A CHAPBOOK BY CORINNA CARLOTTI
Artist Statement:
Love is an act of poetry, and thus, poetry an act of love.
I write about love because of its primal nature. I believe we are born to love-not to choose to love- but to love regardless of choice. The subject of this chapbook was someone who I have loved wholy, even when he didn’t deserve it. It came like a compulsion, something to which I attribute not only love, but art was well.
Valéry writes that his poems “came about from no apparent cause, arising from some accident or other, they developed according to their own nature, and consequently [he] found [himself] for a time jolted out of [his] habitual state of mind. Then, the cycle completed, [he] returned to the rule of ordinary exchanges between my life and [his] thought”. This is the way in which all my poems are born -not from a game of mad lib- but something more prophetic and impulsive. In the same way, do I love. Art and love consume my mind in ways that make them indistinguishable.
I did not start this chapbook as a means to an end, but it became one. It became “The End”. This chapbook was a way for me to put my abandoned love into different lenses so that I could see it more clearly. In doing so, this project which started as a ‘fuck you, I hate you’ project turned into an ‘a part of me will always love you’ project. The process of grieving a dead relationship, but living person became brutal at times, but it also bandaged me in a way I wasn’t expecting.
Poetry, much like love, can not only destroy the soul, heal it, but also lock it in a time capsule. Though I know that there will come a day in the future where my love for this person will leave me, it will always live in this book. The world I have created to grieve us has come from the primal love through my hand and onto the pages I write to live forever, even when that love has gone.
The Chapbook:
Pretty Little 