National Poetry Month : Sarah Mangold,

 

 

 The Atom No. 17
            (for Hilma af Klint)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Mangold is the author of Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners (Fordham University Press, 2021, selected for the POL Prize by Cynthia Hogue), Giraffes of Devotion (Kore), Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish), and Household Mechanics (New Issues, selected by C.D. Wright) and a slew of chapbooks, most recently Birds I Recall (above/ground).  She lives in Edmonds, Washington.

 

 

 

 

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Hilma af Klint’s The Atom Series (1917) contains twenty drawings which illustrate two images of an atom on each page: one image shows the atom as it exists on the etheric plane and the other shows the atom’s state of energy on the physical plane enlarged four times. My twenty poetry atoms consist of af Klint’s original notation for each atom in italics, with my depiction of that notation’s state of energy enlarged four times on the physical plane. Source words for the atoms were collected from Occult Chemistry, Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater (1908) one of the books found in af Klint’s library.