Sometimes the online world reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s image from Haroun and the Sea of Stories: In this tale written for children (putatively) stories live in the sea like currents. All you have to do is sit in your boat, reach your hand into the water and pull one in. Yesterday’s post about Diane […]
Poetry
God Gutters Down to Metaphor
Continuing on the theme of 19th century masters (an earlier post this week featured Paul Cézanne) here’s a poem by Irish poet Derek Mahon (whose work was featured previously here) about Vincent Van Gogh: A Portrait of the Artist (for Colin Middleton) Shivering in the darkness Of pits, slag-heaps, beetroot fields, I gasp for light […]
- Children's Art
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1000 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Listen, Tell, Draw at Bergamot Station Another memorable exhibit seen while we were in LA: This one was at Bergamot Station (in Santa Monica) although not inside any of the many galleries at that location. Sponsored by the Santa Monica Museum, the installation featured the art of children responding to Wallace Stevens’ poem, 13 Ways […]
Twining the Text
Witness I saw that a star had broken its rope in the stables of heaven— This homeless one will find her home in the foothills of a green century. Who sleeps beside still waters, wakes. The terrestrial hands of the heaven clock comb out the comet’s tangled mane and twelve strands float free. In the […]
Heather Bell
Love The truth about Klimt is: when he painted “The Kiss,” he was also beating his beautiful wife. He beat her with one hand and painted with the other. He got two sad blisters on his right palm from this. His wife sometimes slowly pulled up the roots to his favorite willows and cut them, […]
I’d Pick This One Not Once But Many Times
Ganesh, Southern India, 2008 Homage to Goa The ceiling fans in the house go round and round as if to whisk us off to a different sky. I squirt Deet at a thin mosquito whine; gods chuckle softly from a garden shrine, fruit ripen in the gloaming without a sound. Shiva, Parvati and Ganesh the […]
One is Cool, and One is Overheated
Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Bishop Due to my ongoing interest in any and all times Bishopian… This excerpt is from a review by Moira Richards at Rattle of Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic by Alicia Suskin Ostriker: In another essay, about the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon […]
Breath Me, Light
Behind Perfume, Only Solitude Ink will come. Lamp lung breathes light at the edge of an idea. The edge an idea, also the door of the room that silence opens. The pen sighs, a lens for the shut-in light. Breathe me, light. Have the idea to have me. –Liz Waldner I was introduced to Waldner’s […]
Somewhere a Nation Moves
Rehearsals for the New Order The courthouse is empty now ablaze with holly, wreathed and ribboned for the season, standing firm against a thrill of breezes, the grinding arcs of stars, grackles crazed and dizzying the turret, the drunken hair of winter gardens at its feet, while inside great mahogany walls, no judge presides, no […]
Poetry Tracking
How much can you know about a movie, a book, a poem from a snippet, be it a trailer, the first page, the first few lines? Joan Houlihan in Contemporary Poetry Review makes the case that the quality of a poet’s work can be determined with some accuracy by “previewing” a poem’s first few lines. […]