Ars Memoria

From Thornwillow Patrons’ Prize-winner Jacob Rakovan, Thornwillow presents “Ars Memoria”, with illustrations by Herb Roe.

The cycle of poems in “Ars Memoria” were written in dialogue with an alchemical text, The Twelve Keys of Basilius Valentinus, whose images were used as the “memory palace” from which the poems were drawn, and the book of Psalms—particularly as it was used as a folk-magical or hoodoo text, a practice once common in Appalachia. The text has also been illustrated, to serve as another level of erasure/re-imagining/distancing of the received images. Written around the full moon of March 2020—called the “worm moon”—and the beginning of social distancing measures due to Covid-19, the poems are primarily elegiac in tone and address a friend of the author’s recently lost to heroin/Oxycontin addiction. The alchemical process of death and rebirth, of refinement in fire, is here applied as an almost funerary text, grieving the lost “boy” of Appalachian youth, the lost places of Appalachia itself, and recognizing the beginning of the larger historical moment.

The Thornwillow Patron's Prize is made possible with the support of the New York Foundation for the Arts and subscribers to the Thornwillow Dispatch, Patrons’ Edition. Patron Subscribers receive two copies of each new Dispatch publication, including the Classic Edition in letterpress paper wrapper, as well as the Patrons Edition, which is individually numbered and signed. In recognition of their vital support, Patron Subscribers are credited on the Patron Register accompanying each copy of the prize-winning work.

“Ars Memoria” was included in the Thornwillow Dispatch in January 2021. To support and subscribe to future publications like this one, visit www.thornwillow.com/thornwillow-dispatch