Poetics of the Body: Thinking with Andrés Montoya

Abstract

Poetics of the BodyThinking with Andrés Montoya Stephanie Fetta (bio) I am aware of my heartbeat, and my neck and jaw tense slightly as I consider the painting by Andrés Montoya, the poet impetus for this special issue of Chiricú. Known as the winner of the American Book Award, Montoya also painted various watercolors, while knowing he was dying of leukemia at age thirty-one. A roughly strewn lone skeleton, the variably black paint disrupts the solidity I expect to see to announce the a priori condition of death. The conundrum of presence/absence of personhood and death: this issue focuses on the growing awareness of the personhood of the material body—the soma—the flesh-being intertwined with the mind and, nevertheless, the primary entity of our being. The soma lies in support of our mental desires, aversions, and will, but also responds to our moment-by-moment lived experience before our personalities can. With this understanding of corporal subjectivity, the skeleton becomes an expression of the soma; it presents human remains as also a continuing being-ness. The skeleton reminds us we are flesh beings before we are psychologically conceived personalities, and in death, we return to flesh beings. The skeleton found in many of Montoya’s watercolors continues the trajectory of his poetry where the legacies of colonialisms and hemispheric spiritual and poetic traditions are discussed from the perspective of the soma, the cognitive flesh body. The somewhat to-scale proportions of the head, chest, spine, and limbs of the skeleton contrast with the hand bones. These should be described as the hand’s bones, which, like the skeleton’s feet, are less anatomically realistic. Their disproportions visually cue the microsubjectivity Montoya gives to body parts in his poetry. They are massive hands, emphasized even more than the feet, a prominence that speaks to the limitations of an individual’s capacity to modify their world or exert unbridled influence, their reliance on the will of others. The Cartesian mind uses the body for its will; it is probably not a coincidence that the hands and feet are the two primary biological tools to implement the mind’s will. In the final instance, in death, the mind reckons with its ultimate failure to act, its inability to continue its own life, the reality of social interdependence, human frailty, and temporality. Or is it that thus enlarged, they seek to invoke the wanting, [End Page 5] giving, capable, yet empty hands of a poetic subject, longing for God and social justice? No longer invoking a human personage, the skeleton provokes recognition of the material durability during and after the life of the mind. A person who, in the form of a skeleton, hangs in the high school or college biology lab or the doctor’s office calls forth the finitude and forgettability and, by some measure, the futility of all that seems so captivating or crucial to us each day. Montoya’s skeleton reminds my organs and muscles that each of us could end up an anonymous and anatomically unremarkable, structural human exemplum. The confluence between the soma of Montoya’s painted skeleton and its poetic apparition are the premise of Felicia Zamora’s poem included in this issue, “Shared Juries,” after Andrés Montoya: You too,dearest Andrés, understood where the lionlay in wait: in the valleys, in the fields, inthe cage of bone we call ribs, in the cage of bone we call skull, in the cage ofstreets we call society, in my ownthoughts as I doubt worthinessof my limbs in trees The threat of violent death suggested by the perfunctory image of skull and cross-bones plays into my somatic response as does the more playful, now internationally recognized calavera art and global iconography, where la Santa Muerte is wed with Chicanx graffiti fonts. The fonts themselves, now recognizable elicitations of Chicanx culture, death, life, materiality, and pleasure, have found their way onto high-end clothing lines in the United States, taco trucks on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, and Canada, and have inspired Japanese cholo culture, international tattoo art, and beyond.1 Images of personified death...