.) The artist, Ian Fantin, created an activity from a line from Dawn Lundy Martin’s book Instructions for The Lovers. The line is “Yes, to me art is, relationships:” With Ian’s permission, I speak more on this generative prompt that meditates on Lundy’s work. Ian led the class through this activity with three steps that I’ll condense down to the meaty bits. Step one: consider the meaning, the practice, the application, of the word relationship. Step two: What relationships can you identify in your art? Step three: draft an Ars Poetica-adjacent poem. I felt compelled to write along with this activity due to Ian being gracious enough to guide us through their Content Map. I’m thrilled I did.
What evolved was my thinking orbiting between Lundy’s relationships and splitting open a singular word. When I attend a previous CantoMundo session led by Aracelis Girmay she asked us to mine a word. That direction sticks with me still. As poets, we are always mining shit, right—so I imagined my metaphoric shovel again. I think I needed the singularity of one word, to find the plural, to shift from educator to artist in the space. It’s hard let one’s plurality step forward authentically in the moment. The word relationship pulled me, shovel and all… as if the word was asking me to bust it open to see what my organs were really processing. And so I busted. And so I peeked into my own messy innards.
