Rachel Eliza Griffiths is obsessed with beauty. Not in the way that Vanity Fair or Hollywood are fixated on the way a person’s body or face looks.

Instead, she says, her relationship with beauty is “complicated.”

One of her favorite quotes is from Bohemian-Austrian poet Ranier Maria Rilke: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us.”
Griffiths’s poetry, her photography, even her film-making and visual art circles around the idea of beauty warily, both drawn to it, and shy of its terror.

“For me, beautiful things involve asymmetrical words and language,” Griffiths said. “I interrogate [beauty], I ask questions. Particularly as a photographer, I’m quite adamant and vigilant about constant questioning and revising and expanding of what it means to invoke the word, and also the practice of it, and the way that it works in language and visuals will be a lifelong trial, I think.”

This Poetry Moment features an excerpt from her longer poem, “According to Beauty.” The poem is dotted with imagery not usually associated with the beautiful, and with words such as “crawled and staggered,” “shattered,” and “splattered.” Pretty is not the same as beautiful. And in Griffiths’ poem, the beautiful is equally terrifying and gorgeous.

Her poem even interrogates the random distribution of beauty: “Luck fell silently/ through the earth. / Luck crawled wherever beautiful things lived.”

With her line, “the burden of the I within/ a flawless landscape,” the poet questions even the validity of beauty.

Featured in a fashion shoot for O Magazine in 2011, Griffiths wore a canary yellow ruffled blouse and salmon-colored pencil skirt and smiled while she mimed painting words on a wall with a javelin-sized brush.

“Gazelle you are mine. Your corpse pounds into me like music,” the words on the wall read, from her poem “Ode to a Gazelle While I Bathe on Sunday Evenings.” Beautiful and terrible, just like Rilke said.

Susan Thornton Hobby
Producer, The Writing Life

For Reference only:

According to Beauty
 
 
Under midnights you came, a hunter through memory.
It was memory that could please and betray. It was memory
that crawled and staggered, staging the deaths of beautiful words.
It was memory, distressed as a mirror, which shattered smoke.  Face.
It was memory that bewildered the alchemy of the real.
 
I could never escape midnights or the remembering.
 
It was memory, a voice said. The voice belonged to everyone,
which made it into thunder. It was memory waiting in a corner
like a riff of selves in the dark. I am an outlaw woman
shadow-dancing. My life too quick to bruise. What is the name for those who collect the beautiful.

Later version:
My life too fast to burn.  It was memory
that killed my loves, my children, shamed the old country.
 
The moon was involved wherever wolves hunted.
 
Stars were gathered. Arrows piercing my shoulder.  Luck fell silently
through the earth. Luck crawled wherever beautiful things lived.
 
Through fields of water I wandered. Ishmael,
as I fled the whale-skull.  What salt gave me at dawn.
There were colors, textures. Under the hood of irreparable delight,
adorned in moths, I arrived. What is the name
for those who collect the beautiful?
 
The word for the gesture of seeing
but not possessing eyes? Sight ghosted or exorcised. An eye
that blurs as the selves, the burden of the I within
a flawless landscape.
 
Starlings, from a dark cluster.
 
I stare at the way bars lengthen in moonlight
upon my bedroom floor where I danced in a wind
for your lungs.  You held solace, a small yellow bird,
to my cheek until it stopped breathing.
 
Whispers uttered between memorize and believe.
 
It was memory that gave me faith then unleashed termites
in my house, my body. It was memory that held
the faces quiet. It was memory that marched and saluted
my useless authority, mocking my splattered skin.
It was memory that cried for blood
and vengeance. Against the midnights
where the shutters of the law remained latched.
 
And it was impossible to know whether God was
sleeping inside.
 
I told you once about the woman
I met, huddled by a river. Stained yet polished
by rain and music.  I always wondered why
she waited for the moonlight to disappear
 
before she revealed her face,
pronouncing our name.

Miracle Arrhythmia, 2010.
https://youtu.be/Qsm4gG6cy1k