Piet Mondrian, Grey Tree, oil on canvas, 1911 Cathy Wittmeyer
Cathy Wittmeyer hosts the Word to Action retreat in the Alps and edited the upcoming anthology: Eden is a Backyard: Climate poems from Word to Action from Eupolino Verlag. Her poems explore climate wreckage and human frailty. Her work has appeared in Isele Magazine, Superpresent, Tangled Locks Journal and Book of Matches among others. For more on this engineer/lawyer, mom and poet from Buffalo, NY, see https://cathywittmeyer.com
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My Head I may daydream for days, along a choice of three, his rule of thumb, but as long as Shakespeare, Amos or Carley include a decent word, in me, the inner voice calms down the arrows in my head. My mind is not always on my side, off to mill while happy valleys, while misery up the stairs, and down my silver linings, I still cannot settle for gold, still cannot think out loud. I may triumph all with merry memories, talk on the phone or fill wishes with infatuation, with -in order of Summers, then Winters - whale diving and King Arthur-land, yet brain just asks a lot of questions. Bethink, the wizard's daughter knew to stop his head with one thump of her hands, and I wished for an eternal ice-cream shop, a window of wonder. Weren’t we all looking out, wondering when life would start? And so, up and down, monochromally, my head learns to wrap around decisions, around sorrow in the kitchen, and days of tiny leaves or tiled coldness. Anticipation fills a head, the choice is mine. Kate Copeland Kate Copeland started absorbing books ever since a little lass. Her love for words led her to teaching & translating; her love for art & water to poetry…please find her pieces @The Ekphrastic Review, Poets’ Choice, First Lit.Review-East, Wildfire Words, The Metaworker, The Weekly/Five South, New Feathers, AltPoetryPrompts a.o. Her recent Insta reads: www.instagram.com/kate.copeland.poems/ Over the years, she worked at literary festivals and Breathe-Read-Write-sessions, recent linguistic-poetry workshops were via the IWWG (more workshops in the making). Kate was born @ harbour city and adores housesitting @ the world. It’s a Helluva Blue “Vincent Van Gogh understood colour,” I said, walking the trail to the Hollywood sign. The sky that day glowed bright blue and Brody said it was the blue of the skies in Mickey Mouse cartoons. I said it was like a giant Pantone colour chip laid across the whole of Los Angeles, and then that’s when I said this thing about Van Gogh. He went on, as if he didn’t hear me (later he would say, I didn’t hear you). “The applications are due for Making Art in L.A., like next week.” “Yeah. I’m almost done with mine.” My mind was still on Vincent and the colour blue in his Starry Night painting which was not this blue—it was after all, nighttime in his painting—but if he was here right now, he would paint this blue because he understood it. I think this way because I think that I understand it. I am a painter, after all. I teach painting at a college, I paint in my studio, I show once a year (if I’m lucky) in a gallery. I tell myself I understand colour but then I wonder if what I understand is this: if I were ever to paint a canvas and use this colour for the sky, the verdict from the art world would be saccharine, schmaltzy, amateur. What I need to do, what I want to do, is go see the painting in person so I can really assess just how Van Gogh understood that sky, that blue. Where is it? Paris, London. I ask Brody and he says, MOMA. “Can we go there?” I say. “Can we afford a trip to New York?” “Why do you suddenly want to see that particular painting?” I consider being exasperated but hold back and just say, “Like I said, Van Gogh understood colour.” He nodded, then said, “When did you say that?” The Hollywood sign was around the next corner so I sped up and ran the incline – to get away. To get closer to the sky. Brody was okay as a boyfriend, especially since we are both artists. All – mostly all – of my previous boyfriends had also been artists and maybe that doesn’t work. So maybe I would stop dating artists but then I met Brody and so far it’s working out. Sort of. He doesn’t make any dismissive remarks about my work like so many others did. He’s relatively complimentary. Actually, he spaces out when he looks at my paintings and says almost nothing. Perhaps that’s best. On our third date, at Huntington Library, we went to see the Kehinde Wiley painting of Obama, and also walk through the gardens. “Look how Wiley flattens the canvas,” I said. “Creepy in here with all these other old portraits,” Brody said, sweeping his arm to encompass the 18th-century full-length portraits that shared the space with Obama. “I think that’s the point,” I said. I wanted to admire Wiley’s work but Brody was already walking to the door. “I guess we're going to the gardens now,” I said aloud to no one. Maybe to Obama. We were wandering the cactus garden, which is huge, goes on forever with winding paths and a zillion different cactuses. Cacti. I love the strange shapes. I took a lot of pictures, knowing these would appear in some form in my paintings. I said, “I love these so much.” “They are wild, I’ve never seen a lot of these before. They’re like aliens.” “They are like aliens, and look at the way they grow from one part onto the next, sometimes growing bigger than the base where it started. Some of them are like mutants” (he is uh-huhing as I talk) “in that they change form the farther they get from the base, I wonder if being drought resistant shapes them. I have a friend who is a cactus expert and when she got married, she asked for cactus plants as the only gift they wanted—they were planning a big cactus garden at their new house. Imagine that, a whole bunch of cactus for a wedding present.” “Yep, me too.” “You too? You mean you want cactus for a wedding present?” “Huh? Who said anything about a wedding?” I was going to say, I did just now, but he looked so surprised, I was confused and so I let it slide. I look up the cheapest flights from LA to NYC. I look up the cheapest hotels. I add up everything and there is no way for us to go to MOMA. We just don’t have the money for such an extravagance. I am sad about this and tell Brody that I am sad. “Why did you want to go?” he asks. “MOMA. Van Gogh. Starry Night.” I swear I've told him this five times already in the three days since that hike. “You can see it online.” “You know that is not a substitute for seeing any painting in person.” “Go see the Van Gogh at the Norton Simon. Don’t they have a couple?” “Yes. But not Starry Night. I need to see his blue.” Brody looks up (he listened to me!) the Norton Simon’s collection and shows me the images. “There is the Mulberry Tree. It has a blue sky.” So we go, late in the afternoon. Pasadena is a short drive from DTLA and we wind up the Arroyo Seco freeway and into the museum parking lot. I stand in front of the Mulberry Tree with its blue sky. A different blue than Starry Night but it is Van Gogh’s particular blue, like one that exists just for him. Brody stood next to me, looking around the gallery and not at the painting. “It is a helluva blue. You know it’s made from lapis lazuli,” I said. “We took the same class, of course I know.” “Look how different his sky is from the old paintings,” I said. “How the sky is as much an object as the tree is. How like everything is foreground. How different that was back then. I wish I could have been there.” “Uh-huh. Hey, did you ever see that Doctor Who episode where the Doctor meets Van Gogh and takes him to the future so he can …” “See how his paintings are loved. Yes, I showed you that one. You’ve never watched Doctor Who except for that one episode. That I showed you.” “So, are you done and want to get dinner?” Back in our adjoining studios at the Brewery, I said, “So inspired! Gotta paint.” Brody said, “I agree,” and went to watch basketball on his giant screen TV. I stood in front of one of the three paintings I was working on, one with a blue-faced person that I was trying to keep from looking like an extra in Avatar. I kept thinking about lapis lazuli and Van Gogh and that I would never understand colour, never understand blue, and never understand why Brody had this gap where I slipped through and disappeared. Amy Jones Sedivy Amy Jones Sedivy grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in NELA (Highland Park) with her artist-husband and their princess-dog. She recently retired and spends her time reading, writing, and exploring the rest of Los Angeles. With a husband who is an artist, she spends a lot of time in galleries and museums, so most of her stories are about artists or artist-adjacent characters. The rest are about musicians. Maame in the Alcove I’m not among those willing to look back toward the old gods, those who gave comfort, fear, rites to feel whole. But she twists back desperate to cling to them, Cape Coast bollards in time’s typhoon—its unrelenting gusts tug her braids westward, straightening them out. Perhaps it’s ignorance of the old ways: I can’t decipher what distresses her. A water jug her head once bore lies cracked beside a stool (sagging, much like her breasts), yet the hassock at her feet a trendy pouf covered in durable polyester chintz. I keep such knickknacks in an attic baized in webs, mildew, dust: a warped psalter, masques from a bygone fête—remnants of gatherings fit for her mise-en-scène? Why does she parade them—jugs, handholds on a cliff-face as if they’d stop a freefall? Like me, she sits alone; they’ve shuttered the old marketplace. But if she’ll shop in Shoprite’s fluorescent anonymity for her yams, cassava flour, I could help her connect-- where thousands stream a grainy highlife clip and google Who are Asase Yaa, Nyame? Michael Sandler Michael Sandler is the author of a poetry collection, The Lamps of History (FutureCycle Press 2021). His work has appeared in scores of journals, including recently in THINK, Literary Imagination, and Smartish Pace. Previously he worked as a lawyer, in addition to writing poems. He lives near Seattle; his website is www.sandlerpoetry.com. Méliès Moon I will refuse the cold and lifeless rock and instead choose the Méliès moon, a wild, anarchic planet, one eyeball burst by a rocket’s priapic thrust. I will refuse a cold and distant science and instead choose a lunar snowfall sprinkled by star-girls with shining stockings over forests of swollen mushrooms. I will refuse to be cold and logical and instead choose spectacle, the dark side of the moon governed by skeletal simians, the dominion of dreams I am afraid to confess. Jacob Lee Bachinger Jacob Lee Bachinger lives in southern Alberta where he teaches at University of Lethbridge. His book of poetry, Earth-cool, and Dirty, was published by Radiant Press of Regina in 2021. His work has been featured in Canadian journals such as The Fiddlehead, Riddle Fence, and The Malahat Review, among others. For more information: https://www.jacobleebachinger.com/ Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), film by Georges Méliès (French) 1902 Clouds of Glory Papa was a rolling stone. Papa was a bowling ball. Papa was a Hallmark card. Papa was a pocket slide-rule. Papa was a pluggerdoodle. Papa was a binkus. Papa was a schnulli. Papa was the smell of napalm in the morning. Papa was the odor of formaldehyde rising from the mortician’s open door at night. Papa was a Kool Aid flavor, Man-o-Mangoberry, with a twist. Papa was the Cookie Monster. Papa was an unsacked bottle of port wine, passed hand to hand, in an alley behind Fifth and Western. Papa was the beleaguered Ricci in Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 Italian neorealist masterpiece The Bicycle Thief. Papa was the inimitable Nervous Norvus before “Transfusion” fame ruined him and drove him into seclusion in the Hollywood Hills. Papa was the original Nervous Nelly before a fusillade of anti-aircraft fire ripped through his B-17 Flying Fortress on January 27, 1943, on a bombing run over the submarine yards in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, and parts of the waist gunner were splattered across the hatch of Papa’s ball turret, and the catwalk was slickened with blood, and the babyfaced pilot judged the mission a bust, and dropped the plane out of formation, and turned, and limped back to England on one engine, and crash-landed there, in a cornfield, events which would imbue Papa with a disquieting composure that would remain with him the rest of his life. Papa was a chainsmoker, naturally. Papa was not for sale. Papa was not for resale. Papa was not to be removed under penalty of law. Papa was not for everybody. Or maybe he was. Papa was a rolling stone. Edward Miller Edward Miller teaches writing at Madera Community College. Included among his areas of interest are outsider art, street photography, and the American vernacular. 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. 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. |
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