Xicancuicatl: Collected Poems by Alfred Arteaga

Author:Alfred Arteaga
Format: epub

22 color

Desire in painting must be nothing like desire in poetry. Color too, must be different. I find it hard to imagine desire painted, a depiction of its object perhaps, presented in the color of blood. Desire seems verbal, textual, to me: a novel of lust, a lyric of lack. This might well be because I work in words and envision the world in their terms. And so color in my poems must miss the color spread on canvas the way word and phrase are never pigment but the word and phrase for pigment.

I went to a show of work by Frida Kahlo at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. Along with retablos and portraits, undoubtedly as the curator’s supplement, were words: excerpts from Frida’s diary printed huge on the walls beside the paintings. My job as a poet prescribes that I pay attention to words, and I was drawn to those of this painter, but beyond this, I was particularly taken because I so often wonder what of an artist transcends media.

My experience of bearing witness to artists’ expression in alternate media has been associated with death. I arrived in Paris days after Julio Cortázar died and thereby forever missed the opportunity to see him play jazz. And when I was twenty, my friend Tad and I made a pilgrimage from Santa Cruz to Kenneth Patchen’s house in Palo Alto. He was too near death to receive visitors, but his wife gave us a small stack of postcard-sized reproductions of his poem paintings, or painted poems, whichever they were. And of course by the time I stood in San Francisco before the excerpts from Frida Kahlo’s diary, she had long since died.

I grew excited when I realized what Frida’s text was. At last I could get insight into the transition across media from color to word and into the meaning of color for the painter. For there before me, huge on the wall, were Frida’s definitions of colors. For me, colors were words, verbal images, tropes perhaps, hypertext links to meanings of colors. When I meant green, I spelled it with five letters in English and in Spanish. I used language to stand for green in ways that I did not use language to enact desire. I felt that a poverty of poetry is that it requires no light or its continuous spectrum.

In her own words, Frida explained the meaning of several colors, explaining, for example, blue, green and red: “Azul: electricidad y pureza amor”; “Verde: hojas, tristeza, ciencia, Alemania entera es de este color”; “Rojo: sangre?Pues quien sabe!” I was transfixed, making myself as porous a receptor as I had been standing in the British Museum before the Rosetta Stone or before the Elgin’s Marbles of Keats. It seemed to me that this most passionate of painters had sent to me, as I stood there in that present moment, a communiqué from the past, un recado apasionado, that would reveal to me the meaning of colors. For after

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