To the Unlikely Stories home page

Body Language
by Derick Varn

To the archived articlesThe blue and red paint on her body dried slowly and slightly cracked around her joints. Her dyed red hair hung over her shoulders as I smeared more of the paste over her chest, back, thighs, feet... detailing all of her body. After I finished and we sit awkwardly letting the body finish drying, we hung a green blanket over the door of her dorm room. She gave me one of the cardboard disposable Kodiak cameras. I smiled at her. With each flash that would eventually be a few horrible-but-sexy photographs, I realized something about art. Despite the poor lighting and the makeshift backdrop, I tapped into something beautiful and organic. Beauty is not controlling your medium, it becoming part of it. The Japanese, Africans, and Native Americans know this, it took a naked woman to teach it to me.

It's been a year since that spiritual experience involving one of my best friends. I've wrote a couple of bad poems about it, done some more pieces of body art, become a little better a photography and kept those first photographs. I have always been obsessed with the body. The muscles, blood, and sinew often make their way into my art, especially my poetry. The Renaissance artists who played with cadavers in order to learn their art relearned what tribal peoples already knew: the body is art.

Poems seem to have blood and sinew too. Like with body art-painting, tattooing, and piercing, the secret is to work with the body, not to recreate it. Poems are showing images, events, and ideas; however, how you present them as important as what you have to say. My job as a poet is present the image in a poem and let my words speak for poem. Every poet and every reader is a voyeur. We are taking photographs and making the images and ideas surreal or crisp, but we are not really changing anything about them.

Perhaps the reason why Americans have trouble with poetry is that the American culture has a metaphorical stick up it's ass about the human body. Poetry, even in its most urban and symbolic moments, is more organic than prose. Poetry likes to dance in the leaves, run in the rain, and occasionally fuck a loved one. The Yoruba of Africa , Sioux Native Americans, Dravidian Indians all know this-why we have forget it as artists and as a society is beyond me.



Derick Varn is a poet and longstanding contributor to Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.