Today we’d like to introduce you to Antino Art.
Hi Antino, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I write for a marketing agency by day and poetry for inner peace. At its caffeine-powered best, my pen can trace the truths between sword fighting, single parenthood, and lone air travel, drawing from my perspective as a second-gen Filipino American raised on 90’s treehouse culture. My words are published in a handful of eclectic places and heard at poetry events across the Triangle. As a Samurai culture aficionado, I share the belief that writing poems sharpens the mind for battle. You might see me walking around downtown Raleigh on a cloudy day with a Katana-shaped umbrella slung over my shoulder.
While I’ve traditionally used the stage/pen name of Antino Art, that’s a mouthful. So just call me Art. That’s what people have started doing nowadays. If not, they just remember me as the poet with a sword.
That’s my story in an elevator, and I’m riding it.
If I had to pick a beginning, it would be when I moved to Raleigh in 2018 from my hometown of South Florida. That’s when I fell from grace. My 10 year marriage ended after I discovered that my wife was having an affair. I became a single parent. I blew my life savings on plane tickets, flying to a new city every month in search of myself. My daughter, who was 4 at the time, was hospitalized with pneumonia. Then 2020 struck – pandemic, social unrest, and all. My mom got diagnosed with cancer. I’ve been ghosted by every romantic interest post-divorce. And I have not been laid in years.
I needed a creative outlet to restore balance. Poetry was that saving grace. Specifically, the poetry community in Raleigh took me in, gave me a space to hone my craft, and helped me reinvent myself in the process. I’ve always been a reclusive writer. While I’d pen chapbooks and produce content for my work as a marketer, I rarely shared my poems in public. Unless it was through magic shows.
Beyond writing, I’ve been studying the art of magic since I was 12. I turned that passion into a full-time profession and performed shows all over the country after graduating in the 2008 recession with no job offers. My brand of performance was infused with spoken word poetry. However, poetry was always the second fiddle to magic.
After arriving in Raleigh, the magic faded. I grew out of that childlike sense of wonder that magic creates when reality hit me the way it did. My closest friends in South Florida were magicians, and they were now harder to reach. Magic felt like a shell of a past life I could not reclaim.
Even so, I never stopped writing: Daily for work, and nightly for catharsis. Poetry seized the top spot on my scale of artistic priorities. I began going to poetry nights at places like Imurj in downtown Raleigh. That’s where I crossed paths with DS Will, Watson, and other pillars in the local poetry scene, rebuilding my circle of friends in the process. It was as if I was reincarnated. I had a new social ecosystem where I could grow my art, express myself freely, and connect with kindred spirits.
I have been rising ever since.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I believe that suffering is an essential ingredient for art.
Specific to poetry writing, I had to go through a heart-shattering separation with my first love to get to my best work. Beyond my own neurosis, the way it hurt my daughter- who was 3 at the time – was (and still is) especially hard to swallow.
I coped by traveling to a new city every month with a pen in hand: Chicago, New Orleans, D.C., Las Vegas, wherever the wind led. It was a way to distance myself from what happened and refresh my perspective. While I reclaimed a piece of myself at each destination, the one corner of the map that was pivotal in my recovery was Seattle. Their ambient daylight, misty bay, lo-fi coffeehouse aesthetic- it all spoke to me, as if it understood what I had been through.
I returned to myself in that weather-beaten town by the sea. My daughter, Nali, came with me on many of those sojourns. We bonded through the adversity and made bright memories amid the debris. There, I saw the beauty in the overcast.
I fell in love with who I was in Seattle. And my pen moved as free and swift as it ever had to document it all.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
The work I’m most proud of at the moment is a project called “Emerald City Blues”, which I recently completed after three years.
It’s a micro-chapbook that takes readers on a tour of my kindred spirit city, and features the poems I wrote during my self-reclamation sojourns.
Visit http://www.antinoart.com/
What do you like and dislike about the city?
Raleigh’s superpower is kindness. It has the architecture, dining, shopping, and creative energy of a budding metropolis, but balances it with the humble warmth of a small town in the woods. I feel like I’m seen here and remembered by name. The poetry scene in Raleigh, and how it impacted my story, is a prime example of the city’s nurturing spirit.
My only gripe is that Raleigh is an absolute ghost town for dating, especially if you are an Asian male. Not that we fare better in other American cities, anyway. But if any city can end sexual racism toward Asian men who are tired of being seen as invisible, I hope it’s Raleigh!
Contact Info:
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Email: antinoart@antinoart.com
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Website: www.antinoart.com
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Instagram: instagram.com/fatherofnali
Image Credits
Marshall Holloway, Tetiana Volkodav, and Mark Espinosa
