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5X5 10 by Timm Mettler from "A Series of Shifting Landscapes"

Aesthetics are important. There are days when all I can think about is whether or not my silhouette looks like a terracotta statue of Athene, whether my hair is something gold enough to romantically call flaxen and fair. I'll want to look like art or you, or her, or that girl...anyone else but me. It's easy to become obsessed with beauty. When placed in comparison, it can feel easy to fall short. There's this lyric from a song by the Silver Jews called "The Wild Kindness" and it's I'm perfect in an empty room. Sometimes I feel like that line describes me dead on. Aesthetics are important--this thought could destroy me.

I chose to start this post with an image of Timm Mettler's landscape because it reminded me that this thought didn't have to destroy--that it could instead, inspire me to create. I could crumble under my own insecurities. Am I as pretty as her? Or I could choose to transcend comparison. I could write, I could paint, I could sing, I could speak, I could give, I could think. I could become like a shifting landscape, my foundations grating and moving beneath my horizon. I could be abstract and meaningful. I could be unique and rich with vibrancy and texture. Aesthetics can distract, they can create an escape. The profundity of beauty-- bittersweet, and ambiguous. I want to become something like a poem.

Away from your mirror! Beautiful words to obsess about, instead:

Human Beauty

by Albert Goldbarth

If you write a poem about love...

the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.

If you write a poem about death...

the death is a terrible fire,

the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.

We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address

--an insufficiency. And yet, a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm

from out of no where hit New York one night,

in 1982, the crew at a theater was caught

unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped

and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost

inside of what it was a praise of.

* * *

Albert Goldbarth is an incredible contemporary poet. His style is similar to a new kind of poetry called Ultra-talk, and of the same ilk as David Kirby or Mark Halliday. If you want to know more about Ultratalk poetry or Timm Mettler. Click on the links. Comment if you feel inclined.

Signing off. Yours, M.