Poetry: Aaron Fagan
Introduction by Austin Carder
We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”
Aaron Fagan’s poetry possesses and provokes historical consciousness — an awareness of our moment that allows us to experience it as historical, as the site of ongoing change in which we have been drafted to participate. Fagan’s poems ask us what kind of attention we pay to the world and if that attention pays off, whether or not the world pays us back with a measure of truth. To falsely — but I hope helpfully — polarize his poetry, Aaron Fagan operates in two primary modes: philosophical and seeming-autobiographical. Poems of the first type linguistically figure ideas; those of the second relate experience. Both contaminate the other, and perhaps no pure specimens of either exist in his œuvre. Life is our only access to the absolute; the essence must writhe at our feet.
The poem “Concordance” from Fagan’s second book Echo Train (Salt, 2010) displays the deeper unity of his distinct poetic modes, elsewhere presenting themselves more antinomically.
Minding my business
I was reading a poem
Sitting on the toilet.
I got an unexpected,
Conspicuous joy from
Reading the poem.
Come to think of it
I can hardly recall
What the author said.
For reasons I can’t
Explain, it was
The word explain—
I could feel it being
Inverted by my eyes,
Offered up to the brain
In quiet supplication.
I understood I knew
Nothing about this
Little monument
Named explain,
But the purity
Of that engagement
With a single word
On paper had me
Feeling all fucked up.
I wiped my ass with
History in mind.
I began to mourn for
The stories our stories
Are in the place of.
Here is Fagan at his most plain-spoken, donning the mantle of William Carlos Williams under conditions of the present. This is a Modernist poem, written in the age of its impossibility. Its subject is the moment of poetic conversion: the instant in which language speaks to and through the poet, the writing of the poem’s birth certificate. In the poem “The Lay of Tantalus as an Insult to the Library of Dreams” we find the lines:
Addiction is a greed, fear a theft. If language spoke, it would say,
“My true sentence is to be a guardian. I love you infinitely.”
Words stopped your restless steps inches from the abyss.
Words are in a state of constant alert on your behalf.
“Concordance” narrates this speaking, buzzing with the constant alert in which words wait. Thirty lines of ten tercets crystallize glimpses of what a word may wreak. Form in Fagan’s poems often feels staid. From the outside, it appears as if decided upon in advance. But while reading, we encounter what Emerson called “a metre-making argument…a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” By the end of the poem, necessity and freedom have interpenetrated so deeply that each seems a moment of the other. The thought of “Concordance” wants tercets. It lacks them; it desires them. The poem needs frames, glimpses, halting bouquets of insight gathered into exactly these proportions. Fagan supplies them.
What could be more prosaic than reading a poem on the toilet? Maybe reading a novel on the toilet. Seated thus, poetry is perfectly unexalted, humbled, and brought down to earth — the point from which it can reach heaven. Only there can it still sound forth. Stage set, the second tercet lifts the moment nearer to illumination. We might expect a poet to always receive an unexpected, conspicuous joy from poems. But that would make it expected, less than joyful. The shock is conspicuous in that it draws attention to itself, but it is also in questionable taste. Here? Now? Inopportune, as inopportune as forgetting what was said in the poem about which you are later writing a poem. But that is what a poem should do, drown what it communicates with its way of meaning. The kernel of the epiphanic moment — when a part stands in for the whole — appears in the word “explain.” Of all words to take the place of what was said, “explain” makes contradiction known. Explanation will not follow. This is the formula for conveying, and thereby, inducing experience in Fagan’s poems. The prior poem is not communicated to us; it is rather imparted or passed on.
Fagan gives us the word just before it gives itself in the poem. He names it in the fourth and seventh stanzas, leaving the space at the very center empty of explain. He sees it when he reads it, when it offers itself up. Explain explains him. This results in understanding what is not understood. He grasps the “Little monument / named explain”. Triggered by nothing but ink on a page, the epiphany evaporates as quickly as it struck. Those supremely expressive words we call profane make things plain again: “Feeling all fucked up. / I wiped my ass with / History in mind.” In the movement from one piece of paper to another (so many leaves of grass?), historical consciousness leaps up. What might have been lets itself be read in the contours of a single word, a word that becomes a poem. It changes, but it is also perfectly suited to where it takes place.
In “The Deluge,” the crystalline elegy that closes Fagan’s latest book A Better Place Is Hard to Find, we find the lines “A poem is a biography of the words / It’s made from.” The biography of a word lasts longer than any human life. Words, like society, are immortal — if not quite eternal. Yet they only live among us. Fagan is one of their keepers, as Emerson explains in “The Poet”:
…the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises herself; and this through the metamorphosis again.
Poets go on making all the words, which is not to say they manufacture new ones. They go on scratching in the annals of the Name, heaping stones on the muses’ tombs. Language is the archives of history, but what does history teach? Stein proposes: “Let me repeat what history teaches. History teaches.” If we are to learn not what history teaches but that it teaches, then fossil poetry will be our guide. The poet names the thing when he feels it being inverted by his eyes and offered to his brain in quiet supplication. In the closest proximity to second nature, nature itself becomes audible. To answer its plaintive cry, we have only to carry out nature’s baptism, we have only to bring it to speech. Aaron Fagan’s poetry takes up this metamorphosis, poetry’s unfinished task of symbolizing the world. //
Introduction to Camilla Ha
Camilla Ha and I met in 1998 at Chicago’s Mad Bar, which hosted a regular poetry night called Mental Graffiti. From that time forward, our love and friendship have evolved and endured. Our collaborative energies with art projects now extend to our building a life together as a married couple. Her work is imbued with frenetic menace and absurd humor. It is fitting she has trained in butoh, a nearly unclassifiable dance form that revels in existential discomfort and sublime wonder in equal measure. For Camilla, the form is about luring the mysteries of inner reality out into the light of day. In that light, one could argue everything she does is butoh. In fact, to this day, she uses a light amount of rice powder in her daily makeup regimen. What draws me to Camilla is her boundlessness and the way she doesn’t shrink from integrating all aspects of human nature.
—Aaron Fagan
POEMS FROM LATEST COLLECTION A BETTER PLACE IS HARD TO FIND
(The Song Cave, 2020)
MY LONESOME COWBOY
The vulture at the kitchen table has the body of a man
Spinning ice around in his tumbler with a swizzle stick,
Eyes training on me vacuuming the living room poorly.
The one judging the situation here is me. The stained
Beak and centuries of death that made it are neutral.
Who is the vulture not to say a word about the ways
We betray our instinct to destroy all we love by loving?
These moments line up and lash themselves to stakes
We say will stand in the fire to endure time immemorial.
And we would not be wrong to believe it and then not.
The cord gets yanked out of the socket, the vulture
Skids the chair away from the table, and stands taller
Than expected—walking over to me and then away,
Leaving a gift in my hand. This may or may not make
Sense to you, but I let the flower die so it belongs to me.
KING AND TRUMPET
One night I was drunk at the Heartland,
And, apparently, I spoke to Dan, the bartender,
Because his roommate called the next night to say,
“My roommate, Dan, was your bartender last night.
I hope you don’t think I’m crazy for calling like this?”
A few hours later, after cocktails at the Green Mill,
She invited me home and screamed when she flipped
The lights on to find her chows, King and Trumpet,
Each with a dead kitten hanging from their mouth,
Which I wrapped in tin foil and buried them warm
In the backyard by moonlight smoking a Lucky.
That Sunday we met up near the Shell with the “S”
Burned out at the corner of Touhy before heading
To Leone Beach. She was so small, all that fit her
Was this worn-out pink girls’ bikini she later made
A point of saying was see-through, her bobbed hair
Bobbing with baby-blue ribbons, nearly horizontal
In flip-flops and giant sunglasses, trying to hold back
Her chows. She’s a cop, a mom, and a boxer now,
Yet years before we met, when she was a stripper
In New York, she would shoot junk into the cowgirls
Riding torpedoes on her forearms, but after the beach,
She made us chicken and corn on the cob. Her hope
Was I’d write more and drink less, while she—
With the giant dogs at her tiny feet—painted
The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey over
A clown from her collection of John Wayne Gacy
Originals surrounding the bed where we made
Love and I first read The Double Dream of Spring.
HARMONY
Sisyphus punches in, each morning,
At a mountain he must face, all day,
In hell, for eternity, and at night,
Having not reached the summit,
Again, he walks down slow, where
The rock rushed by, careful to see,
With new eyes, where it all went
South, again, and then, later,
At the bar, in town, sits cooling his
Bleeding hands against a whiskey,
On the rocks, and maps new paths,
On a napkin, inside the wet ring
His tumbler made, again and again,
The routes running on to absurd
Lengths, hands shaking, and if it
Wasn’t a map, you might think
It was the history of history,
Or parts of a nude in repose,
Patient with death and belonging.
MASSTIGE
Adorning the sea,
Gasping for air,
With a mouth
That isn’t there,
You are what I want
When I don’t want
Anything anymore—
I thought this
Was pretty at first,
But now I’m not
So sure what it is—
I wanted to say
Something true
So I said nothing.
When you die,
I will eat you
And cry. Let go,
I say to myself,
They can have
What they stole.
There is no such
Thing as fixity,
And time has run
Out of reason.
Driving to work
I listen to breathing
Under water on
The radio and wonder
About the ways a Ouija
Board is a computer.
Out of the poetry
Of thin air, a sample
In the song says,
You may be fearless
In this world, but there
Are other worlds.
Your enemies will
Make you whole.
When you read this
Mental habits, memory,
Imagination, feeling,
And will create
The conditions you
Fear most until you
No longer fear them.
Reading Hass
Reading Buson,
By his translation—
His Holiness the Abbot
Is shitting
In the withered fields—
I go back and forth
In my mind about
What it means.
Some days,
It’s a brief, funny
Parable of humility.
Other days, I see
A city razed
By war, nature,
And progress—
Dumb with grief,
His legs tremble
As he squats under
The moon, trying to
Lead by fertile example.
untitled, triangle, 2013.
KIRA
Waiting for the future to come full circle so I can say I told you so,
Currently, I’m standing in sunshine so bright I can barely open my eyes.
And it’s so lovely and warm. On a day like today, it would be awkward
And fun to be someone else. At each and every turn, isn’t it refinement
That draws us in—the art of saying nothing in vast permutations of logic
And chance, smearing meaning thin across time and accountability?
Everybody knows, that’s how business grows. You are already too late
To say what you meant, I say to myself, so I read out loud to her.
Inside the book of art, a girl in a photo holds up a piece of paper that says,
“The whole world is on fire and the milk from my tits tastes like kerosene.”
She tells me to spit in her mouth for the first time. Only the romantic dies
Forever and is, therefore, immortal. Turning back to the book, the artist
Says, “Hey, can I use these pictures of you in my book?” and a girl says,
“I’m only okay with you using that photo if you title it, ‘the sweetest
Tightest most magical pussy that I ate all day every day for a week
Then left it to dry out like a dead cat on the side of the road.’”
No one will ever know or care that I went out searching for hours
With a flashlight in the storm, making pass after pass, across the mile
Between the barn and home where I stopped, gave up, looked
Down, and saw her earring shining through the snow, which is why
It’s hard to hear you say I don’t know the first thing about love.
Vogue (Strike a Pose), 2008
CARGO CULT
My die-cut heart has grown implacably thin
On a hardscrabble fantasy, but that’s love
For you, dangling on a chain of keys to nothing.
She’s an insomniac drooling in the sun, my heart
That is, a thousand roses pressed in a book of flesh.
That’s not the dumbest thing I could say but close.
How about hunger is a voice field dressing a live
Wolf as we make out with it—the improper fit
Of our mouths pressing together in abject passion,
As its fur, a slipped off negligee, drops to the floor
With measurable attack, sustain, and decay.
Blood resigns from the body as a voice says,
Yes, say that, except rise and fight with Satan
Who has long loved God more than any man.
THE LAY OF TANTALUS AS AN INSULT TO THE LIBRARY OF DREAMS
One more go with the west wind to anchor in chora—
Soar into every cell of self terrifyingly lit from within
A godhead’s screams bursting from your hair in flames.
Yes, life is a rough trade. Prose is a prison, poetry a prism.
Snakes fuck at your feet. Four mirrored triangles hover
Radiant at your chest, each synchronized to autonomous laws.
They do the police in different shades of the fifth element
As sparks of consciousness broker the harmony between:
Dispelling the little lunacies which make the otherwise sound unhappy.
Hell is still empty—the devils, still here. If I don’t know
Where to go, I’ll get there. You might not square the circle,
But at least abandon the tan house. Ovid is our supervisor:
Who loves following the fleeing forms of entertainment,
At the end fills the hand with fronds and picks berries lovingly.
Dying releases the love withheld in life. Something in us
Adores a puzzle, concentration, and Elsa’s “Ejaculation”:
I want to die— / I want to live— / between this / Lovembrace!
In giving, you find the art you wanted is still busy spoiling
Cannibals’ fun. We must be drawn backward. The wheel
Inside the wheel is the part containing the whole.
The monument comes down with the legacy. Come in,
Come in. You’ll see what you’ve never seen before.
Literacy still means learning to unlearn and learn again.
Even if my fears prove to be justified, it doesn’t matter,
Objects have lost their value in this terrible time of war.
And it’s always a time of war. D minor is the key of tragedy.
Tempered by the active and the passive voiced communicant,
May I say, wherever we go, togetherness is our home now.
Love calls us back to the middle path and seals the union within.
Tattoo and take care not to deny the holiness of the heart’s affections.
Addiction is a greed, fear a theft. If language spoke, it would say,
“My true sentence is to be a guardian. I love you infinitely.”
Words stopped your restless steps inches from the abyss.
Words are in a state of constant alert on your behalf.
Having dispensed with every game of patience, off we go to bed
With the dream at the end of the universe that has been with you
From the moment of birth to the moment of birth in death.
You cannot imagine what harms you from what will save you.
Anyone who has been lost knows the truth of resurrection.
When I ask you to protect me, you say, “I love to protect you.”
THREE KINDS OF EVERYTHING
Dawn approaches and abundances stampede,
Our bodies make love as we weep and dream
With an effulgent smell of death engulfing us,
We lie to each other about the way we feel,
Bend time, curve space, to discover, in tandem,
What love is only by what is left of love when
Love returns, whether by death or dismantlement,
To begin, inch by inch, through suffering and song,
As though this unrehearsed, yet familiar, way leads
To the place breath insists us on to, melting edges
Off the fact we have come so far yet just begun,
What happens stalls out within the fear we have
Seen the truth of an instance a little too clearly
And now we are living only for emergencies.
EARLY WORK FROM GARAGE (Salt, 2007) AND ECHO TRAIN (Salt, 2010)
IN VINO VERITAS
I dipped my finger into the wine
Placed it on the crystal rim
And with just the right lack
Of pressure I gently followed
The thin resonant line
Pointing to the heart of the thing
With no decipherable center.
THE SOURCE
The moon has done its part
And it will do its part again tonight
Reflecting light that will illuminate
Our sleep from a source that truly is
On the other side. In this light
It’s no wonder that we lie here
Like cattle crowded by the bent visions
Of our dreams. We’re better off if the sun
Is the eye of God and not the whole of God—
A single vision that sees everything
And nothing as the same thing.
No two ways of looking at it.
No other version of the self
Going around seeing the future
As a perforated edge along the stars
That can be torn away at any moment
While losing sight of the fact that stars
Burn from their own resources.
Tonight we read from them the story
Of our own light burning—
How the distance it travels is our distance.
LOVE
Say it’s a form of heat that doesn’t rise
But passes from one body to the next.
Say it flows through you and then out
And back in again like a ghostly thread
Weaving a basic pattern inside of you
That will slowly begin to take the shape
Of what you’ll think you can describe.
SPLICE
Watching
The moon
Above two
Actors on
Television,
I wonder,
With no one
To turn to,
If I watched
The moon
The night
The moon
Was filmed.
GYM
There is safety around the smell of coffee and laughter.
And a story so simply told it sounds like our story—
Like your life, a lie you made up as you went along—
Until it stopped working, and then you are the hair
Arrested in the shower and won’t wash down the wall.
And it’s puzzling in the purest sense of puzzling to you—
Inspiration comes in with a dusty tool bag and leaves.
And you wear that “What the fuck?” expression you have
Every time you experience an aspect of relativity like this.
Everything and nothing infinitely like something and never
Left to be what it is or would become begins to sound
Like math for peace—if you just took an involuntary breath
Of hope and surrendered even more to what happens next
And everything you can’t imagine after that, with love.
And that is when we doubt and say you'd have to be dead
Or free. The storyteller tells us only our idea of who
We are is dead. And that we are all our own religion.
YES
To the snow that fell earlier today
And kept me from diving inside,
Where yesterday is a warm country
Thousands of miles away from here—
Footprints get me giggling about how
Temporary all of my arrangements are
And that my feet are adding a few steps
Against the idea that I am a spare part
Of this day I am too scared to live in.
And, Yes, because it feels special to feel
Like nothing special, and in particular,
In boots, on a sidewalk, late in winter.
ECHO TRAIN
“A glorious dream! though now the glories fade.”
— Goethe, Faustus
Committed to a toy machine aboveground,
I can no longer see the more the past drains
Over and into me as it would a tool to cut.
It lends to the expression: Pass forth, freely.
Hearing out an estatescape of smiles and
Coordinated handshakes, nodding to recover
And depart to return, giving off its pangs,
And its collapses, and its releases—a bundle
Of luck we try to embrace the passage of—
A fountain of youth takes up a collection
Pool, in medias res, when the work of drafting
A policy in the marsh is done. The feeling
Of the forward, irrevocable flow of time
Is a fluke. I was once an insane asshole, too.
Distant future, distant past—overall, these
Are the same. Time’s arrow is a heart: the
Length from the tip of the hand to the heart.
Not all of us will have to learn the French for,
“No, black holes are not about to de-story us,”
But this bit is about the width of an avocado
On the moon, as seen from earth. It’s not
Always this way. Depending on the days
My shoes will last a day. Maybe two days.
I wake to go out to say hello to the grasses
I weave. And people and the dirt. I rub
The dirt in my hair. Indoors, you told me
To put water on some carrots and I obeyed.
Another thing I couldn’t quite explain.
Reason in the canary wavers. You will be
Learning more. Lightning spits back. Imagine,
Floating there, hypnotizing a pocket square,
Having it do whatever you want it to do. You
Can have it escape from a jar. You can have it
Change color, dissolve a knot and more:
Appear and disappear, in and out of somewhere
And nowhere. With beautiful, pathologically
Suspended disbelief, we can be cheap enough
To burn out in a festival of panic over eternal
Nutrition. Or, though our deeply flawed ideas
Persist, we can unveil what an array has led us
To be so allergic to our space and our time, and
It must lie a helpless log upon the waves.
WITH SOMEONE ELSE’S TELEPHONE
Gathering information and groceries
In the morning—before the full pitch
Of afternoon and its distractions—
Let’s say I was—for the first time—
Struck by my innate love for you.
And each shopping day after that,
I have experienced the full pitch
Of my innate love for you, just
Before noon, when you are gone.
Gone—for practical purposes, just
Shy of healthy—in the sense of
Forever, once I get the headline—
From the day after the last time
I went shopping—out of my mind,
About a person in the Safeway
Parking lot who was arrested,
Reciting lines from Paradiso,
Naked, in Italian, and full pitch
For the sun and other stars to hear
The darkest light of love revealed.
Who, Me?, 2009
THE FUNERAL DINNER
“It is enough to tell of the books we’ve read, and our biography is done.” — Osip Mandelstam
On the title page of Rose Hecht’s copy
Of A Guide for the Bedeviled you can see
Lipstick traces where she kissed her husband’s
Name beneath the inscription: To Rose for
Whose heart and out of whose spirit this book
Was written by her grateful lover, Ben
Rose, who after his death went through
Each book in his vast library, documenting
The mind of the man she loved in life,
Taping in extra pages where his opinions
Required more than simply highlighting
“Benny’s favorite line” in A Hero of Our Time.
In a dog-eared copy of The Brothers K
She got to page one hundred and
Stopped writing. You’d think reading too
Unless you turn to the last page, some
Five hundred later, where two words seem
To be enough to follow the closing passage:
“Well, now we will finish talking
And go to his funeral dinner.
Don’t be disturbed at our eating pancakes—
It’s a very old custom and there is something
Nice in that!” laughed Alyosha. “Well,
Let us go! And now we go hand in hand.”
And it’s as though she disappeared
Into what her hand guided her to say,
Right then, into the book itself,
And became the words: me too.
RESISTENTIALISM
I was sitting in a field. It was a great field.
One I was surely not the first to write about.
The thought that so many thoughts had been
Drafted in the company of its expanses
Was putting me on the edge of its openness
That had become so crowded with sentimentality.
Ghost lines, of those who came before me,
Took over as if they were in the wind, carrying
Only the particularly bad ideas that had ever been
Expressed there—right to the spot I was sitting
Like a whispering pollen giving hay-fever to my
Imagination—I couldn’t breathe when they bound
Together like troops repositioning for a final sweep:
Plush was a musket at my temple, my eyes dilated
In the face of the dark cannon barrel green
And grass was striking a deadly match.
MAKING LIGHT
The gum on my left shoe as I walk
Across the carpet makes a sound
Close to little spits of radio static.
And the tug it gives my leg lets me
Know I am aware of my walking,
Lets me know I know where I am
I am in my life and in the library.
This is a rarity for me and I let
The rarity of it in, jog my memory,
And allow myself to wonder where
I was the last time this happened
And am I free enough to smile.
THE HOUSE THAT BUSTER KEATON BUILT
Looks just as thrown together as I am—on edge
And tired of windows framing days. Mullions like
Crosshairs on a gun aimed at me. The flight of stairs
Lead up to a door that leads to another door that leads
Down to the underwater basement, where I, in a lead
MARK V diving suit, sit at a lop-sided desk composing
Poems—surrounded by the silence of their inspiration.
Upstairs, my wife pumps a loom—making both
A blanket for our son and air for me, striking a delicate
Balance between the practical and the absurd while I,
Stone-faced and a porkpie hat off to you, write—
An octopus as my inkwell, a swordfish as my mighty quill.
They Came To Me, 2009
NEW YEAR’S EVE
Let your old acquaintance be forgotten.
In the olden time, in days gone by you
Might have been a temptress, you might
Have been the voluptuous fruit of innocence.
It doesn’t matter now. He’s drunk, Eve.
He’s on his second pack of cigarettes and
Doesn’t have the balls to talk to you.
Look at this sad Adam eyeing the wax
Apples in the bowl. He’s got that look
In his eye like he’s going to throw up
Or make a toast to you: “Ashed my ashes
From dusk to dusk and wept I’ve kept
This fib of a rib. I’m turning a new fig leaf,
My dear, I swear I was wrong to kiss and tell.”
LECANOMANCY
Here an enamel of light once weighed
On the water whose whole nature
Was reflection, spotted in shadows
That had the ability to escape
The all-night sleep of your soul
Unwilling to claim its dreams were,
By design, full of whispering signs—
Each covered in small flowers
And stars endowed with a magic
Virtue to avert evil. However,
You and your dreams are still
In the air and this is the instrument
Used to measure the pain: Let your
Language surface along with your most
Morbid dread and end where no one word
Can be recalled any longer than the light
That you’ve kept faded—but be willing
To stay all night in danger of increasing
All the other dangers that are ready to
Follow in your wake. You are becoming
A truth without a name that is even
More scared than you already are
Each time the wind blows across
The water a little harder than usual,
As if here is where you were about to speak
For the very first time, but can only manage
To vomit out flames, moonlighting
As your own gravedigger—every dread
Is submerged by another dread and to your
Soul’s alarm—here is where you might
Achieve one aspect of mastery over the sea.
Aaron Fagan’s latest work is availabile on Caesura here.
Camilla Ha is a multidisciplinary artist who combines text, personae, dance, costumery, sound, animation, painting, sculpture, and food to create immersive installations and performances. She is currently based in Houston, where she’s studying to become a psychotherapist.
Aaron Fagan at childhood home in Victor, New York, 1976.
Aaron Fagan skateboarding at The Brooklyn Banks, NYC, 1989.
