Ekphrastic Writing Challenge
Thank you to everyone who participated in our Anders Zorn writing challenge, which ends today. The prompt this time is Number 7, by Anne Ryan. Deadline is October 5, 2018. Everyone can participate! Try something new if you've never written from visual art before and discover why there are so many of us devotees. Ekphrastic writing helps artists and lovers of art to look more carefully, from different angles or mindsets, at visual art. And it helps writers discover new ways of approaching their work, their experiences, and writing itself. The rules are simple. The Rules 1. Use this prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the painting or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. 3. Have fun. 4. Send only your best results to theekphrasticreview@gmail.com. 5. Include ANNE RYAN CHALLENGE in the subject line so that your submission doesn't get lost in the sea of emails. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. 7. Deadline is October 5, 2018. 8. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 9. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, following the deadline. 10. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges!
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La Guinguette
Somewhere outside Paris with its bistro taxes, yowling alley cats, and bony beggars, these slab benches and battered wooden tables await the weekend drunkards seeking cheap white wine, innocent birds, and oblivion à la fraternité. No wonder le garçon’s shoulders slump sur la droite as he anticipates waiting on/wrestling with the bands of holiday bathers trained in from Gare de la Bastille, his afternoon yellowing into the monotonous stuccos and moldering foundations of Nogent-sur-Marne or Le Plessis- Robinson or Nogent-sur-Seine. ‘New gents,’ too, to this banlieue, the soused and fledgling laborers will soon descend on his tiny town to guzzle a sour nectar, though no flower’s in sight—nor prudish mother, other than the scarce locals pitched forward over open bottles, hanging on each other’s every worried word. He sneers from under his leafy post that after seven slow years sanctioning city boys seducing coyly stubborn country girls, he knows this half-full dance hall en plein air will once again fill then thrill to the bal-musette, the stench of lithe, sensuous bodies peppering the evening breeze. Listen as he laments the loss of his own young life when he assumed a future featuring far more than indulging working-class brats till the day he died. Now, even the cracked glass crowning the café’s lamp post seems to signify his doors have shut—not a one ajar-- and this subsistence beside a scenic river will never proffer further options, none, anyway, that could set him free. D.R. James D. R. James has taught writing, literature, and peace-making for 33 years at a small college and lives and writes in the woods east of Saugatuck, Michigan. Poems and prose appear in various journals and anthologies, and his most recent of seven collections are If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press) and the chapbooks Split-Level and Why War (both Finishing Line Press). www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage Dessert pour Deux ~ We oft’ passed by the tables outside the small bistro, but walk on in stride. The wine flowing, not free, would soon prove that we had a purse that fell short of our pride. Once we married, our family and friends, though of meager means, shared of their ends, and inside the café out of sight, tucked away, déjeuner, with a love which transcends. We’ll remember that old Maitre-D’ at the guinguette they called “Chez Amis,” because, at that table, young, willing, and able, we asked, “May we?” He said, “Mais Oui!” Ken Gosse Ken Gosse prefers using simple language and traditional meter and rhyme in verses with whimsy and humour. First published in The First Literary Review–East in November, 2016, his poems are also in The Offbeat, Pure Slush, Parody, Home Planet News, and other publications. Now retired, Ken was raised in the Chicago suburbs and has lived in Arizona over twenty years. Married, children grown, but multiple cats and dogs run their lives. Last Patron in the Outdoor Café Summer’s fullness, sun, have faded. Autumn’s coming is broadcast by wind that strips the last leaves from the café’s trees, propels that one lone bird as he swoops south. Yet, wrapped against cold, one last chance to enjoy outdoor arbors still beckons as respite from shopping chores: A moment to oneself to order coffee, a pastry… a moment alone to think and plan… to prepare for those even more barren hours in the shivering days of Winter, just ahead. Joan Leotta Joan Leotta has been playing with words on page and stage since childhood in Pittsburgh. She is a writer and story performer. Her Legacy of Honor series feature strong Italian-American women. Her poetry and essays appear or are forthcoming in Gnarled Oak, the A-3 Review, Hobart Literary Review, Silver Birch, Peacock, and Postcard Poems and Prose among others. Her first poetry chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon, was just released by Finishing Line Press. Joan's picture books from Theaqllc, Whoosh!, Summer in a Bowl, Rosa and the Red Apron, and Rosa's Shell celebrate food and family. Her award-winning short stories are collected in Simply a Smile. You can find more about her work on her blog at www.joanleotta.wordpress.com The Calling There you are, Vincent, Filtering the world With solitude’s metallic taste, With melancholia’s aversion to life. Standing in the midst of your own dreary painting, You are anxious for change, To transform your palette to yellows and blues, To find solace in the night sky, To dream your way to stars. Your posture depicts the loneliness of undiscovered cave etchings, A longing for other worlds, For relationships like those of your café patrons, For the freedom of the lone bird above you. You are an Aries, As sensitive as tea bags in hot water, Always feeling the air that is Saint Remy’s, The darkness that will swaddle you for your journey To reach the stars. You agonize that you are on the brink, That the Fates have cut you a short thread, That you would labor with the fury of a spinning top gone mad To complete the art coursing your veins. Vincent, because we see what you can’t, We implore you to come out of the shadows. The light will bless you, The sun ordain you, Your sons and daughters will populate the earth, And your creations receive eternal life. Jo Taylor Jo Taylor is a retired English teacher (as of 2018) residing in a small town outside Atlanta. Though poetry was her favourite genre to teach, she had little time to devote to writing it. At this season of her life, however, she writes daily, mostly about family and faith. "The Calling" was inspired by the many students who, when given an ekphrastic challenge, chose to write about Van Gogh. His offspring, indeed, are many! The Bad Waiter puts his fingers around the rim of the water glass, sneezes without handkerchief, asks for your order two minutes after you sit down. He brings the main course before you’re finished with the hors d’oeuvres, forces you to lift your plate to make room, asks how the food is tasting while your mouth is full, stacks dirty plates in front of you, perfunctorily hands you the bill. You say he hasn’t been trained, doesn’t view the job as a career, a métier, unlike the starched and pressed servers in Paris, who are not snooty or servile but efficient, pacing the meal, elegant as dancers, stretching, gliding, holding aloft trays of wine and beer, platters of coq au vin, gigot d’agneau, cheeseboards, lemon tarts, landing these safely, leaving you to savor the faint sounds of a small orchestra, the whispers of rumour, the beginnings of a late-afternoon breeze. Ronnie Hess Ronnie Hess is a essayist and poet, the author of five poetry chapbooks (the latest: O Is for Owl and Canoeing a River with No Name) and two culinary travel guides (Eat Smart in France and Eat Smart in Portugal). She lives in Madison, WI. ronniehess.com La Guingette Rendered in the sepia of an old photograph full of people you have never known, this café is hardly genial. Clearly, Van Gogh felt no welcome here. No one waved him over to a table, offering a glass in greeting. The figures are faceless, outdoor tables lacking in detail. It’s the light he features, grey autumn sky with its lone bird, grape vines climbing metal gates, still waving their green banner, refusing to give way to winter. Stiff brown grass licks like flames around the diners’ feet. Robbi Nester Robbi Nester frequently writes Ekphrastic poetry. She is the author of four books of poetry, including an Ekphrastic chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections of poetry: A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and a forthcoming book, Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag), which is available for advance sale from the publisher at http://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/narrow-bridge-robbi-nester/. She is also the editor of two anthologies: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014) and an Ekphrastic e-book, Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees--celebrating the photography of Beth Moon, accessible athttp://www.poemeleon.org/over-the-moon-birds-beasts-and. Her poetry, reviews, articles, and essays have appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and other publications. Come Share a Glass With Me Van Gogh presents his La Guinguette in muted tones. It is a sweetly balanced painting in several ways. Its rosy beiges meet oranges and browns overlaid with touches of greens to represent the trees and what may be ivy above the trellises. This is a quiet scene, but I wonder about the hidden relationships of the ten people present in the scene. A guinguette is described in a French Dictionary of 1750 as a small cabaret either with or without a small dance hall where people can gather to drink a cheap “but malicious” light green wine. The artist painted this Guinguette with four alcoves in the middle distance. These are airily separated, one from the other, by bent-wood trellises. Couples are seated in these alcoves and glasses and bottles are faintly visible. What do the people discuss? Do they talk of the rising price of cabbage? That Jeanne will meet Pierre after his shift ends? Three rustic wooden tables and benches fill the foreground with one bench situated askance from its table. A bustled woman sits engrossed with her partner in the foreground. Nearly each of the figures in the painting wears a hat, but for the waiter who stands in a place of importance at near-centre. Behind the alcoves is a building to the right whose 32-paned window adds airiness and whose brilliant orange slanted roof points toward a towered structure to the left. Around the tower a bird flies, but that bird, unless a very large bird, seems slightly out of proportion. Viewers of this painting can enjoy the way the gas lamp in the foreground rises up to meet the corner of the orange roof of the distance. Here is overall balance of composition. I love the quiet tone of conviviality demonstrated by the people seated at the tables; most appear in relaxed but engaged stances. The figure who dominates the scene, however, is the waiter standing— immobile, patient, nonchalant but attentive—in his sober black jacket and pants, with a very long white apron. He’s emblematic of something particular. He seems to speak the sentiment, ”As long as this cabaret exists, as long as you, my people, visit, I’ll be here to serve you.” We must not pity him, as Orwell in another era, advises us. For le garçon stands proudly, as servant, dreaming of the day when he too will have the money to sit at leisure like his customers. I’ve read guinguettes were popular in the areas surrounding Paris’s suburbs for the cheap wine to be had, and at a time when citizens often swam in the nearby Seine. Perhaps customers came for after-bathing relaxation. Perhaps the cabarets died out when the people’s habits changed, the river having become too dirty for swimmers and too busy with barge traffic. In the meanwhile, nothing will disturb the relaxation permeating Van Gogh's scene. Vive l’apres-midi! Another round here, Garcon! Carole Mertz Carole Mertz, poet and essayist, has recent essays at Eclectica, Mom Egg Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, The Working Writer, and elsewhere. She enjoys spending as much time out of doors as possible. She lives with her husband in Parma, Ohio. Not Blue, Not Yellow
Your virginal roses white with pinks as delicate as a young girl's blush cannot rest their petals loosening as we watch ready to fall they turn and bow their heads smiling up at us from underneath each ruffle remembering what it took to come here out of seed and woody branch to unfurl each velvet layer from the tight wound bud to share their sweet communion with each passing bee come here at last as cut and gathered captives who yet stir and lean together ready for the dance-- this life refusing to be still Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy: "I have always been a writer, but spent most of my working life as a Registered Nurse. I've had work appear in many print and online journals, including 3Elements Review, Califragile and Earth's Daughters. I have an electronic chapbook , Things I Was Told Not to Think About, available as a free download from Praxis Magazine Online." Fading Lovely, but limp brown at the edges, some nodding low some blooms already fallen onto the table, dying. Vincent, are you bidding us farewell with this bowl of roses? A still life, still alive, but fading. Joan Leotta Joan Leotta has been playing with words on page and stage since childhood in Pittsburgh. She is a writer and story performer. Her Legacy of Honor series feature strong Italian-American women. Her poetry and essays appear or are forthcoming in Gnarled Oak, the A-3 Review, Hobart Literary Review, Silver Birch, Peacock, and Postcard Poems and Prose among others. Her first poetry chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon, was just released by Finishing Line Press. Joan's picture books from Theaqllc, Whoosh!, Summer in a Bowl, Rosa and the Red Apron, and Rosa's Shell celebrate food and family. Her award-winning short stories are collected in Simply a Smile. You can find more about her work on her blog at www.joanleotta.wordpress.com Still Life with Pink Roses, by Van Gogh It surprises me to see this canvas of pink roses, heads bowed almost to the ground. They are gathered in a metal pail halfway buried in the grass. Through Van Gogh’s eyes, the banal so often becomes tempestuous and dark—sunflowers unnaturally bright, throbbing with life. Twisted trees all unregulated emotion. But these blowsy roses, petals close to dropping, faded as old wallpaper in an abandoned house, seem as calm as cows grazing in the meadow. Yet the vivid grass and leaves suggest an undercurrent of the old mania-- unchecked, burning in the summer light. Robbi Nester Robbi Nester frequently writes Ekphrastic poetry. She is the author of four books of poetry, including an Ekphrastic chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections of poetry: A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and a forthcoming book, Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag), which is available for advance sale from the publisher at http://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/narrow-bridge-robbi-nester/. She is also the editor of two anthologies: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014) and an Ekphrastic e-book, Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees--celebrating the photography of Beth Moon, accessible athttp://www.poemeleon.org/over-the-moon-birds-beasts-and. Her poetry, reviews, articles, and essays have appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and other publications. Fragments Pieced from a Letter in a Bottle
… as in Brueghel’s design, the surface barely perturbed, conceding only a discreet and motionless pair of legs. This, too, a triumph of the Old Master — a vista drawn wider than its namesake, the canvas stretched beyond the tension of some hollow and undergirding principle. For old Pieter understood that containers occupy a higher echelon than their contents, as in the constant pressure of the bottle-cap keeping the hiss from escaping the cola, preserving its pop. Or that same bottle with a letter nestled in its core, enclosing it, eliding its form, floating into the shape of a castaway’s trope. The missive commands speculation only because it is found in the tautness of the bottle, delivered by the non-agency of the tide, tumbling in its glassy contours like a Venus emerging from the bone-white ridges of her scallop-shell. Meaning emerges simply, like the accretion of calcium in the heart of the mollusk — shaped around detritus, putting into form the skittering of the body against the chaff of that which it encounters. Or like this: the cryptic reading of sea-foam as it splits and swirls around some barely-there disturbance, a pair of legs dropped abruptly from the sky. Anurak Saelaow Anurak Saelaow is a Singaporean poet and writer. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Eunoia Review, and Ceriph Magazine, amongst other places. He is the author of one chapbook, Schema (The Operating System, 2015), and holds a BA in creative writing and English from Columbia University. “To Go to a Star”: Participation Mystique in Starry Night Over the Rhône, by Roula-Maria Dib9/16/2018 “To Go to a Star”: Participation Mystique in Starry Night Over the Rhône
“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream,” said the father of luminescent stars in velvety blue night skies. Perhaps there is more to the dreams he paints than the beauty of colour. Dreams of starry night skies kept haunting young Vincent, as he had once related to his friend, painter Emile Bernard, in 1888; thus, Starry Night Over the Rhône came forth, only to be the ancestral parent of his flagship Starry Night, in which he depicted the night view from his asylum room at Saint-Rémy, and Café Terrace at Night. In Starry Night Over the Rhône two lovers walk by the river; there is a sky-illuminating constellation, The Great Bear, only to be paled by the stark brightness of gas light reflections on the face of the water. Standing in front of this masterpiece at the Musee D’Orsay, contemplating, I find a vision of the artist depicted here: a ‘blue’-print of Vincent’s destination—and destiny. He had reached for the stars, but in his own way: “Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.” And he certainly takes that route, leaving behind him a whole trail of stars, thousands of art works produced in such a short period of time. As if the purpose of his life was to give life to these paintings, these expressions of nature, of the human psyche with all its universality: “I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” His life was a journey to these stars, his “death to go to a star” an abnegation of the self, a declaration of his mission as a vehicle for art. As Carl Jung once said: "The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle." My other live encounter with Starry Night Over the Rhône was an immersive experience at the Van Gogh Alive exhibition (in Dubai), where people felt as if they were literally swaddled in Van Gogh’s paintings, words, and spirit. The Starry Night paintings projected on the surrounding walls around us, along with the music and artist’s quotes resembled those of poetry, visual poetry, which he strove to compose with colour: “Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.” So Van Gogh’s poetry transcends the paper only to find itself transferred onto canvas. But to look at, to feel, to take in and be taken in by the blue and yellow tidal brushstrokes actually brought out the pulse in his visual verse and gave life back to the artist. Blue speaks the language of a hundred metaphors, and the illuminating yellows in the night sky and on the surface of the river express a thousand emotions: “How lovely yellow is! It stands for the sun.” The interactive exhibition rooms were reverberating with life, with the extension of a life unfulfilled except after its end, with the legacy it left behind. It is not as if Vincent had any unfinished business, but the paintings were actually continuing his own work, his own life. As the artist himself had said, “The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.” And as his paintings live on, he lives through them. And in some way, so do we through this experience that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl would have dubbed as participation mystique, or “mystical participation.” Returning to Carl Jung, who clarifies Lévy-Bruhl’s term, “it denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.” The response most people have with Van Gogh’s art is of a very emotional nature, creating a palpable mysterious intimate relationship between the observer and the painting. This is the kind of relationship Van Gogh had with his artefacts, and the kind of relation we have with them as well. In them we see the immortal side of his identity: a whole life of colour, pain, and happiness-seeking despite the life of suffering he had led. We hear the poetry spoken in a universal language, the language of an experience we all share, the experience of love, life, and pain combined and expressed by colour. This was how Van Gogh, like many of us, knew life: “The way to know life is to love many things.” But the question remains: Why Van Gogh? What is it that makes this artist, despite his late artistic vocation and early death, live up to his name and be a “Vincent”, a conqueror for more than a century? With Van Gogh, there’s so much about soul in colour—about rhythm, and dance. He found a fortune of colour and life in illuminating the night sky: “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.” There is so much to see and even listen to in the synesthetic artefacts that he had intended for us to both see and hear, as he had once stated: “In painting I want to say something comforting in the way that music is comforting.” His musical paintings were both solace and therapy to him, the embodiment of the tortured artist archetype. In this almost-audible work, there is music along with the stars over the Rhône —a melody as above so below, both in the sky and on the river’s surface, where blue and yellow strokes dance to the tunes of one another. He believed in perfect pairings of colour in order to create illuminating effects in night skies: “There are colours which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple which complete each other.” Then again, along with the stars, Vincent’s eyes still speak to us through his self-portraits. At the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum, there is another Van Gogh self-portrait (1887 version, before the infamous ear-slicing). As I stand in front of this brush-stroked selfie by the world’s most loved Dutch master, the large gamut of yellows, greens, and blues in his wandering face once again recalls the person in the picture, the icon behind the painting. I stand there for a while, despite the queue behind me, for isn’t it Vincent himself who had once claimed that, “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning”? And there is just an incredible depth of meaning while conversing with Vincent’s own self-rendition—there’s the pain, the passion, and the path to the stars he chose to take in his Starry Night Over the Rhône. There was so much sorrow behind every star: “I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.” Suffering from schizophrenia, manic depression, hypergraphia, and Geschwind syndrome (temporal lobe epilepsy), Vincent lived in a time when there wasn’t much support or acceptance for his psychological turbulence, constantly teetering on the edge of derangement: “I wish they would only take me as I am.” According to Martin Gayford’s biographical novel, The Yellow House, “The brushwork has a flurried quality, perhaps reflecting Vincent’s anxious condition.” He probably felt the need for help—voluntarily admitting himself into the Saint-Rémy mental health institute, and mentioning “persecution mania”, among his other sufferings, to his brother, Theo, in one of his letters. However, there was more than the challenge of suffering—there was a late vocation that somehow negated the artist’s identity—his paintings were the new ‘self’ that had emerged from him. The paintings displayed more than technique and effort: his works were a part of him, the eternal part that would live on for many years after the young artist has left the world. His legacy, the thousands of art pieces scattered around the world in the protective abodes of famous museums, are his alter-ego, everything he wanted to achieve, and everything he wanted to be during his lifetime. Paintings of the artist (who couldn’t sell more than one painting during his lifetime), once filling the walls of the Yellow House, have now filled the world’s museums. I have had the chance to contemplate many of these masterpieces in different places: Sunflowers at the central hall in London’s National Gallery (arriving at its current home in the 1920s—despite the time of great resistance to modern art then), Thatched Roofs Near Auvers (his very last painting) and Cabanes Blanche at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the famous Les Vessenots in Auvers encased in Madrid’s Thyssen Bornemisza museum, Tete de Femme at the Reina Sophia, a self-portrait at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and the famous painting of his Arles bedroom at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. Vincent the artist was the man who had sold only one painting during his lifetime, the man whose art (including Starry Night Over the Rhône) had only been exhibited twice during his lifetime (at self-organized displays in Montmartre). His paintings, however, are the other Vincent, the non-Vincent—the rich, the accepted, the appreciated, and the immortal: “The pains of producing pictures will have taken my whole life from me, and it will seem to me then that I have not lived.” He never lived to see any of that success, but he gave life to these paintings. His identity today is one of the most assertive ones in modern art history; through them, Van Gogh remains—alive. Today, four of the top thirty most expensive oil paintings in history belong to Van Gogh. This post-impressionist who never belonged to any school of art has turned various elements of nature into motifs; he is seen in every sunflower (“The sunflower is mine, in a way”) as well as every bottle of Absinthe, and his life and works have inspired various modes of art like Martin Gayford’s novel The Yellow House (and its film version) and world’s first fully oil-painted rotoscoped animation movie, Loving Vincent. Van Gogh’s road of “death to go to a star” had not only been that of physical demise, but that of ego dissolution: “I consciously choose the dog’s path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter…” He chose to be a vessel for art and to dissolve his ego in it, allowing his imagination “to expand away from the egoistic mood, [in order to] become vehicles for the universal thought and merge with the universal mood." Participation mystique with his masterpieces, then, has kept his identity, as well as ours, well-preserved: as Jung would describe,“an individual may have an unconscious identity with some other person or object.” This is how Vincent merges his soul with painting. This is how the Vincent becomes in-‘vince’-ible. Roula-Maria Dib Editor's Note: This piece was written for the Ekphrastic Van Gogh Challenge, for Starry Night Over the Rhone. Out of consideration for its length, The Ekphrastic Review decided to publish it separately from the other entries for this artwork. References: Jung, Carl, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types ed. and trans. by Gerhard Adler and Richard Francis Carrington Hull (Princeton: Princeton 2014) Jung, Carl, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 15: The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, ed. and trans. by Gerhard Adler and Richard Francis Carrington Hull (Princeton: Princeton 1978) Jung, Carl, Man and His Symbols, ed. by Aniela Jaffé (New York: Dell, 1968) Gayford, Martin, The Yellow House (London: Penguin Books, 2007) Roula-Maria Dib is a university professor at the American University in Dubai where she teaches courses of English language and literature. She has published some poems, essays, and articles in magazines and journals such as Renaissance Hub, The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, Agenda, Two Thirds North, and The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS). She recently completed her PhD in Modernist Literature and Psychoanalysis from the University of Leeds in the UK. Her dissertation focused on Modernist literature (namely the works of James Joyce, Hilda Doolittle, and W.B. Yeats) in light Carl Jung’s psychological theory of individuation, or spiritual transformation. The themes that pervade her work usually revolve around different aspects of human nature, art ekphrasis, surrealism, and the collective unconscious. Dear Brother, finally made it, musée d’orsay-- the van gogh we’d loved, our picture, sticks to me, it struck me, when i saw it, a pure night. as gold & blue as we thought it’d be, but then back at the hotel, i remembered it all navy. funny. like your little-league uniform, but it was prussian & ultramarine & cobalt there, in person. & the golds, the golds-- cornstalk-streaks in the water, the gassy ghost-lights & the stars were all so subtly themselves. van gogh wrote his own brother of the picture, the big dipper’s pink & green sparkle’s discreet paleness contrasts with the gaslights’ harshness, whose reflections are red-gold & go down into a green-bronze. they had some translated letters there to read. wish you were here-- how can i tell you? i walked with him, i must tell you. his dark, blue ghost, his straw hat, as tilted & tangible as if you'd breathed him alive, along that sloping-away or sloping-up into the picture, a carmine patch on my overcoat, two young lovers in the mud, avoiding impastoed ruts, & stalls in our furtive conversation, where i told him about you, & he said, the starry sky-- i’d very much hoped to paint it. Darren Lyons Darren Lyons is currently an MFA student in the Creative Writing Program of The New School in New York, NY. Recently, his poems were published in The Ekphrastic Review, Chronogram, and The Inquisitive Eater, and a poetry/painting project of his was featured on The Best American Poetry Blog. One of Darren's short stories and another poem were published in the 2016 and 2017 editions, respectively, of Stonesthrow Review. Guiding Lights Awake in this moment our concerns far behind us, we make our way, reflecting on direction Beneath the gaze of a thousand million souls, guided by their light, our path is chosen. Our course made clear, we embrace the calm that descends upon us going forward, together. Ken Gierke Ken Gierke was forty before he found the need to write poetry, but even then he was pressed for the time needed to focus. Retirement has given him that, as well as a different perspective on life, which has come out in his poetry, primarily in haiku and free form verse. More of his work can be found at https://rivrvlogr.wordpress.com/ Admiring Starlight, Waiting Fishermen will set out now in the glowing whirl of Starlight on the nighttime River. But I, more cautious, will watch sleepily from my window the lovely play of dark and Stars upon the Rhone. I will set out only when Sun takes precedence, light splayed out, across the river’s shores making bright lines up and down her current-- day’s path made sure and firm. Joan Leotta Joan Leotta has been playing with words on page and stage since childhood in Pittsburgh. She is a writer and story performer. Her Legacy of Honor series feature strong Italian-American women. Her poetry and essays appear or are forthcoming in Gnarled Oak, the A-3 Review, Hobart Literary Review, Silver Birch, Peacock, and Postcard Poems and Prose among others. Her first poetry chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon, was just released by Finishing Line Press. Joan's picture books from Theaqllc, Whoosh!, Summer in a Bowl, Rosa and the Red Apron, and Rosa's Shell celebrate food and family. Her award-winning short stories are collected in Simply a Smile. You can find more about her work on her blog at www.joanleotta.wordpress.com Starry Night Couple on Shore Shawl wrapped around my shoulders, not because of any breeze off the Rhone, but because I want to keep my feelings to myself, afraid they will spill out over the reflection on water, get caught in the undertow of boats tied to shore. It’s the argument from earlier this evening-- why he extends his arm for me to link mine through, not because the path is uneven, or the darkness this far from cafes and bars, but the undercurrents in every conversation, how he does not approve of the way I pull away from him early in morning, leave our bed for the rise of the birds from their roosts and how they fly off, not to return until the sun is about to set, same as the way he left each daybreak in the skiff with the excuse of providing fish. Dishes can sit from first coffee through evening meal. The gentleman I see all over town with his easel understands. He knows how you can get lost in thought, roam the fields with paints waiting for just the right sunflower to bloom. Kyle Laws Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO. Her collections include Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018); This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017); So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015); Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014); My Visions Are As Real As Your Movies, Joan of Arc Says to Rudolph Valentino (Dancing Girl Press, 2013); and George Sand’s Haiti (co-winner of Poetry West’s 2012 award). With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Granted residencies in poetry from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), she is one of eight members of the Boiler House Poets who perform and study at the museum. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Letter of Thanks to Theo I go outside at night and paint the stars, dear brother, and I capture starry nights, near to my yellow house, right here in Arles. My royal blue water reflects gold gaslights, and lovers in the foreground walk together over mauve ground that borders the River Rhône beneath my blue-green sky, under the Bear. Soon morning light will dawn; they’ll head for home. When dusk descends and shadows start to creep-- when day is over and the night draws nigh, that’s when I’m wakeful. There’s no time to sleep. I have to go outside and paint the sky! I thank you from the bottom of my heart for oils and brushes to advance my art. Sharon Fish Mooney Sharon Fish Mooney is the author of Bending Toward Heaven, Poems After the Art of Vincent van Gogh (Wipf and Stock/Resource Publications, 2016) and editor of A Rustling and Waking Within (OPA Press, 2017), an anthology of ekphrastic poems by Ohio poets responding to the arts in Ohio. She has presented ekphrastic poetry readings in multiple locations including the Arts in Society Conference, Paris and Groningen University, the Netherlands. She won the inaugural Robert Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry. Her ekphrastic poems have appeared in Rattle, First Things, Modern Age, The Lost Country, Common Threads and several anthologies. Website: sharonfishmooney.com Law of Attraction The world’s a watery reflection-- only the sky seems solid, thick with stars, vibrating like struck bells. Golden ripples of light radiate into the river below, stars diving below the surface in showers of sparks and steam. In its turn, the river rises out of its basin, sleepwalking toward the surf. The sea, restless sleeper reaching for the shore, takes a bit of land each time it sweeps the sand. Even proud mountains give themselves to waves and wind, wear down to a pebble, and are borne away. Robbi Nester Robbi Nester frequently writes Ekphrastic poetry. She is the author of four books of poetry, including an Ekphrastic chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections of poetry: A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and a forthcoming book, Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag), which is available for advance sale from the publisher at http://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/narrow-bridge-robbi-nester/. She is also the editor of two anthologies: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014) and an Ekphrastic e-book, Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees--celebrating the photography of Beth Moon, accessible athttp://www.poemeleon.org/over-the-moon-birds-beasts-and. Her poetry, reviews, articles, and essays have appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and other publications. Starry Night Over the Rhone Oh, to have seen it his way, celestial fireworks, the heavens revealing the universe beyond his brushes, the histories of it, its wild, intricate corners, fierce explosions, disappearances, dark holes. To be dazzled, showered in rapture, even the watery elements turned to stardust. We had gone for a stroll that night to find a restaurant recommended by the owner of the inn. We had stood for a long time in front of one of Lyon’s many murals, marveling at the city’s famous residents, their faces drawn referentially across the wall. We wandered further and came upon the river, the full moon reflected in it, gently waffled by the waves. There were bright lights along the quays, voices coming from the bars and bistros, sounds of contentment, even jubilation, irrepressible laughter, glasses clinking in the air. Ronnie Hess Ronnie Hess is a essayist and poet, the author of five poetry chapbooks (the latest: O Is for Owl and Canoeing a River with No Name) and two culinary travel guides (Eat Smart in France and Eat Smart in Portugal). She lives in Madison, WI. ronniehess.com Starry Night Over the Rhone Cast ashore, the couple turns away from harbour’s shimmer, backs to incandescent stars. Flash, mirrored pinpricks glitter, salutes distant as plans, hope, as recollection. Linked arms stop them staggering toward home, muddy boots in step, qualms thrusting weary legs ahead like ill wind. Healing hearth’s edge-- soup perhaps, bread, bed. What did they leave in river’s sludge? Diane G. Martin Night Sky for E.B.P. I know Vincent’s starry, starry night, though ignorant of constellations, of our universe and all others. I grant that nothing stays, stars burning out as you did with hidden bottles of wine. Today I think back to your wide eyes looking up at me from the delivery table and know the ways I failed that trust—young and blind. My mother, Elizabeth, your namesake, quoted Milton on his blindness…in this dark world…In your dark world, death claimed your stricken body, not your place in the only firmament of stars I’ll ever know. Diana Pinckney Diana Pinckney, Charlotte, NC, has five collections of poetry, including The Beast and The Innocent, 2015, FutureCyclePress. She is the Winner of the 2010 Ekphrasis Prize, Atlanta Review’s 2012 International Prize and Prime Number’s 2018 Award. She admits to being addicted to writing ekphrastic poems and has led a workshop on this form for the Charlotte Center for the Literary Art. Imagine Driving with VVG in the Passenger Seat A small village pops up ahead on the way to Arles; a church steeple, other roof tops, finally a road. The dirt pathway winds through stores with houses on top, bakery, tailor and blacksmith shops; a path wide enough for the horse I rode through the field of golden haystacks. There is my friend Vincent, covered as usual with paint—shirt out, trousers torn, splattered feet bare and calloused. Come friend, ride this white horse that has followed me here. He is like a blank canvas for you to imagine painting or carrying you into a starry night. I have missed you while living my life of money and clocks, now we have a chance to catch up with our lives . I hand him a geode—it has been opened to allow its mysteries to come to light. Its cave is lavender—lovely little stalagmites in turquoise and clear quartz around the sides. Does this bring your canvas of wild irises to memory, or shall we ride toward it on our horses—their bare backs smooth and powerful, their legs delicate like the flowering orchids at Arles. I will take you back to my land—to the present so you can see your fame. In response, you leapt from your horse to mine, now a small car driving down a highway on the way to Amsterdam. I want to show you the history of your work; so few artists knew the power of your colorful mind. They painted the same old portraits and all gussied up soldiers with medals flashing. Yet you, painted from your inner vision of people and countryside even though sales were almost non-existent and you were troubled with your own demons. Look at what your work sells for now; see it hung in museums all over the world. Vincent, you are like a field of sunflowers in our lives. Jackie Langetieg Jackie Langetieg is retired and lives in Verona Wisconsin and secretly wishes it were Verona Italy. She lives with her son and two kitties. She is a regular contributor to the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, has published poems in small presses such as Bramble, Verse Wisconsin, Wis. Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and has published two chapbooks and two collections of poetry. She currently is working on a series of stories for a memoir. Percussive Voices
A Moko Jumbie caricature finds its way into a sculpture of found stuff from garage sales (or from a foreclosed RadioShack whose workers also wore masks of artificial smiles). The totems leaned up against the museum wall—assemblage of speakers (bass, treble and midrange); equalizers and power amps; turntables and microphones—the personages expressive as if they had something to say despite no passerby’s desire to hear it. But inside their stillness, their unheard sound waves pulsed from their bodies, hearts resounded in the silence, at least I could feel the resonance of heartbeats of djembe drums, their quiet medicine. I sensed the healing-- one for the black man, the other for the white. John C. Mannone John C. Mannone has work in Artemis, Poetry South, Blue Fifth Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Peacock Journal, Gyroscope Review, Baltimore Review, Pedestal, Pirene's Fountain, and others. He’s a Jean Ritchie Fellowship winner in Appalachian literature (2017) and served as Celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He has three poetry collections, including Flux Lines (Celtic Cat Publishing) forthcoming in 2018. He’s been nominated for Pushcart, Rhysling, and Best of the Net awards. He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex, Silver Blade, and Liquid Imagination. He’s a professor of physics near Knoxville, TN. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com Vesuvius Flows into Jacob More
1- The dark entrails of seraphim unbind, raw, from the firmament. Pompeii confesses to Jacob More. He pronounces the last rites. 2- An elderly woman, everyone’s grandmother, though not once a mother, turns to her grindstone again. She's the one who drinks the first seething exhale of Vesuvius; Jacob More drinks the last. 3- The doves addled coos harrow the ears. They surrender wings to ash. Under layers of crimson paint no longer will they bring peace to the maritime. 4- Jacob More leaves his stool, walks the pebbled sand, looks to another mountain, thinks he can make out Pompeii’s desperate refrain: "Paint me as though killer spoke thunder Out of scarlet clouds, As though my blood was the first to weep Upon eastern sands." 5- Infinite night drops on Pompeii through muffled screams of falling. The sand converts to glass. The petulant hiss resounds as molten paint runs into saltwater. 6- The parched canvas beseeches the doves to surface, but Jacob More has painted the final rites, and hardened over by centuries, Pompeii can’t shake itself from a dream. Baruch November Baruch November’s collection of poems entitled Dry Nectars of Plenty won BigCityLit’s chapbook contest in 2003. His poems and short fiction have been featured in Lumina, Paterson Literary Review, New Myths, The Forward, and the Jewish Journal. He teaches literature and writing courses at Touro College and lives in Washington Heights, New York. Out on a Limb
Standing alone, off to one side in the chlorophylled fullness of grass and sky – all seasons are parked here: the petal pinks of Spring, bronzed Fall, Winter crouching in hibernation. The tree cries shade for stragglers or lovers who meet in the glade come Summer. Wild flowers and weeds spring up, tickle among the roots – fickle wanderers move on. If I lift my eyes to the left I see a rarity of blue, an egg, a mood, a kindred spirit. If I can raise my foot from where it’s rooted I just might be able to approach it. Betsy Mars Betsy Mars is a Connecticut-born, mostly California-raised poet, educator, mother, and animal lover. She holds a BA and an MA from USC which she has put to no obvious use. Her work has recently appeared in Verse Virtual, Praxis, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. Whatever colour I was, I am now bilious. The sun staggers across the slow day to a ratchet of cicadas. Every living thing has gone to ground, buried in shadow. As in a besieged keep, I hold my breath. Ideas die in me, reabsorbed like eggs. These hours won’t come again, yet I’ve done nothing. Perhaps the heat will tire of laying waste and retreat. I’ll part the branches to the dust of its leaving, lifting a hurried bloom in darkness, a cap of flesh bearing spores. Devon Balwit Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has numerous chapbooks and collections, including We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/Complicated (A collaboration with Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic); Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders); and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Aeolian Harp Folio, The Free State Review, Rattle, and more. Van Gogh's Green Who can help me breathe what I see? And if you arrived, the Unexpected, the One I thought I called for, would I embrace or try to shatter you?— you, with your brittle demand to inhale, breath by barely tolerated breath, again, again, the verdancy of high summer in a still place where solitude already torments, its fierce pleasures piercing with the threat of ecstasy. Shirley Glubka Shirley Glubka is a retired psychotherapist, the author of three poetry collections and two novels. Her most recent book is The Bright Logic of Wilma Schuh: a novel (Blade of Grass Press, 2017). Shirley lives in Prospect, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes. Website: https://shirleyglubka.weebly.com The Poet’s Garden Apparently you never penned a poem, yet I glimpse poetry in all your prose. You loved the painter-poet Jules Breton, Longfellow, Moore, Rossetti and you chose to weave some of their themes into your art-- the autumn mists of Keats, calm seas of Heine, Breton’s wheat fields, his peasants, and his larks. You turned to others’ canvases; you mined The Angelus, that painting by Millet-- That’s it. That’s rich. That’s poetry, you wrote, then copied it. And now I see the way your willow weeps, one mournful, plaintive note that echoes through the garden its refrain, reminding me of other poets’ names. Sharon Fish Mooney Sharon Fish Mooney is the author of Bending Toward Heaven, Poems After the Art of Vincent van Gogh (Wipf and Stock/Resource Publications, 2016) and editor of A Rustling and Waking Within (OPA Press, 2017), an anthology of ekphrastic poems by Ohio poets responding to the arts in Ohio. She has presented ekphrastic poetry readings in multiple locations including the Arts in Society Conference, Paris and Groningen University, the Netherlands. She won the inaugural Robert Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry. Her ekphrastic poems have appeared in Rattle, First Things, Modern Age, The Lost Country, Common Threads and several anthologies. Website: sharonfishmooney.com Before the Mistral In the poet’s garden, the painter sweeps green with a feverish broom into the grand bassinette of a late summer day, then wires the sky with golden yellow of winter wheat. But he does not forget the quicklime fires of twilight and hears their weeping in the pinhole whispers of blue. Before the dream, the edges mattered-- the only way to hijack a hidden horizon so the weeping can be contained. Amy Nawrocki Amy Nawrocki is the poetry editor for The Wayfarer and the author of five poetry collections, including Four Blue Eggs andReconnaissance, released by Homebound Publications. Her work has appeared in many print and online publications including The Connecticut River Review, Fox Adoption Magazine, Sixfold, The Loft Poetry Anthology, Reckless Writing Anthology, and Wildness: Voices of the Sacred Landscape. Her latest work, The Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory, published as part of the Little Bound Books Essay Series, has been awarded a Gold Medal for the Living Now Mind-Body-Spirit Awards. She teaches literature, composition, and creative writing at the University of Bridgeport and lives Hamden CT with her husband and their two cats Perfect Days We only meet on Sundays. He picks me up at noon sharp. We don’t talk while he drives. Instead, we only sing our favourite tunes, exchanging loving glances. We leave the car at the side of the road and walk into the park. Clear is the sky, as if the universe silently agrees with our plan, always bright and sunny the day, warm like our hearts each time we follow the path into our favourite habitat. We walk and walk, away from people, into the most secret places, far from the crowd, away from comfort zones. Once we reach the clearing, we throw away our clothes and run around the weeping willow naked, chasing butterflies, before we end up into each other’s arms. We never catch them. Butterflies are sneaky and fast and fly in mysterious ways. Like human souls. Yet that’s the fun of it. We wouldn’t know what to do with them, should we get them in our hands. Butterflies are not to be caged. Neither are human souls. We then lie on the ground, under the clear sky, embraced for hours, talking, playing, flapping our wings against the ground, immersed in pleasure. Those are the times when I wish I had him beside me every day. I hold on to him, bursts of dopamine reinforcing my fixation, as if he’s the cigarette I hold in my hand and shouldn’t smoke, yet a typical chain-smoker can never resist the temptation. “No strings attached,” he says. “No commitments,” I reply and we laugh our hearts out. We have been repeating the same ritual for years. I have trusted him for so long that I have forgotten how it is not to trust him. My younger self watches us from afar. She frowns and stares, as if asking me: “Was that really what you wanted?” And I nod, because I was too young to know then, yet now I realize that this is all I ever wanted. My younger self can’t know yet what true love is, yet I’m grown enough to be wiser. That little girl has seen so many films in which the protagonists are all dressed up, married, living in big luxurious apartments or idyllic cottages or beach houses that she thinks these are the necessary preconditions to nurture love. I smile to comfort her, yet she walks away in disgust and she can’t know, yet that’s exactly what she longs for too, only she’s too young to realize; butterflies are not to be caged for perfect days to last. Mileva Anastasiadou Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in many journals, such as the Molotov Cocktail, Jellyfish Review, Asymmetry fiction, the Sunlight Press, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn and others. https://www.facebook.com/milevaanastasiadou/ Kintsugi
Living in dread takes a toll. Fear turns every blue sky charcoal. Death never gives up its patrol, all we have is a fragile parole. Fear turns every blue sky charcoal, we use sacred scrolls as blindfolds. All we have is a fragile parole – hairline cracks shatter, explode. We use sacred scrolls as blindfolds. We mend broken pottery with gold when hairline cracks shatter, explode. We pray these precious wounds hold. We mend broken pottery with gold – death never gives up its patrol. We pray these precious wounds hold. Living in dread takes a toll. Sheila Wellehan Sheila Wellehan's poetry is recently featured or forthcoming in Forklift, Ohio; Menacing Hedge; San Pedro River Review; Tinderbox Poetry Journal; Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Visit her online at www.sheilawellehan.com. |
The Ekphrastic Review
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