Today’s poem is inspired largely by Jemma Borg’s poem The Art of Memory, from her wonderful 2022 collection Wilder. I’ve included an image of the poem below.
In my poem, which I called The Art of Flight, I borrowed Borg’s imagery of angels — something I’ve found captivating in poetry ever since I started reading Rilke as a teenager — to write about flight, another human preoccupation since, it seems, the dawn of time. Like memory, flight — or the yearning for flight, or the imagining of flight — seems in a paradoxical way to have some bearing on how we define ourselves as humans, as land-based mammals. We are creatures who are very much defined by the constraints of gravity — that is, for instance, why we’ll only grow to a certain height, or why our bones have the density that they have — and yet we yearn for and indeed practice flight as a means of escape.
In The Art of Flight I took Leonardo da Vinci’s famous flying machine as a central image (in a sense, the machine stands in contrast to the angels of the poem). I have never really had a particular fascination with Leonardo but it piqued my interest when a queer friend of mine started telling me — at a house party we both went to — that Leonardo in his own Renaissance way was queer too; he was a vegetarian, a polymath, he was a man who slept with other men, and his scientific drawings appeal to so many because they seem to transgress the nebulous line we’ve since drawn up between Science and Art. So that became something that I wanted to work in.
Aside from the angel imagery, I also borrowed Borg’s structure of two dense paragraphs to make my poem. This structure seems to speak to a certain duality inherent in the central theme of both poems: there is the image on the one hand, and then its reflection in memory, on the other; or there is the flight — the fantasy — and then there is the ground, its reality.
THE ART OF FLIGHT after Jemma Borg “Despite the thousands of pages Leonardo left in notebooks and manuscripts, he scarcely made reference to his personal life.” — Frank Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings When Leonardo asked the Sybil what it would take for men to be capable of flight, the wise woman replied men would only fly if they could let go of everything they had taken in during their lifetimes here, all of their burdens and connections to the earth. The way the mangroves list free of their roots. Angels could fly, she said, because their bodies had no substance — they held no memories. It was not that they chose to fly — for they had no choice — and their bodies were as light and as strong as a song. The artist — who lived like a poor man, eating only vegetables and fruits — thought long and hard about what the wise woman had said. Some hours later he left the cave of the seer, who was hanging upside down in a jar, to return to the churches and sturdy walls of the city. And if in later years he ever felt blue, I wonder if it was because he too felt that longing — too often, and far too much — to paint himself the same colour as the artful sky. Why fly if one could snap the bones of a bird as easily as the kindling used to build a fire? And he would think then of everything he had not yet lost, and he would start to feel free.
Such an interesting insight in Da Vinci's life, and a beautiful poem, Jack. I particularly love the idea that angels are so light because they have no memories to carry.