Jacob Rakovan
Published: 2021-12
Total Pages:
Get eBook
Ars Memoria, or the art of memory is a technique used much in classical rhetoric for "storing" information within places both real and imagined, as well as in the generation of new texts. As an Appalachian writer in diaspora, I am constantly navigating the liminal space between real, remembered, and imaginary space-between memory and creation. The cycle of poems here 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 when used as a folk-magical or hoodoo text, a practice once common in Appalachia.