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. Illustrated by Herb Roe.
Jacob Rakovan is a writer whose work is heavily inspired by the history and landscapes of Appalachia. He is the author of The Devil’s Radio and “Ars Memoria.” Rakovan blends myth, memory, and regional history to represent themes of identity, loss, and cultural inheritance in his writing.
Rakovan is originally from Appalachia, and has been described as an “Appalachian writer in diaspora,” which reflects his engagement with the region’s people and traditions. He received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 2011 and a National Endowment for he Arts Fellowship in 2013.
