Your Top-Notch Persona

Scented Offering by Anna Panunto is a structurally diverse collection of visceral, emotionally driven poetry that focuses on the senses. Indeed, no two poems in this collection are exactly alike. While some have a more traditional stanza by stanza poetic structure like “The Eternal Fire Within,” others have a more modern, split structure like “Gaze; Parallel.” The structure alone in some of these verses will have you searching the page for meaning. Much like with her art, Anna’s writing is not like most other authors– rather than insert her own Will and meaning into each work, she implores readers to find their own meaning in her work. She states as much in the introduction of the collection:  “Your interpretation of my poetic form will be uniquely yours. May you find a piece of  yourself embedded in some of the verses! For as much as we are all unique, there is  also a commonality that surprisingly threads us together” (2). This isn’t to say Anna doesn’t have her own ...

  Art can be incredibly motivating and being around art can have an immensely empowering effect on us.  It’s a similar effect to one experienced while being surrounded by religious relics or statues– art can make us feel invigorated and influenced by something greater than ourselves. It’s almost like experiencing what John Keats called the Sublime in a more easily accessible way.  According to Romanticist writers like Keats, the Sublime is defined as a meeting of the subjective-internal and objective-external, and is the strongest emotion we as Humans can experience.  It typically requires us to put ourselves in awe-inspiring situations like seeing the sunrise from the peak of a mountain or looking up at a statue that towers over us. Instead of climbing a mountain or finding a huge statue though, with art we only need to go to a museum or into our living room, if we’re collectors. There are many different types of art and genres, all of which can have a powerful effe...