Reni’s Cenci in the Sitting Room Silent surveyor of a walled world. An inert postal stamp, I go nowhere. Since the tall man carried me in, I haven’t said a word. First, just you and him, budding breaths quickening the newly-married air. Then, you, young mother, craning over a swaying crib. Tropical palm bowed to a swirling sea. Soon, there are more. Sometimes I wish I could block my ears from the racket. Coffee table turns slide, and another, tongue bulging, Etches her initials in the hidden underside like some ancient hieroglyph. In winter, a fire is lit below me- blazes through the bricks at my back. Sometimes you sing, plucking me from the crisp canvas on a palpable breath and I lilt unnoticed, billowed robes surging the sitting room. But time hangs curtains of quietude, Now a crossword half done in a spidery scrawl, dust on a sheepskin rug. I miss all the bustle, And the tall man who brought me in. I see your solitude, seeping into the cold chasms of the walls, crawling along the faded carpet, spilling into my gilded frame. Splitting my flat, rippling heart. And then a tone soaks the stillness, sonorously stirring something within these walls. A dip left in your wing-backed chair. A sturdy pull of the door handle. And I hear you restored, Sifting through the hot press for the spare sheets. Sarah Kelly Sarah Kelly is an emerging writer living in west Cork, Ireland. She has had work published in Banshee, as well as the Honest Ulsterman, and is a teacher of English in a local secondary school.
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Tanaquil Le Clercq in Her Wheelchair Balanchine’s principal dancer with the liquid spine walked on toe-tips and nicotine. But in Copenhagen, paralyzed by polio, she caught her crippled reflection in an iron lung. Twenty-seven years old, she could make a faun grovel with her whiplash kick and hip-wrench swivel. For forty-three more, both legs, half an arm paralyzed. Yet her hands still fly through her old roles. Teaching young dancers in Harlem she catches herself in their bodies’ lithe mirrors. Step, lift, breathe, hold. You are one, resurgent. Now bow. Accept your flowers. Derek Webster This poem was inspired by two photographs of the dancer. View the first one at 45.21 (Tanaquil LeClercq Teaching at the Dance Theater of Harlem, 1970s) and the second one, click here (Afternoon of a Faun, with Francisco Moncion, photography by Frederick Melton (USA) 1953.) Derek Webster’s Mockingbird was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best poetry debut in Canada. He received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is the founding editor of Maisonneuve Magazine. His second book National Animal appears in Spring 2024. He lives in Montreal and Toronto. Visit Derek here: www.derekwebsterwriter.com Curlicue for the unknown maker of the Lindisfarne Gospels (possibly Eadfrith) You’re old, no longer fit for heavy labour – though stretching a calfskin membrane, keeping it weighted on the slope is work enough – and you spend all your days in the scriptorium, pricking out and ruling the vellum pages – lightly, or pigment puddles in the grooves – so many words to a line, lines to a page, and now you become a geometer, with compass and dividers following the principles of design by which Creation may be understood, where the work is a meditation, every flex of the quill, stroke of the nib demanding your full attention, and you find great possibilities in the script, a blend of runic and Roman through which you inscribe a moment when cultures change, and, living in troubled times, to illuminate the Word is a daily devotion, so you never think of claiming the work with a signature or imagine that scholars will ever seek clues to your name. Jill Sharp Jill Sharp's poems have appeared most recently in The Frogmore Papers, Poetry Salzburg Review, London Grip and Orbis. She has published a pamphlet, Ye gods (Indigo Dreams) and is featured in a six-poet collection, Vindication, from Arachne Press. She was runner-up in the 2020 Keats-Shelley Prize and was a Hawthornden fellow in 2023. Object after Object, by Meret Oppenheim (Switzerland) 1936 What can you stir up inside me fur-covered with my matching spoon? Some say I've gone pubic in public to perturb you into seeing your lips on my furred rim. At tea time approach me with your nakedness, both of us freed, at last, from domestic use as again and over again your eyes compel you to drink me in. ** Shoe In after Project for Sandals by Meret Oppenheim (Switzerland) 1936 I'm a shoe turning into a foot turning into a shoe: furry body with heel and strap, I'm not yet entirely viable until worn. With human toes, I may also be part bear. Fish will not deflect me being hunter and haunter. Strap me on: see what you become. ** X-Ray of My Skull after X-Ray of My Skull by Meret Oppenheim (Switzerland) 1964/1981 Wearing hoop earrings and rings am I still too naked for you? Forget my lips, forget my errant nose and tongue. My thin skin. Love me to the bone: my slender neck bones, my jawbone, my long finger bones. In this world gone grey-black let my skull sing its own dreamscape of broken eggshells brimming from manual typewriter rolls, bell peppers plattered on rough seas beginning to lift off and darken my cranial sky. ** Stone Woman (1938) after Stone Woman, by Meret Oppenheim (Switzerland) 1938 Here I lie—stranded between sand and sea—reclining as the sun bakes my stone head my stone shoulder belly and hips. My legs, submerged, have not grown barnacles or fins. My Mary Janes and knee-highs waterlogged. If you should come upon me do not disturb. I prefer this littoral space since I'm caught between two states of being. Where else could I hide far from war but in plain sight. Sharon Dolin Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022). A 2021 recipient of an NEA in Translation, her book of translations from Catalan, Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga was awarded the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize from Saturnalia Books and was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. Dolin is Associate Editor at Barrow Street Press and lives in New York City. Monet From Different Angles: How to Vary Your Approach to Ekphrastic Writing, by Alarie Tennille12/9/2023 Monet From Different Angles: How to Vary Your Approach to Ekphrastic Writing Monet has been called the Father of Impressionism. He’s also a second father to my poetry, which is why I’m using him as a prime example of the many ways we can bring art to life in ekphrastic writing. Most children love to draw when they are young, but I was a bit more serious about art. Somehow my parents couldn’t tell that I was legally blind. Once I got glasses at age four and a half, I couldn’t read or draw enough to suit me. I tried hard to make my pictures look like what I saw – no stick figures for me. Although avid readers, my family didn’t really appreciate art, and we were given little art education in public schools. So how did I get hooked on Monet and the French Impressionists? By hanging out under “Painting” in the World Book Encyclopedia. I’m surprised I didn’t wear those pages out. Monet and his colleagues got me through more than one research paper. Soon I was asking for art books and checking them out from the library. I think the Impressionists especially appealed to me for two reasons: their bright palettes and the way their blurry world looked much like what I always saw. In college, although dissuaded from an art major by my parents, I still sneaked in a few art history classes, including French Impressionism. More importantly, I learned that the art instructors were impressed with my art critiques. It still took decades before I began publishing poetry. That’s when Claude Monet moved back into my life. After writing many poems about my deceased father, Monet became the second leading man of my poems. Visiting France gave me my first big chance to see lots of Monet’s paintings in a single show. We went to Giverny, Musée d’Orsay, and every other museum we could find in other cities. Somehow we overlooked l’Orangerie, where entire rooms overflow with Monet’s waterlilies, but we went back a few years later for that. Since my husband is a volunteer at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, we often visit several Monet paintings there as well as special exhibits featuring the Impressionists. I often write ekphrastic poems about specific paintings, but the more I get to know him, the more often Monet himself or just his name will pop up in unusual places. In “At the Movies with Monet,” I couldn’t resist taking him to the Tivoli to witness his documentary, I, Claude Monet. “Naturally, we go to an art house. Monet remembers the first movies by the Lumière brothers. I assure him his art will be shown in full colour…. A loud ringtone at the end of our aisle makes him jump. Sacré bleu! he explodes….” In “Today I Feel Like Monet,” I simply share Monet’s certain jubilation about the return of spring. Many of those art books I consulted in college contained lots of black and white photos, which lost all the magic of Impressionism. The poem begins, “A tedious winter even for the Midwest – like page after page of Impressionist paintings printed in black and white." When we finally got to L’Orangerie, I wanted to enlarge my topic, to demonstrate how Monet’s many water lily paintings convey a day’s journey around the pond and to allow Monet to speak for himself by putting a header Monet quote before each of the paintings I featured. I would like to paint the way a bird sings. The subject is the light. …appearance changes at any moment. It’s terrible how the light runs out. (from “Surrounded by Monet’s Water Lilies”) In a more recent poem, “Why I’m Sitting in a French Jail Cell,” I visualize going back to Giverny and jumping into the lily pond – an attempt to uncover the secrets Monet has tucked underwater in his paintings. In my imagination, I also feel free to take the opposite point of view. In “Autopsy,” I express indignation. “Now curators plan to spend more than a million dollars on art forensics:… They want us to watch Monet sweat… Never mind that true genius is making it look easy.” Because Monet has influenced so many artists and this poet, I couldn’t help but invite him into a painting set in France by an American painter. This ekphrastic challenge to Rainy Night at Etaples by William Edouard Scott. Because Scott painted it in 1912, when Monet was still painting and just before WWI, it seemed appropriate to have the French narrator remember this particular night and be reminded of Monsieur Monet’s skill. “My wet shawl shuddered, my numb feet shuffled on. Swinging wide to avoid the corner puddle – almost home, almost home – I stopped. The swirling water shimmered under the lamp post as though posing for Monsieur Monet.” As you can see, I don’t always wait for a specific work of art to inspire what I write. Think of your own favourite painters. Feel free to sprinkle them into a poem you’re writing about a particular place or season. You’ll be honouring their contribution to how you see the world. (Same goes for music, dance, even ice hockey – part of the writer’s “write what you know” admonition, only we get to sprinkle our wild imaginations into the mix.) If you’re curious to see the complete poems, they live in the archives of TER: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/at-the-movies-with-monet-by-alarie-tennille https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/today-i-feel-like-monet-by-alarie-tennille https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/surrounded-by-monets-water-lilies-by-alarie-tennille “Why I’m Sitting in a French Jail Cell” at https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/monet-ekphrastic-writing-responses “Le Temps Perdu” at https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/william-edouard-scott-ekphrastic-writing-challenge-responses Alarie Tennille Alarie Tennille was a pioneer coed at the University of Virginia, where she earned her degree in English, Phi Beta Kappa key, and black belt in Feminism. This is all the bio she chooses to share today since she’s already told you so much of her life in the narrative, The Bird in the Box after Joseph Cornell Perhaps the artist didn’t understand. A depiction of yearning requires velvet, brocade, buttons. Admittedly, the palette is soothing, buff white, the breast of a snow bunting. One small window proffers light. A relief of blue in all that beige. I accept it is inspired, how the perch divides the space: above, below. But clearly the bird has flown. Viewers can see the seed feeder in situ - a dish where the hungry came to eat. It is a simple bowl in porcelain, but lacks the gold of an escape. What a shame plumage is missing! To omit the vanes of the bird is heart rending. Two scraps of paper represent its feathers - mawkish curls, stiff with cardboard quills. A word is scribbled on each: the first says, "climb," and the second, "fly." Juliet Fossey Juliet lives in’ Wordsworth’ country’ in the Lake District, U.K. She enjoys writing whilst walking on the fells and accepts getting wet is part of the creative process. Her work has appeared in Pennine Platform, Mslexia and Artemis. Light waves penned upward crash I stumble onto a row of non-descript artwork, small frames blue-black, an armchair surfs along the sea mustached man a willing participant therapy session with Poseidon? arm curled like a shell, the kind of chair people put in rooms only for decoration, certainly not for riding. lighthouse lurking, shining, the light. the light what? A search for meaning, this is a modern art museum, after all. Jackie Sizemore "With no hometown to speak of, I come from the Rust Belt, the South, and Tokyo. My poetry has appeared in Noble / Gas Qtrly, Print Oriented Bastards, Yes Poetry, and Variant Literature. My lyric essay was listed as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2018. My projects have earned SAFTA and Wildacres residencies. I received my MFA from Boise State University and BA from Carnegie Mellon University." If you enjoy this essay, you may want to join us on online on Sunday for our workshop on writing with Hammershoi's art. Fifty Shades of Grey: the Evocative Silence of Vilhelm Hammershoi Vilhelm Hammershoi’s curiously withdrawn paintings of muted, spare interiors and a faceless woman in black are most often compared to Jan Vermeer and Edward Hopper. I see the chain of continuity, but Vilhelm’s works also contain an understated current of erotic poetry. There is softness in the hard angles, and a sense of eavesdropping, of happening on a window and looking into someone’s private world. These are not mere depictions of blank walls and pianos and housewives reading letters. They are haunted, too. The grey Dane was a reclusive, elusive man whose art garnered modest recognition in his lifetime. But after his death to cancer just shy of a century ago, he faded into relative obscurity. There was an important retrospective at the Musee D’Orsay in 1998, and a well-received exhibition at the Met in 2001. Yet Hammershoi remains a cult figure. He is revered by a ragtag assortment of followers intrigued by the unsettling beauty of his images. The works fetch sizeable sums from museums at auction. But, perhaps as he would have wished, he has never found the limelight. By the few accounts we have, we understand Hammershoi was a reticent man, preferring solitude or quiet company. He was described as “taciturn” and shy. He spoke softly, and was painfully sensitive. He had his own kind of closeness with a chosen few, especially his wife Ida, the subject of most of his portraits. His paintings reflected the quietude he sought. “Hammershoi’s ‘reality’ is a room devoid of people,” wrote Dr. Kasper Monrad, chief curator at the National Gallery of Denmark. The artist’s legacy was bolstered by a chance encounter with Monty Python’s Michael Palin, who found himself enchanted by the uncluttered, desaturated interiors and the mysterious figure whose back is always turned. Palin said the artist’s grey and sepia paintings stood out from others, “like undertakers at a carnival. These…sparsely furnished rooms, almost stripped of colour, conveying a powerful sense of stillness and silence…there was something about the work that drew me like a magnet. Something beyond appreciation of technique or decorative effect, something deeper and more compulsive, taking me in a direction I'd never been before.” Palin followed his muse to Copenhagen and made a documentary film, thereby dusting off the bygone relic and reviving Vilhelm to a brief vogue. Besides Jan Vermeer and Hopper, there is little to compare to Hammershoi’s work. Alex Colville and Hopper both share something of their detachment. They too convey ordinary life scenes with a kind of eeriness that is difficult to pin down. Magritte sometimes used a similar maze of doors and windows to create mystery. And the tonalist artists of Hammershoi’s time certainly influenced his palette with their ranging greys. We know he liked Whistler, for example, because he painted his own version of Arrangement in Grey and Black (Whistler’s Mother). And Vermeer’s influence is obvious in Vilhelm’s interior subjects, light, and perspective. Indeed, after the 1998 retrospective, he was dubbed, “the Danish Vermeer.” But Hammershoi distinguished himself from both of these teachers and from his heirs by stripping colour and detail utterly from his scenes. With all distractions gutted from the narrative, we find in the starkness a stunning, subtle subtext of sensuality. What has been removed, what goes unsaid, what lies beneath, is the real story in these paintings. The shifting light through the window, the people frozen in time. How we are standing at the edge of the painting, looking in, like the artist himself. Hammershoi’s rooms are pared down, and his subjects are oddly unadorned, placing them in a kind of still-life twilight zone. But their quality of isolation does not beg for change. The paintings are evocative vignettes, haikus of sorts to the beauty of the ordinary. One gets the sense that much more would shatter this fragile shelter. He is already overwhelmed. “Each of them looks like the sad home of a recently bereaved widower, whose place has been forcibly tidied up by a cold, hard, bureaucratic, social worker,” writes Christie Davies, who does not see what I see. She chides the artist for having “locked himself into his glum apartment in Copenhagen…produced dull, glum interiors which he sold to his dentist.” I think that Vilhelm understands that he has all he needs, even if he seldom leaves his house. Christie minces no words in expressing her repugnance towards the “bleak houses” and bare walls and the “total absence of cheerful, welcoming clutter.” But I find each quiet conundrum to be like the moment of a sharp intake of breath. In their very stillness one can hear the heart beating wildly. In light of such art history, Christie finds unsurprising the Danes’ unusual claim to fame as top producers of hard-core pornography. “Perhaps it is necessary to arouse them from their dreadful ennui…Better they add lithium, for their souls are eaten away by spiritual caries…We can see from Hammershoi's work that the Danish sky is an endless undifferentiated grey and there are no hills.” Perhaps. Vilhelm and his wife really did live in the kind of minimalism he portrays, with walls and furniture they painted white themselves. We are painfully intimate with the artist’s awkward reservation. There is the sense of existing apart from the routine clatter and upheaval of life. But this isn’t about monotony. This indicates to me someone who was extremely sensitive and easily overwhelmed. Many said the painter had neurasthenia. This was a popular but vague diagnosis in Hammershoi’s time, pointing to a variety of nervous conditions from dyspepsia to chronic fatigue to depression. But I feel his work shows attentiveness to beauty, even if it is redefined by minimalism. There is a sense of awe rather than alienation. There is a reverence towards mystery. It’s as if Hammershoi found solace, and soul, in his unique relationship to the world and to Ida. To some degree, he understood or made peace with his own limitations, and he accepted those of his wife. Maybe Vilhelm did not require bright colours and rolling hills for a deeply sensual experience of life. In my study of art, I return time and time again to the writings of Thomas Moore. Moore writes more about music, psychology, God, and even golf than he writes about art, but as an especially gifted observer, he shows me how to see. A recurring theme throughout his work is that real depth of experience comes from entering fully into life’s mysteries, including the painful ones. Instead of viewing every uncertainty, imperfection, quirk, or heartbreak as a pathology that needs to be tidied up and fixed, we can open ourselves to what it reveals about our soul. It’s not that we should never strive for better; rather, Moore acknowledges that both the hands we are dealt and the choices we make lead us into a range of encounters that deepen our very humanity. My sexy has been filled with tumultuous highs and nightmare fall outs, and looks nothing like the serene and vacant world of the Hammershois. Its excesses and lackings have been messy and fraught with dramatics, inconsistent and embarrassing. “Colourful” is a fitting, if polite, description. In contrast, what we can see of Hammershoi’s is reserved, restrained, almost elegant, in fifty shades of grey. So very, very naked. Art allows us to conjure the lives of others. The fact of fiction gives us access to other realities. In speculating on the private world that Hammershoi has revealed publicly through his art, I can’t help but thinking about Moore’s insights on love and sexuality in his books Soul Mates and The Soul of Sex. The paradox of finding such intense sensuality in the chaste, introverted renderings of this painter makes sense through Moore’s lense. That Vilhelm paints interiors with such sensuousness is even more interesting in light of Moore’s observation that, “The word ‘intimacy’ means ‘profoundly interior.’ It comes from the superlative form of the Latin word ‘inter,’ meaning ‘within.’ It could be translated… ‘most within.’ In our intimate relationships, the ‘most within’ dimensions of ourselves and the other are engaged.’ There is a heartbreaking dispassion in Vilhelm’s artworks, rendered in the almost obsessive neutrality of his depictions. Yet the artist remains focused on his wife, allowing all of us to share his preoccupation. His idea of beauty is unadorned, to be certain, but there’s a sense of complete surrender to the terms of the relationship. There’s a tenderness sometimes absent in more raucous, racy, noisy ways of desire. There is an exquisite intimacy within the seeming aloofness. Look at the rapt attention he pays to the naked curve of her slender neck. The few mussed tendrils against the bare skin are almost a fixation. Ida is a geisha. The nape, which the Japanese saw as a woman’s most erotic aspect, is vulnerable and exposed. Whatever the dynamics of their marriage, there is an understanding between them. There is no tension in the air, and the melancholy is balanced by some kind of reverence. “It isn’t easy to expose your soul to another, to risk such vulnerability, hoping that the other person will be able to tolerate your own irrationality,” Moore continues. “It may also be difficult…to be receptive as another reveals her soul to you. “ Such mutual vulnerability is “one of the great gifts of love.” In Hammershoi’s work, the gaze of the artist is almost fetishistic, and once you notice it, all the pretenses in the paintings and in your mind begin to unravel. You have a hundred questions. Is the woman waiting in vain to be touched by a man who is too tentative or tepid? Is she playing a losing game of temptation with a husband who is really married to his nervous disorders, or to his paintings? Was this as far as he could go, in his imagination? Or, is this all that she will show him? Is this what she has had to become, for him? The couple had no children. Is the barrenness of these pictures a more literal key? These tantalizing scenarios toy with my inner voyeur, but I keep coming back to the lack of desperation in their distance. There is a comfortable certainty between them. Was the artist so reclusive that he found it safer just to look? Or was Ida the one who was aloof? That she never returns his gaze seems a reasonable clue. Perhaps he cannot bear for her to return his gaze. He is safe where he is. Perhaps she can only bear to be seen, not touched. There is no sex in these paintings, and yet, I feel, that sex is part of their subject. It’s there right away, in our uneasiness when we first find ourselves inside of them. Sex is many things, gorgeous, topsy-turvy, sacred, complicated, ugly, absent. Sex is a shape shifter. Whenever we think we’ve got the hang of it, figured it all out, come to terms with whatever it is we need to address or accept or change, it reinvents itself and takes us for another sort of ride. We may find our ravenous curiousity about who is doing what to whom shameful and pathetic, but it’s rooted in more than lasciviousness. We are constantly trying to place ourselves and our shoulds and woulds and wouldnts on the human spectrum, and it’s a never-ending puzzle because where we find ourselves keeps changing. Every relationship and every unrequited desire changes the dynamic, exposing more of our interior world to ourselves and to others. Sexuality is the theatre in which our most intense fears and weaknesses and our most painful wounds show themselves. Whatever our particular darkness, it rears its ugly head in our sexual dramas. It is where we enact our unresolved rage, losses, regrets, and betrayals. In it, our obsessions and compulsions are manifest. Conversely, it is also where our highest traits are brought to light. It is where we overcome our selfishness and heal deep-seated hurts. It is where we practice generosity, love, fearlessness, courage, openness, commitment, nurture, or self-control. Hammershoi’s paintings are erotic hauntings. More frank treatments of sexuality, or vulgar ones, are in no short supply, and there are pragmatic perspectives and funny, bawdy ones, too. There are spellbinding and explicit paeans to desire. But Vilhelm’s paintings remind us that sex is hidden. No matter how many times we have it, or don’t have it, analyze it, moralize it, medicalize it, avoid it, or confront it, there is still more mystery to fathom. In the deepest recesses of our psyches and our bodies is this mystery, the literal meaning of life, which we can never wholly grasp or catch up to. It is obscured even if we are addressing it directly, or doing it, for that matter. We return to it, over and over. We have all of us evolved various defenses and compulsions in response to the heaven and hell of Eros. Vilhelm’s paintings of empty rooms and his evocative portrayals of his most intimate relationship reveal some of his. They are open-ended questions, with a silence that is all at once patient, reverent, despondent, and poetic. He is on the outside looking in, while she is on the inside, looking away. Lorette C. Luzajic This essay first appeared in Fascinating Artists: twenty-five unusual lives. Lorette C. Luzajic loves reading and writing about art and artists, and that is why she started The Ekphrastic Review in 2015. The Impossibility of Love, by Kate Wilson Independently published, 2023 Click on image above to view or purchase on Amazon. Interview with Kate Wilson on The Impossibility of Love The Ekphrastic Review: Van Gogh is the most “ekphrasticized” of all the artists. Why do you think that is? Why did you choose to write about Van Gogh’s work? Kate Wilson: I think the fact his paintings have become so popular over time and he’s been commercialised has played a part in the number of creative pieces that draw inspiration from his work. In the UK and around the world there have been several different immersive gallery experiences in recent years which explore his troubled life and I think his personal story; his suffering and tragic death also compound this interest. But then again, I don’t think people would be so inspired by his works were they not beautiful. There is something about those vivid colours which makes them incredibly appealing. For me personally, I chose to write about Van Gogh because his paintings meant something to me. As a child I painted my own version of the sunflowers and my grandmother bought me a print of them shortly after in an effort to encourage me. She was a painter herself and Van Gogh’s sunflowers are tied up with my memories of her. The Ekphrastic Review: Colour is naturally a recurring theme or inspiration in these poems, as it was for Van Gogh’s paintings. Tell us a bit about your relationship with colours in general. Tell us something, too, about the way Van Gogh used colour that you find especially moving. Kate Wilson: For me, colour helps articulate mood and emotional state and has often been important in my writing. When I was looking at Van Gogh’s paintings, particularly his self portraits which show the evolution of his style and use of colour over time, it seemed there was a correlation between the vividness of his work and his own mental turmoil. It felt to me like his way of seeing the vibrancy and beauty of things came at a great cost to him and I found this incredibly sad. I’ve tried to capture this in the collection. The Ekphrastic Review: Tell us about how you chose which paintings to write about. What surprises did you find along the way? Kate Wilson: There were some paintings I knew I wanted to write about from the outset, simply because I liked them and they’re significant paintings of Van Gogh: Sunflowers, Starry Night and Café Terrace at Night. However, I tried to be open minded about the others and used the process as an opportunity to explore and get to know more of his paintings. I had no idea Van Gogh has painted anything particularly wintry for example, so enjoyed taking Landscape with Snow and Snow-Covered Field (after Millet) as starting points to explore a different season of Van Gogh’s work and add some variety to the poems and setting. The Ekphrastic Review: What was your process like? Tell us what poetic contemplation of the art looked like for you. What was the evolution of these poems like? Kate Wilson: Some of the poems began as a free writing exercises, so I’d have the painting in front of me and just get into a flow as the ideas came to me, almost as though I was mimicking the process of painting I imagined Van Gogh to have. I knew I wanted to do something which explored the artist’s life and pain but that I still wanted the poems to feel personal, so I had this in mind while writing. Then the process of refinement and editing took several months, as I tried to shape the collection and ensure I still captured some of the energy I was hoping to by writing this way. As I mentioned earlier, I was open minded about the paintings I explored and actually wrote a lot of material on other works which didn’t make it into the pamphlet. The Ekphrastic Review: What interesting things about Van Gogh did you learn while working on this collection of ekphrases? Kate Wilson: As I was working on the poems, I dipped in and out of the book of letters between Van Gogh and his brother Theo. Probably my most interesting discovery was that Van Gogh was a beautiful writer himself. When he was buoyant and feeling positive about his work and life, his letters were poetic and his phrasing beautiful, especially when he wrote about colours. In my poem, “Hallowed Ground”, I used the phrase “lemon green” and this was borrowed from a letter of his. The Ekphrastic Review: Which poem in this collection surprised you in some way? I think “Thirty-Six Self Portraits” is the poem which surprised me the most. When I started writing I didn’t know where it was going and I didn’t expect it be an overview of his life. As soon as I began to cut it down, it started to look like a retelling of his story, showing how he changed and how his suffering ultimately got the better of him. It’s also more imagistic and less narrative but somehow still has a lot to say. TER: Scroll down past the images to read this poem! Thirty-Six Self-Portraits You began in gold ruddy with light, though you never lost the frown You didn’t want to be seen obscured in coal felt hat, direct stare The picture of the artist as a sombre man Blue enters a crusade of strokes makes your expression unreadable There is one image where your eyes are not visible The man with three faces edges of eye sideways glare Yellow is an assault woven like wheat fields overflowing Borders are sharp like your eyes piercing as a lemon grove You wear green for the first time jaded, taken prisoner by yourself You try to capture your hunger sunken eyes, hollow hours in pursuit of perfection Lost in a foreground which grows and expands in sand and brown How sometimes you drink to forget but it’s pastoral Hunched from nights of plenty shrinking under eyes of shifting hue Blanketed in brilliant white bandages Vivid relentless blue waves and swirls which grow definitions A shadow that follows and follows Kate Wilson Wat Rong Khun A sculpture of Iron Man with a crown of flames sits on a bench outside of The White Temple near head statues of orcs, elves, demons, Captain America, The Hulk, Hellboy, Batman, and other heads dangling from the thick branches of a slanted tree. No grand explanation for their arrangement other than being World Things that recall our time placed near the seraphic beauty of the modernist white temple and its fragments of mirrored glass that line the edges of the white flames brightening the structures from the bridge to the Ubosot, the main building where, inside, a mural of more World Things from our time are playfully painted. Before we go, hand-in-hand, into the marvel, let us first explore the outer parts and admire the statues of Naga serpents and their sculpted flames of Thai and Hindu gods and their sculpted flames and stroll beyond a big lotus made of hundreds of thousands of tin pieces and through a walkway underneath hundreds of thousands of tin pieces (we might need to relieve ourselves by now so past a fountain is a restroom building sculpted with golden flames) and walk beyond a Bodhisattva and the tinier Bodhisattva above it wreathed together in golden flames. Only after we have exposed ourselves to enough beauty that we want to dissolve in it do we stroll toward the heavenly structure and admire, at a distance, the Ubosot that appears to be pulling white flames toward the sky and its reflection in a pool of silver and orange fish that appears to be blurring white flames in a mirror reality and after we have overcome the seduction of another realm will we stand before the entrance of a bridge surrounded by two pools of a hundred or so hands reaching, grasping to where no rope exists to pull them out of a concrete hellscape as we peer closer and see faces in agony. Take heed of the warriors that point at us before we journey beyond desire and cross the bridge into the Ubosot and feel ourselves dissolve into white flames lined with mirrored glass images of ourselves shattering as we enter the temple where a mural of Hello Kitty, Transformers, Pokémon and other World Things of our time surround us among planets painted in bright pinks and yellows and planet-sized lotuses painted in bright pinks and yellows and we exit from these World Things feeling our own permanence and impermanence as we vanish in front of a gargantuan sculpture of the art god Ganesh placed back onto the world as we stumble into a workshop of everyday artists and workers shaping white plaster and mirrored glass. Efren Laya Cruzada Efren Laya Cruzada was born in the Philippines and grew up in South Texas. He studied English and American Literature and Creative Writing at New York University. He is the author of Grand Flood: a poem. His work has been published in The Light Ekphrastic, Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, Star*line, and other journals, with work forthcoming in The Tiger Moth Review. Currently, he is working on a poetry collection based on travels throughout Latin America and Asia. His day jobs have included coaching chess, teaching ESL, and writing for blockchain media companies. He now resides in Austin, Texas. |
The Ekphrastic Review
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May 2024
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