"art is our best wing" sounds like a motto for a classroom poster, but the next two lines take the comfort out of it. Art is "uncomfortable / as hanging by the neck." Dave Bonta's "Art student" is twelve short lines in four tercets, and what it says about apprenticeship is not encouraging. Art may lift us, but it also constricts. Learning it means giving up the tidy idea that to learn is to understand.
The first stanza sets two images against each other. A wing suggests flight and freedom, while hanging by the neck suggests a body that cannot move. The word "best" quietly implies that our other wings are worse, so art is a makeshift one. The poet places "uncomfortable" alone on its own line, and its length stretches the pause before the shock of the comparison. Whether the word describes the wing or art itself is left open. The understatement is darkly funny, since "uncomfortable" is a mild word for what it is being compared to. An art student might also hear a gallery pun in "hanging", because paintings are hung. That is an inference, but it suits a poem whose speaker is a student of art.
The second stanza turns to a made object: "one house very handsomely done / was so like a thought / I returned home." The phrase "very handsomely done" sounds like a teacher's or a critic's verdict, polite and slightly old-fashioned. The odd comparison is that a house, the most solid of things, is "like a thought," which has no weight at all. The final line can be read two ways. The speaker may have gone back to a real house, or back into his own mind. In either reading, good art does not make him stay and admire it. It sends him back to where he started, changed.
The third stanza states the method: "I teach my ear / not to understand sounds / and that way to learn." The paradox sits between the verbs "teach" and "learn", which frame the lines and make the speaker both pupil and instructor. Understanding, here, is an obstacle. To understand a sound is to name it and file it away, and the ear stops listening. The student trains himself to hear what is actually there before it turns into meaning. Drawing teachers sometimes ask students to draw what they see rather than what they know, and this stanza applies the same idea to hearing. The sense has also moved from the eye, which was busy with the house, to the ear.
The last stanza is a simile without a main clause: "just as the dead / receive their legacy / of moth and fur." It is attached to the stanza before, so the student's learning is compared to the way the dead inherit. The dead are the perfect pupils, since they receive without understanding. What they are left is not money or land but moths and fur, the damage that creeps into a wardrobe. The image echoes the first stanza. A moth is a creature with wings, a smaller and more fragile version of the "best wing," and it eats what hangs in the dark. A fur coat hung in a cupboard is another kind of "hanging," and the opening comparison seems to return in an altered form. These links come from the poem's own vocabulary, so the ending feels earned.
Formally, the poem is spare. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, no capital letters and no punctuation. Lines run from about three to seven syllables, and the stresses follow the way someone might speak. The lack of punctuation lets each stanza hang in the air, which fits the poem's central image. Quiet sound patterns do the work that rhyme would otherwise do. The round vowels of "house," "thought," "sounds" and "home" recur, and the soft consonants of "moth and fur" give the ending a muffled feel.
The poem is significant because it avoids the romantic picture of the artist as an inspired, soaring figure. In twelve lines it describes art as risky, as a discipline of unlearning, and as an inheritance of decay as much as of beauty. The title makes the speaker a student, so the poem reads as a series of lessons, none of them easy, and the last one is that the dead also inherit.