Panic at John Baldessari’s Kiss
by Elena Karina Byrne
The aftermath always happening like an airplane falling, or a manmidair falling from a horse, and an arrow, a gun, many gunspointing away, at us, our all bull’s-eye-on-the-mark. This is what hesees when he sees. Maybe Wrong or not, the appropriation, the filmclip, chase, pressed lips over lips, photo moment on the minute-drawnbreath in, the over, the under, bodies in black and white cut to pose,the way a kiss can pose, dispose of everything around it for another,dispose of thinking. It’s like waving good-bye. Mouth to mouth seeingas saying. Inside. Resuscitation back to the brain saying yes as the mouthmakes an O. Circles for the digital age, colored dots for faces alreadymade for erasing. Hurry, come, he, 6’7”, sees fifteen minutes from theMexican border, cremates his old paintings up close. But the ashes werekept in a book urn, not so afloat in the ocean with my parents, Above,
On, and Under (with Mermaid) to kiss and kiss, riot in the dark depthof it. The collision, the kiss, the capture, once in the for-all-we-knowof haunting who comes first. Kiss into kiss and so into kiss. All lawsof gravity leave us. Gender begins in violence and space. Space beginsin gender and violence as all laws of gravity leave us. So, kiss, kiss, kiss!
This prose poem is ekphrastic, after Kiss/Panic by John Baldessari.
This poem is more a reflection on and appreciation of Baldessari’s work as a whole, mentioning his works Wrong and Concerning Diachronic/Synchronic Time.
The separation between a prose poem and a narrative work has to do with a lot of things. The biggest thing in my mind separating this from a work of flash fiction is the stream of consciousness style (though the repetition of sound is also a large factor in the distinction). The speaker manages to go both everywhere and nowhere in her description of Baldessari, both of his art and the man himself. Anyone who gets truly swept up in art will tell you about all the times they see something they love and start to ramble about it, on and on, until what they’re saying makes no sense to anyone but them, and sometimes not even them. This poem wonderfully captures that moment in time, and in doing that makes itself seem very genuine, as opposed to how sometimes very constructed works can come across as contrived.
The poem plays off of the photo’s collage form in that more than one continuous work, it’s a series of loosely connected images, threatening violence, but with passion at the center. One thing that helps all of these to connect is the repetition of words. Not including the title, the word “kiss” is used ten times in this poem, and of these, only one is without another “kiss” beside it. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker presents us with a wonderful example of the interesting things you can do with repetition, with the phrase,
All laws
of gravity leave us. Gender begins in violence and space. Space begins
in gender and violence as all laws of gravity leave us.
Like a sonata, every element of a section is presented before being restated in such a way that it’s put with another.