What If the Sky Could Help Us I listen to the news of another war, chopping onions on this early October night. I put the knife down but feel like screaming at every man. Then, I remember Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City. That vast sky, sugary and glistening with peaches, offering sweetness to the windswept world. I take a deep breath. Visualize the two faint ships adrift in the bright melancholy of the ocean. Let myself sail with them, like a tired seabird on a mast. I feel myself relaxing. The wild shaking of rage turning into something else, something far less ruinous. What if I could study the sky for a few moments, like here, from the kitchen window, to become spacious and quiet, to become inclusive of every changing cloud and colour? What if my habits of hurting others, could be altered? And if I look long enough, amazed at the alchemy, at the sun’s fathomless art, I could evolve. Teresa Williams Teresa Williams is a poet living in Seattle, Washington. Her work has been featured in Psychological Perspectives, Lily Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing she likes to wander near mountains and rivers with her wolfdog. She received an MFA in poetry at Pacific University.
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Rock Art of the Lower Pecos A yucca hides the quick retreat of a red racer beneath spines. Agave’s rough leaves used for sandals and twine, the botanist says. A crow spreads its feathers, complains at our descent to the cliff shelter. A trinity of rectangular figures sways on the rock wall. “First red, then yellow, then black,” a paleobiologist says, foaming over his discovery of paint layers. Tangle of shapes and lines—antlered shamans and creatures pierced with arrows—I can’t make the connections. An ochre ripple, the river drying out in the bottom of the canyon, weaves though the composition. For a moment the cave breathes in the morning wind. Welcome to the altar, our guide says. I have a button of peyote in my hand, jimson seeds in my pouch. Horned roaches and hairy animalcules swarm the walls. I squeeze through a hole in the sky, impale the beasties that afflict the woman, lying on a grid of sticks, a bushy-tailed panther at my side. No saint, no martyr… I am the bird that glances at the moon and harkens the call of waving plumes. Mark McKain Mark McKain’s work has appeared in Agni, The Journal, Subtropics, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Superstition Review, Western Humanities Review, ISLE, Gulf Stream Magazine, and elsewhere. His second poetry chapbook Blue Sun was published by Aldrich Press. He experiences global warming in St Petersburg, Florida. Two years ago on a drive from Florida to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he made a determined stop to see the inspiring rock art images which are little known and should receive more attention. Still glowing from yesterday's incredible Dress You Up session on fashion in art history and literature, with TER editor Kate Copeland. It was a truly amazing time and some of you were inspired to create brilliant poems already. Join us on Thursday night for a wine and art write night. Inspired by the paint night phenomenon, we get together on Zoom to relax and write together while diving into art. This time, we are looking at mermaids in art history, and using some mermaid themed work to fuel creative writing exercises. Bring your favourite Shiraz or Chardonnay, or a pot of tea. Our workshops are about creation, connection, conversation, and creativity. We delve into the theme and think about the images, write, and share if we are moved to. New and experienced writers will be equally inspired. An art history session is also coming up. Learn more about Mexican art history at Frida's World: Mexico's art story. See you there! The Mermaid Muses: writing with sea sirens in art history
CA$35.00
Join us for a deep sea dive into the story of mermaids in the visual arts. We will look at a variety of mermaid art and use it to inspire our own nostalgia, fantasy, and mythology. Thursday, March 14 from 6 to 8 pm. A wine and art write night! Bring your favourite wine (or a cup of tea) and we will relax together, look at amazing art, and get some ideas down for our poetry and stories. Frida's World: Mexico's Art Story
CA$35.00
Join us to explore the incredible story of Mexico's art history. It will be a whirlwind tour through time. Frida Kahlo was passionate about pre-Columbian artefacts and her husband was considered the master artist of Mexico. The couple were surrounded by art stars and brilliant creatives. Of course, Frida became the most beloved artist and icon. We will look at a wide variety of visual art through time. This session will focus on looking at and talking about visual art rather than on writing exercises, but writers will find a wealth of inspiration to be mined for their poetry and stories later. On Birkenau, by Gerhard Richter During an April in Berlin, when it is still winter, I wear fingerless gloves through a blank white day and take the bus to the Neue Nationalgalerie. Here in the basement of a stark glass building is a Gerhard Richter show: 100 Words for Berlin. The centerpiece of the show is his four Birkenau paintings. The Birkenau pieces are ceiling-height abstractions. Each is slightly different, but they are all executed in grays, reds, whites, greens, their thick paint smeared horizontally and unevenly. The paint is thinly cratered like a moon landscape. The paintings are based on—literally, painted over renditions of—four photographs taken inside Birkenau, the death camp partner to Auschwitz’s concentration camp. Initially Richter attempted to render the photographs figuratively; later, as he came to believe in the impossibility of doing this, he covered them with paint. The photographs were taken by prisoners—the only such photographs of a Nazi camp by victims. It was 1944. * The first time I visited the genocide memorial at Ntarama, the tour guide told me to take photos. We had walked around the site and she had recounted to me the story of Rwanda’s genocide, and now, the way she framed it, I felt she was asking me for something in return. I wasn’t sure: wasn’t it rude, somehow, to take a picture—as if a picture was indeed a taking, as if it was almost embarrassing to photograph these remains? As if violence was somehow shame? I resisted it. Yes, the guide said, moving her hands forward, palms up, in a sweeping motion. At the time—they do not allow this anymore—many tour guides at Rwanda’s memorials were telling visitors to take photographs. Proof of genocide needed to be shared around the world. Too many years of being ignored had taken their toll. Now photographs would prove what had happened here, what had been neglected in 1994 and neglected every year after by outsiders who valued Rwandan lives as little as they plausibly could. As if by witnessing one was returning something to Rwanda: attention, a weak form of reparation. I took a few photographs that first trip: broken windows. Clothing hanging from the ceiling. The same photographs everybody took. The same photographs you would take to rate a visitor attraction. Here is what you’ll see from the outside; here is what you’ll see when you enter. The contents, the clothes, the bones. Here is a close-up at a slight angle. Here you can see the trees. I would hold on to those photographs for years. I was a researcher; I needed them; they made me uneasy, hearts beating in a locked box. * In 1944 in Birkenau, a member of the Sonderkommando, who were responsible for burning bodies from the gas chambers, held the camera. It had been smuggled into the camp by the Polish resistance. The probable photographer was Alberto Errera, a Greek Jewish naval officer. A small team of Sonderkommando members put the exposed film into a toothpaste tube and a woman named Helena Datón smuggled it out. The note that accompanied the photos was from Stanisław Kłodziński, a leader of the camp’s resistance. He wrote: "Sending you snaps from Birkenau – gas poisoning action. These photos show one of the stakes at which bodies were burned, when the crematoria could not manage to burn all the bodies. The bodies in the foreground are waiting to be thrown into the fire. Another picture shows one of the places in the forest, where people are undressing before ‘showering’ – as they were told – and then go to the gas-chambers." When they were first published in the 1940s, the photographs were cropped. In the originals the photos are crooked and slightly blurry, human figures listing to one side. The crops straightened the pictures, aligning them vertically. They made the photographs more straightforward, like journalistic documentation. But they also removed the blackness that had framed each photo. Errera had taken the pictures from a hiding place--the shadowed exit of a gas chamber. In their original form—crooked, unbalanced, half-obscured by the darkness of the building—the pictures are documents not only of events but also of Errera’s towering bravery. I think of Errera hanging back, trusting the interior darkness to hide him. Outside it’s bright—sun on a clearing, pale bodies laid out on the ground before trees—and the photographs are taken at an angle, as if Errera had snapped photos at waist or chest height, unable to check his aim. There is debate about what exactly the photographs depict, based on when they were taken. One narrative says that they were taken within half an hour or even fifteen minutes of each other; another says they depict morning and afternoon. Both arguments are based on the angles of the shadows. Some say they are the before and after of the same transport: people arriving at the gas chambers, being told to undress, heading for the shower, and then, after, the same laid out, dead, in the clearing. Facing Birkenau, I consider Errera taking the first photographs, guarded by several other men; he pointed his camera through the gas chamber’s door, or window, or (one source says) opening through which Zyklon B was poured, knowing exactly what was going to happen, momentarily, to these naked women heading through the trees, toward a spot somewhere to his left. And then after. * A decade ago, for the first time, I stood in front of a room to talk about Rwanda’s genocide memorials. I showed none of those images from Ntarama; none of its bones, or its broken windows. None of its exposed and fleshless human bodies. Someone did ask me why. At the time I thought this choice not to show the dead had to do with shock or respect. I was thinking about the gaze as both witness and violator, of the dead as exposed to view, whether or not they had chosen it. But of course this is an old, old story. Susan Sontag talks about it in Regarding the Pain of Others, her book on the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people's pain. Photography is new, but looking is not. Sontag goes all the way back to a story told by Socrates about Leontius: "On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, 'There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight.'" Is it feasting? Something to be eaten and then processed, a consuming witness stuffed with guilt? * Richter reportedly created the Birkenau paintings after a year of attempting to render the photographs figuratively. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl reports that Richter first saw the images in the fifties. … In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. He covered them with paint, layering it on and scraping it away. Now, as Schjeldahl acknowledges, you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. When I visit 100 Words for Berlin, in the same room as Birkenau are images of the original Sonderkommando photographs. The explanation contained in the glossy trifold brochure seems to move the room: the photographs and the paintings slot into place, history stacks around them. I stare at the paintings as if I can see the traces of women’s bodies beneath them: the men standing around the corpses, rummaging as if in a pile of belongings; the smoke rising in great thick billows; the trees stretching up toward the sky. There are two photographs where the walls of the gas chamber are visible, and the corpses of the dead through the opening. A third shows mostly trees and then, down in the bottom left corner, women walking toward their deaths. The fourth aims too high: it shows only branches. What was happening down below them, what Errera saw as he clicked the shutter, is lost. * I passed by the bones at Ntarama and took their picture—but the word took is wrong. I took nothing from them; they felt nothing as I went by; they were still quietly, securely themselves. It was me that felt the churn as the tour guide told me to take a picture, me who sensed them thrumming with blood as they sat quietly in my research folders. The twitching, nervous thing that needed a shield was me—the thing that needed a filter, needed to cover those photographs in paint and color, needed to hide from them. I think of Richter attempting to representing those photographs and then painting over them, scraping the paint off, over and over: sealing them in a box. His process has sometimes been represented as coming to terms with the futility of representation. But it is also a process of protection, a way to admit smallness in the face of something too big to consume at all. The dead are quiet and their photographs equally so. It’s the rest of us who are alive, passing through the rooms of art and death, a roiling, churning set of bodies, turned into what the faces of the silent, judging dead render us: made of what we eat. There’s one more thing Schjeldahl says about Richter’s work on Birkenau. After Richter first saw the Sonderkommando photographs in the 1950s, he encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. He did not paint Birkenau until 2014. He stared at them for six years. Annalisa Bolin Annalisa Bolin’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is an archaeologist and anthropologist who researches how people perceive and use the heritage of the difficult past, working mainly in Rwanda and the US Virgin Islands. The Magpie This is not a winter of discontent though the crackled paint reminds us of age, but what the French have called effet de neige-- just the absoluteness of a moment before its mauve and pink fiction is spent and a magpie’s black, white, and blue message vanishes with the haste of a turned page defying the artist’s eye and intent. We’re left questioning whether bird remained centered on a gate for him to complete and then en plein air capture snow still bright, amazed that fence shadows wouldn’t have changed too quickly to be done sur le motif against the world’s constantly failing light. Claude Wilkinson This poem was first published in the author's collection, Marvelous Light (Stephen F. Austin University Press.) Claude Wilkinson is a critic, essayist, painter, and poet. His poetry collections include Reading the Earth, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, Joy in the Morning, Marvelous Light, World without End, and Soon Done with the Crosses. He has been a Provost Scholar and also John and Renee Grisham Visiting Southern Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. Other honours for his poetry include a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and the Whiting Writers' Award. Pilgrimage You bump on beater bikes over miles of dry lake bed, past the Man and the Temple and roving throbbing art cars into deep playa. Far off in the dust, a vertical ring of floating stones like a relic of ancient rites. You come upon it then, an elliptical staircase. Twenty-seven rough-hewn sand-toned boulders, each the weight of four men, suspended from looming columns by a ship’s rigging of cables. Through the wires, wedges of cloud and mountain. Light, air, and earth, the frame. Stepping into it like entering a grove of redwoods. If you’re bold, you scramble up and over the twenty-foot peak; you can’t help grinning. If you’re old like me, you try five giant steps till the wobble defeats you. Like at six on roller skates: dread had already breached my bones. How many exhilarations did I miss? But I wouldn’t miss this. Hello new planet! I stroke the sun-warmed stone like an amulet, pray that nobody falls. Gaze down at rock piles that hide the hardware. It took three engineers and heavy equipment to anchor my son’s vision, make it soar. A pilgrim, I visit day and night. At noon, it throws down a shadow on the desert floor like a fat pearl necklace. At dusk, it’s swarmed by revelers, their billowing scarves and sarongs the only colour. One morning, I bask in its stillness, then spot four legs dangling from the top. I settle on the first stone, turn to the sun. Susan Auerbach Susan Auerbach is a retired professor of education who returned in midlife to her first love of creative writing. She often writes in the key of grief, as in her chapbook, In the Mourning Grove (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in Spillway, Gyroscope Review, Greensboro Review, and other journals, and in her memoir, I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach: A Mother’s Quest for Comfort, Courage & Clarity After Suicide Loss (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017). She lives with her husband, dog, and seven chickens in Altadena, CA, where she takes inspiration from the San Gabriel Mountains. Winter Apples in tribute to Seraphine de Senlis My apple was old but no less sweet for having set on the checkered tablecloth since before Christmas. A bit more pith, a white inside slightly yellowed waiting for that painting of the apples I ordered this morning by the French painter (pacing the border of madness with footsteps of a cleaning woman) who splashed her apple tree with orange and red and roots below ground that bound it in the wind storm that grabbed apples and threw them onto damp grass where the doe and her fawn tiptoed with caution (weighing smells in the wind) to eat so many apples, tart and wet. Tricia Knoll Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose next book Wild Apples (Fernwood Press, 2024) incorporates this image on the cover, a tribute to an artist of the past whose life and painting resonates with the poet as she writes about moving 3,000 miles to Vermont after downsizing. Knoll is a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. Website: triciaknoll.com a few small nips My splintered spine is draped in dahlias and cannas. Strong stems snapping in the storm. The knuckles that line my back form a fist. Am I the luchador, or the vanquished? I’m laced with scars. smooth mounds cover jagged bones so they don’t catch in your throat. Yet with every lover, you feast on my marrow. You devoured my toes so I could no longer raise myself to reach your lips. Our cantos for revolution, like so many women rolling over in your bed. Lana Crossman Lana Crossman: "Originally from rural New Brunswick (Canada), I live in Ottawa, Ontario. As a student, I studied art history and journalism, which led to many years of working in the arts, including at the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts. My poetry was included in an online exhibition, Atlantic Vernacular (2021-22), in which poets were commissioned to write original poems inspired by the fine-craft works on display. My poems have been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, The Light Ekphrastic, and other journals. My chapbook, Buoyant, at last (Rose Garden Press, 2022), includes a poem inspired by Atlantic Canada artist Mary Pratt." Poetry as Recreation: an Interview with Bruce Boston In a career spanning more than five decades, Bruce Boston has published speculative poetry that, while rooted in vivid images, reflects constant energy and recreation. Many of his poems and stories, from his debut 1969 collection, XXO, to the more recent Brief Encounters with My Third Eye: Selected Short Poems 1975-2016 (Crystal Lake Publishing, 2016) and Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets (Mind's Eye Publications, 2022) have worked off previous concepts and ideas, leading towards ekphrastic elements. Boston caught up with The Ekphrastic Review for a short interview to discuss his work and provide some samples of his poetry. Matthew Sorrento: Your interests as a poet and fiction writer seem very broad. I assume you are interested in all types of poetry. Did you try any specific approaches at the beginning of your career? Bruce Boston: I think like most beginning writers I tried to emulate the writers I enjoyed and admired most. And yes, my interests were broad. In poetry ranging from Pound and Dylan Thomas to Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson. I would often transpose such influences into a speculative context. For example, my poem "In the Short Seasons of a Long Year without You" was inspired by Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife." My poem "Riders of the Night" by Stevenson's "Windy Night": In the Short Seasons of a Long Year Without You A sudden summer of greenhouse density, watching five satellites and a captured score of jagged meteors jostle for position in the syrupy night. An instantaneous fall that flashes spun gold for the barest moment, then withers a planet overnight and leaves the landscape spare and barren as my limbs abed without you. A fast frame winter of frozen lakes and ice strewn seas, with cold so sharp it hammers out a dwelling place within my bones. When you stepped through the shifting portals of the star gate, you flickered and vanished more quickly than the changing seasons. You promised to return before the red pods burst and the winds of spring ochred the dawn skies with their pollination. Yet already the days burn blue again, the thickening nights are dense with moisture, and I feel the rush of autumn’s gold death soon swift and sure upon the land. In the short seasons of a long year without you, your image and promise falter within my mind. Perhaps it is time to try on a new life, some different clime, a time to cede the lies and reasons of our love as you have let them lie. In the short seasons of a long year without you, the maw of the star gate waits, a thousand worlds beyond, another passion spent behind, this sheet of broken lines I leave for you to find. Spirits of the Night When the night is dark and stars fill the sky, And the air is cold, the moon full and high, Riders pass on by who move like the wind, Carrying the soul of all that has been, And they keep riding to the dawn. When we are asleep and warm in our beds, Spirits of the night move through our heads, Images and forms the unconscious breeds, Fashioned from the depth of unholy needs, And we keep dreaming until dawn. When the sun is high and light fills the air, Shadows of the night are lost in the glare. Deep in our minds there still run those streams, Currents dark and swift just like in our dreams, And they keep flowing past the dawn. Spirits of the night, keep our trail bright, Guide us from the darkness, light our way. We are children now, and forever more, Cast down in the rush of history’s play, Living as we can from dark to dawn. However, there were also many fiction writers who use a poetic voice in their prose that influenced my poetry. To name just a few: Lawrence Durrell, Nabokov, Thomas Wolfe, Angela Carter, Robert E. Howard. Matthew Sorrento: I assume that some of your ideas would not work best in poetry, and ended up as fiction, and vice versa. Has this been common in your career, and do you recall any early works of yours that came about this way? Bruce Boston: One can look at the range of expressions available to creative writers in two ways. As distinct categories with clear divisions: poem, prose poem, flash fiction, short story, novelette, novella, novel. Or as a continuum in which length and depth are extrapolations and evolutions from shorter expressions. A musical analogy would be Listz’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, which takes on symphonic proportions and evolved from simple gypsy folk melodies. In my own work, I tend to view creative writing most often as a continuum. I’ve had poems evolve into flash fictions or short stories. My fantasy “Tales of the Dead Wizard” exists as both a poem and a short story, and has been published in both forms. The prime example from my own work regards the poem “In the Garden of the State,” which was published in the 1980s. The poem depicts a state in which the powers-that-be attempt to shape its citizens as bonsai gardeners shape their trees, in this case “pruning” their personalities by means of “the surgical implantation of biochips/injection of neurochemical inhibitors/the traditionally proven application/of stimulus-response indoctrination.” This poem, more than two decades later, eventually evolved into my dystopian sf novel The Guardener’s Tale (Sam’s Dot, 2007), which tells the story of a state psychologist-guardian who attempts to reprogram three interrelated criminals into citizens who will fit into society’s laws and norms. Thus the question of which form works best for a particular idea depends on the nature and depth of the ideas you are trying to express. Matthew Sorrento: Your work is very image-based. Do you see yourself as this type of writer? Bruce Boston: I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “this type of writer.” If you are talking strictly in terms of craft, i.e., using images to draw a reader into a poem and hold their interest, my answer is yes. The clear and smooth flow of language, along with vivid and appropriate imagery, are two tools of craft that can help accomplish this. However, if you are referring to Imagism, the school of poetic thought founded by Ezra Pound and others, shortly before World War I, I’d have to say “only sometimes.” I’m wary of schools of thought and manifestos that attempt to define artistic forms and lay down rules for their practice. My own reading and influences, and consequently my writing, are too eclectic to embrace any signal method. That said, I would agree that many of my poems adhere to the basic principles of Imagism as stated in Poetry (March, 1913): 1. Direct treatment of the "thing." whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. Yet many of them do not. Though I generally write in free verse, employing what I consider the musical phrases in language, I’ve also written and published my share of rhymed and metered poems, including a few sonnets. (the metronome). I generally use economy of language (no word that does not contribute), but I’ve also written poems that are spontaneous explosions of language and image, stream of consciousness, that no doubt contain many extraneous words, as in this poem. And though I have some sense of it, I’m not completely sure what direct treatment of the "thing” means. In the poem just mentioned, as well as most of my surreal poems, I think that readers would be hard pressed to actually say what the “thing” is, so I must not be treating it very directly. Matthew Sorrento: You have worked in ekphrasis occasionally. Would you say that the approach shows up naturally, or do you make it a deliberate exercise? Bruce Boston: I only tried it as an exercise once. The poem was published, but it was not a very good poem. One might learn something about craft by doing an exercise, but the best poems are a product of both craft and inspiration. When Rod Serling was asked: “Where do you get your ideas (inspiration)?” he responded: “Ideas are everywhere. They’re in the air.” I agree with Serling. One can find inspiration anywhere. An overheard conversation. A walk in the park. An encounter with an old friend. The way sunlight strikes a particular object. Ekphrastic poetry differs from this kind of inspiration in that it is a second-level inspiration. You are being inspired by someone else’s inspiration rather than something in the everyday world around you. The problem with the term as it is generally applied today is that it is too narrow and only seems to apply to visual art. There are all kinds of second-level inspirations. What if I am listening to a piece of music or reading a novel and I am inspired to write a poem? These would be second-level inspirations and there is no terms for them that I’m aware of. Also, ekphrastic seems to generally apply only to a description of a painting. I wrote a poem “Two Nightstands Attacking a Cello” that was inspired by Dali’s A Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello. However, this does not describe the painting in anyway but extrapolates from part of the situation it portrays. So I’m not sure whether the following can be dubbed ekphrastic or not. Two Nightstands Attacking a Cello It doesn't stand a chance. Their solid wood panels and sharp edges beating its delicately formed and hand polished shell. Their vicious drawers with brass handles gouging at its neck, striking and raking its tender strings, forcing it to cry out in a discordant roar. Afterward the nefarious pair return to their stations by the sides of the bed, once again motionless, seemingly innocent as any object of inanimate furniture, marred by little more than a scratch or two as evidence of their abandon, their brutal and unprovoked assault. Aching in every fiber of its fragile being, the cello retreats to the corner of the room, suffering in silence, nursing its many wounds. Yet when it summons the courage to speak, it discovers that the resonance of its voice has been transformed through this ordeal of pain and humiliation. The true dulcet tones and melancholy overtones too long hidden in the hollow of its chest have emerged unbidden. Astounded by the depth of this doleful epiphany, mute and wooden as the day they were made, the nightstands listen with strained indifference and all the pent fury of rectilinear forms. Further, my collection Surrealities was inspired by surrealism as a whole (its paintings, writings, and philosophy). All the poems therein are definitely second-level inspirations, inspired by the creations of others, but I’m not sure whether this could be called an ekphrastic collection or not. ** Bruce Boston’s dystopian novel The Guardener's Tale, a Bram Stoker Award finalist, is now available in a Kindle edition. Visit bruceboston.com / Facebook. Matthew Sorrento is co-editor of Film International and teaches film studies at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ, United States. He is co-editor of Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon, and his collection David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (co-edited with David Ryan) was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in December 2021. Don't miss this special Saturday morning delight- a literary romp through fashion in fiction, poetry and art history, with Kate Copeland. Lorette will show some striking images of fashion in art through history, and Kate will take us into literature to show some fascinating examples of what clothes can mean. Dress You Up, Zoom Workshop with Kate Copeland
CA$35.00
Join us on Zoom on Saturday, March 9 from 10 am to noon eastern standard time, for a survey and discussion about fashion and its underlying subtexts and meanings that make their way into our poetry and stories. Ekphrastic editor Kate Copeland will take us on a fashionable tour of art and clothing, with time to write our own artistic exploration of appearances. Weaving through personal and cultural meanings we attach to clothing, Kate will touch on poetry, research, linguistics, and Anne Sexton's iconic red reading dress. Lorette will show us a brief survey of fashion in art history. Virginia Woolf would sign off her invitation with "bring no clothes," but we invite you to dress up or bring your favourite garment, to inspire your own poem or story. |
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