Poetics of the Body: Thinking with Andrés Montoya

Abstract

Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Indiana University • doi:10.2979/chiricu.7.1.02 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-bymoment 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, poetics of the body Thinking with Andrés Montoya