 Guernica, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1937 Guernica at MOMA I was ten, I wanted an egg salad sandwich in the cafeteria, wanted to see Pablo’s funny goat in the courtyard. No. The horse: black lines scratched on a world of white exposed its great thick neck, head turned up to empty air. Dagger-toothed mouth screamed, balled buccal muscles strained from lifting its railed chest and back to legs that might run to sweet grazing. I moved from sketch to sketch to painting: screaming people broken buildings and the impossible — above the horse -- naked light bulb — pupil of an eye. I stood there. Horse took me, took all I was, expanded to fill the room, rode me. We two became chimera in a world of black and gray, white spaces shined, offered peace but no entrance. I stood there. I stand here, this memory stretches like metal heated under pressure, frozen, ready to fissure. The horse riding, still riding me. Jonathan Stolzenberg Jonathan Stolzenberg is a retired Developmental/Behavioral Pediatrician and Family Psychotherapist living in West Hartford CT. He is a docent at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain CT. He is a graduate of Harvard College and obtained a Master’s in Creative Writing/Poetry from Trinity College, Hartford at age fifty. His work has been published in The Notre Dame Review, The Texas Review, The Louisville Review, Caduceus, The Connecticut Review, and Gulf Stream Magazine. He has rejections from some of the best poetry journals, and is a proud member of The Back Room Poets.
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 The Potato Eaters, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1885 The Potato Eaters April, 1885, Nuenen, Netherlands. Dark interior. Stillness. No romance. Dinner. Potatoes. No pies. A meager light curbs a scanty catch in the air – the old man’s white cup extended to the old lady in black; tending the tea, she doesn’t see thischance of mutual ambiance. The denial continues with the young couple – the man’s gaze is sent away from the lady’s imploring eyes on the side. The young diner entirely declines a sight into her plight. Van Gogh has denied any sparkle of bonding between equals in longing. He wanted to present the peasants’ plain existential account – the daily expenditure of muscle and mind to the last blow of strength and command. Their potatoes are set on the table in good order, the light reverberates on their pealed orbs and evaporates with the steam, leaving a lonely unnoticed gleam - they are to replenish, not to enjoy. Vincent’s peasant, at the table as in the field, is a sole warrior of strife, in the life’s knot’s tightest bent, with no victory at hand - nature’s hazardousdecoy, the dark side of the pastoral ploy. Grumpy faces: smiles – snatched by the wind. Battered hands: cuddles - burned by the sun. Ruffled bodies: costumed joy - washed away by the rain. Ruff attitude: fine manners – buried in the soil. The peasant – Vincent’s liberator of the earth apple from the underground’s dark grapple. Ekaterina Dukusina Ekaterina Dukusina lives in London. A graduate in Philology and Philosophy, she is interested in the history of arts, ideas, culture and universalism, going back to Sanskrit sources. Considering poetry as human’s alter ego, she is an avid explorer of the metrical word. Former educationist, she is now a volunteer at the V&A Museum; and at the British Museum for the interactive program Hands On. Her creative acumen is attested in the authorship of the British Library publication The Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander, listed by questia digital library at position 9 in one of their periodical selections 16 of the best publications on illuminated manuscripts.  Fractals, by Sudeep Sen, Wings Press, 2016. Ekphrasis, Curation, and Visual Art in Sudeep Sen’s Fractals Introduction Contemporary Indian English poetry in the third millennium becomes the primary matrix for cosmopolitan art. It provides a cultural and spiritual cornucopia, takes us back to the forgotten past, celebrates the diverse change in various forms of art and serves as a vital interface between the text and the image. From terse, unpunctuated verse to the folk tales, from the giant historical moment to the success stories of digital installation of art, contemporary Indian English poetry retrieves episodes and fragments from every corner of the world that we inherit. It becomes a space where various art-forms merge and morph into unconventional literary pieces. Since there is a constant change in the modes of writing, use of white space, and themes in literary pieces, especially in Contemporary Indian English Poetry, a more meta-representational and rhetorical conceptualization of the term ekphrasis is desirable. James A.W. Heffernan in the introduction of his book Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery writes, “ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the silent image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. Over the ages, its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures” (1994). Drawing on a wide variety of forms of art from all around the world, especially paintings and photographs, the article tries to explore the spectrum of ekphrastic poetry in details. Transforming words into movements and spaces into poetry Sudeep Sen in one of his finest collections of poems, Fractals, recreates visual poetry by expanding his work beyond language and text. Recognized as the seminal voice of the contemporary poetry scene, Sudeep Sen has made an outstanding contribution in shaping the contours of contemporary Indian English poetry and has paved the way for a new generation of sensibility. Fractals; a collection of over 300 poems split into three sections: “Newer Poems: 1998-2015”, “Selected Earlier Poems: 1980-1997” and “Selected Translations: 1997-2015”and various sub-sections exudes an aura of exoticism. The very first poem of this collection titled “Mediterranean” (21) creates the foreground for startling images airbrushed with subtle layers of emotions. To quote a few lines: My lost memory white and frozen now melts colour ready to refract This poem conforms to the hallmark of ekphrastic poetry, where Sen unfolds the secret of Alexandria, a port city located on the Mediterranean Sea in northern Egypt with erudition and poetic lyricism. The expression “my lost memory/ white and frozen/ now melts colour/ ready to refract” connects us with Lewis Mumford’s book The City in History, where he writes “what was left of the old urban drama was a mere spectacle…” The backbone of Egypt’s culture, once brimming with life, art galleries, and rich cultural history comes alive with Sen’s "Mediterranean." Sudeep Sen’s “Blue Nude”(131-82) section from his collection Fractals displays his penchant for ekphrasis. The “Blue Nude” section (inspired by Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude series of cut out figures) is further divided into six sub-sections – ‘Dreaming of Cezanne’, ‘Picasso Triptych’, ‘Matisse Sequence’, ‘Canva’, ‘White Balance’, and ‘Mixed Media’. These six sub-sections immerse the readers in subjective experience, with its amazing range in terms of art-forms and artists from all around the world. The poems in this section also reiterate Sen’s engagement with visual arts.  The Card Players, by Paul Cezanne (France) 1895 The first section, ‘Dreaming of Cezanne’, has three poems, all based on the paintings of Post-Impressionist painter and French artist Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). The first poem, “The Cardplayers” is based on Cezanne’s series of oil paintings of the same name. Painted between 1890 and 1896, there are five paintings in this series: one is in a private collection; the others are in Musee d’ Orsay, the Courtauld Gallery, the Barnes Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum Art. The version varies in size, background and the number of players. Through these paintings, the artist reflects the life of the ordinary locals or the Provencal peasants quietly smoking and playing cards. Sen in his poem “The Cardplayers” refers to the smallest (47.5 × 57 cm) and the most refined version of Cezanne’s painting. The poem catches every detail of the painting, from the colour of the background to the shape of the furniture, the position in which the players are sitting and the dress they are wearing. Reading the poems from this section is like visiting inside an artfully and meticulously curated museum of poetry which includes art pieces from every generation and of every kind. Sen’s artistic eye catches every microscopic detail. To quote a few lines from the poem “Cardplayers” (133): The deal was done and stamped on the brown rough leather of the parchment. The wooden table’s crooked legs hardly held its own weight, let alone the gravity of smoke, spirit, and connivance.  The Skulls, by Paul Cezanne (France) 1901 The second ekphrastic poem in this section is “The Skulls,” (135) based on Cezanne's still life The Skulls, painted in his final period between 1890 and 1906. Cezanne’s work constitutes the most powerful link between the ephemeral and the permanent. Skulls on wood, on carpet, on drapery – studies encrypted like an unwrapped pyramid of bones, mummies waiting to be embalmed in oil and graphite – as I sprinkle water and colour on the shrine of my night gods. Painted in a pale light, using graphite and watercolour, this painting has inspired many artists including Picasso and Andy Warhol. This painting depicts four skulls, placed in a pyramidal configuration. These skulls take us to the traditional theme of a symbolic work of art called “Vanitas” which focuses on the temporality of life, the futility of all kinds of pleasure and the certainty of death (Google Arts & Culture). We find a similar theme of transience and mutability in the poem “Dungeon” (188) where the poetic persona of Sen visits a dungeon to look for Cezanne’s bones. Sen writes, “I had come looking for a holograph of Cezanne’s will and skulls, but what I found was a score-sheet – an opera with the aria highlighted.”  Jacket on a Chair, by Paul Cezanne (France) 1882 The third poem from the section “Dreaming of Cezanne” titled “Jacket on a Chair” (136) is based on the same theme. In the book Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong writes, “With its empty, crumpled garment, Jacket on a Chair is even more blatant in suggesting human inhabitation by dint of its very absence than Cezanne’s sketches of empty chairs.” (34) The chair’s wooden frame provided a brief skeleton, but it wasn’t enough to renew the coat’s shape, the body’s prior strength, or the muscle to hold its own. The poems in this section are not just the celebration of different art forms, but it has to do a lot with human psychology, their dreams, delusion, and predicaments as well. Sen explores the complex and convoluted mysteries of the human psyche. His poems are consciously cerebral and appeal to a wide selection of people coming from different backgrounds and having different mindsets. Sudeep Sen’s Fractals also brings forward an array of artists from different genres. From the eastern miniaturists to artists and writers like Gustave Flaubert, Andre Gide, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Kazuo Ishiguro and Pico Iyer, to saint and spiritual poet Shah Latif, from one of the finest Israeli poets Yehuda Amichai to the representative of Slovenian “historical avant-garde,” Srecko Kosovel, these artists provide exciting meta-poetical fervor to Sen’s poetic atlas. Sen’s extraordinary sensory awareness, sensitivity to rhythm, astonishingly rich images, and a wide array of influences summarize what ekphrastic poetry can do. The philosophical insights, images, cultural references, and epic assemblage calibrate historical horizons and establish genealogies of events. The fusion of the visual with the verbal, allows the poetry to move freely without getting restricted in one medium. Dr. Queen Sarkar Dr. Queen Sarkar is a multilingual poet, an academician, and a translator based in Ranchi, India. Sarkar has been appointed as the “Ambassador of Good Will Seeds of Youth XXI Century, India – United Nations of Letters –Uniletras.” She is also the Ambassador of Peace for Switzerland/ France. Her review articles, poems, and research papers have been published in reputed international journals and anthologies. Sarkar has done her Ph.D. in Contemporary Indian English Poetry from IIT Kharagpur. Her research areas includes – poetry, translation, cross-cultural communication, cultural studies, adaptation and appropriation. Sarkar’s poems have been translated in Spanish, Arabic, and Gujarati. She is also the bonafide member of World Nations Writer’s Union.  Mea Culpa, by Kay Sage (USA) 1950 Mea Culpa With the curtain peeled back you can see beneath I’m wrought from timber, so then, can claim I was once alive, lived and grew beneath the sky. Now become mere armature, though somewhere lurking in this dynamo some leftover gristle, electrical impulse. I’ve got feelings, I swear it. For example, my blessed, busted little heart is today at an utter loss. Can we prescribe victim to someone destroyed by a force without sentience? The apple may want to rot and fruit at the foot of the tree but gravity doesn't care much either way. The good book says a person who suffers, says at the hand of either agency or action so maybe sentience is overrated in this world. But what of cause and effect, of our invisible hands puppeteering across the lives of others? Every time I step through this door my body becomes something to give and to take. The good book says also: a person or animal sacrificed, or regarded as sacrifice.. Theadora Siranian Theadora Siranian is a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Press, CONSEQUENCE, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2014, she was shortlisted for both the Mississippi Review Prize and Southword’s Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Theadora received the Emerging Woman Poet Honor from Small Orange Journal. She currently lives and teaches at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Her chapbook, She, will be published as part of the Seven Kitchens Press Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series this summer. More of her poetry can be found at theadorasiranian.com. The Cape Heaving the sashes skyward and swinging the porch door wide would not suffice. Through-winds crash in, tousling tail ends of delicate nets, throwing them outward, salt spritz gathers in its gusts; not an invite more a forceful request. My whitewash, clapboard house has partway succumb to the ocean. Come! Be close with the ocean! We unmoor our impromptu gathering, this cloud-swallowed morn - ship it outside, dogs in tow. The modest kitchen table, heavy driftwood, loses its legs among the surf grass, anchored with a cast iron candelabra - stifled ivory towers, exuding soot - frivolous against the bruise of the sky. A crochet tablecloth undulates around an island of various fruits; one castaway mutt, defending scraps from long-beaked jabs and swoops. Our chairs are lapped by sallow waves I right my slice of cake, raise my thick-set mug moor my brown, stiff-collared cape behind my back as one friend settles her fiddle into her neck scarf; moon- bright waves breaking about her night-ocean clothes - right through to gentle ripples in her stocking socks. She thrashes hard - will not be drowned by the loud heckle of the ocean, the gull clatter and our yapping pugs. This seething wash, like us, steals from the land, that steadies the house. While the gale crests our hair in chaos, the other friend, whose colouring, she insists makes the autumn suit her clothes, turns to the water with a scolding pose and dances out her contradictions. Stephanie Stanton This poem was inspired specifically by Andrea Kowch's painting, The Cape. Click here to view. Stephanie has been writing poetry for little over seven years. Inspiration for her work is varied, but mostly she writes about what she knows and experiences, delighted by an excuse to be quirky. She has performed on a number of occasions and has had work published in The Curlew and on the literary website, Words for the Wild. Stephanie attends the Mid-Kent Stanza group, who do love an ekphrastic challenge.  The Two Saltimbanques, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1960 The Two Saltimbanques when words don't come easy they make do with silence and find something in nothing to say to each other when the absinthe runs out. his glass and ego are bigger than hers, his elbows sharper, stabbing into the table and the chambers of her heart cobalt clown without a smile. she looks away with his misery behind her eyes and sadness on her lips, back into her curves and the orange grove summer of her dress worn and blown by sepia time where she painted her cockus giganticus lying down naked for her brush and skin, mingling intimate scents undoing and doing each other. for some of us, living back then is more going forward than living in now and sitting here- at this table, with these glasses standing empty of absinthe, faces wanting hands to be a bridge of words and equal peace as Guernica approaches. Strider Marcus Jones Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between forests, mountains, cities and coasts playing his saxophone and clarinet in warm solitude. His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, India and Switzerland in numerous publications including mgv2 Publishing Anthology; And Agamemnon Dead; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; A New Ulster/Anu; Outburst Poetry Magazine; The Galway Review; The Honest Ulsterman Magazine; The Lonely Crowd Magazine; Section8Magazine; Danse Macabre Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts; Don't Be Afraid: Anthology To Seamus Heaney; Dead Snakes Poetry Magazine; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Syzygy Poetry Journal Issue 1 and Ammagazine/Angry Manifesto Issue 3.  St. Michael Archangel, by unknown/disputed artist, Master of Zafra (probably Spain) 1495 - 1500 Saint Michael and All Angels in an Initial I an antiphon How they crowd, historiated, this little I. Serried wingtips, row on row of burnished nimbuses, recede behind a striding Michael and that sword. For all I know his gangsta birds are all that won me two good years and seven good enough. Some fight. Look-- this Lombard painter’s looped a bowl in the Latin I: Iesu, Iudith, my namesake. I grew up proud and haunted-- false seductress, whore for God. Like her I wielded my own sword, and borrowed glory. But now I don’t know. Blades have done their best, not good enough. If Pascal’s wager is a fool’s bet, what’s left but to admire the gift of contemplatio? Was that his heretic idea, painting the sea of faceless angels stroke by stroke? That the will to art like the will to God, leads not at the last to the will exalted. That I and the chanters of his antiphon will not see face to face. That my coup de grâce won’t come from one angelic action hero’s sword but from the company of all those golden harrows. Randall Couch Editor's Note: The poem refers to a Lombardic illuminated antiphon page illustrating the triumph of St. Michael with iconography similar to this panel shown by the Spanish Master of Zafra, in the Prado, Madrid. Randall Couch’s most recent book is Peal (Coracle, 2017). He edited and translated Madwomen: The Locas mujeres Poems of Gabriela Mistral (Chicago, 2007), which won the UK Poetry Society’s biennial Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation, was one of two finalists for the PEN American Award for Poetry in Translation, and was named one of ten poetry books of the decade by the London Review Bookshop. His own poems and critical essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A founding member of Penn’s Kelly Writers House, he has appeared frequently on its PoemTalk podcast, cosponsored by the Poetry Foundation.  How many ways can you write an ekphrastic poem or story? Here are fifty different ways to approach an artwork to get to a poem. Fifty Ekphrastic Approaches is an Ekphrastic Review ebook, $8 CAD. Click here to purchase.www.mixedupmedia.ca/ebooks.html Happy writing!  The Forlorn Hope. Artist not known. The Forlorn Hope—Vicksburg, 1863 Back in Vicksburg, the town was surrounded With a battle line twelve miles long. U.S. Grant sought to conquer the city, But the rebel defenses were strong. An advance storming party was risky; They could possibly lose every man. But they must cross a ditch and climb over a wall Just to capture the Stockade Redan. With extreme disregard for the danger, While exposed to a torrent of lead, The men carried their logs and their ladders And soon painted the path with their dead. The one hundred and fifty brave soldiers, All unmarried and all volunteers, Had advanced at a run while opposing cannon Brought fresh screams to their still-ringing ears. So, from ten in the morning 'til darkness, They would fight the good fight 'til they fell. A majority there didn't make it; The remainder survived living Hell. The survivors were honoured as heroes, Received medals almost to a man For extreme gallantry of the storming party At the fight for the Stockade Redan. Randal A. Burd, Jr. This poem was first published by The Society of Classical Poets. Randal A. Burd, Jr. is a married father of two and an educator who works with the disadvantaged in rural Missouri. He holds a master's degree in English Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Missouri. Randal is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Sparks of Calliope poetry magazine. His latest collection of poems, Memoirs of a Witness Tree, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books late this summer.  David & Yonatan, by Boaz Vaadia (Israel) 1998. Photo by Gail Goepfert. Lesson From Stone How to enter a many-layered body-- connective tissue of bluestone, unyielding edges, sharp, resolute. Immune to grass or grackles. Soles planted, bracing for plummet, the touchstone of the stout-hearted-- survival. Let nothing come unglued, nothing tremble. Backbone, the keystone of what must be braved. Gail Goepfert This poem first appeared in One Art: A Journal of Poetry. Gail Goepfert has authored a chapbook, A Mind on Pain, 2015, a book, Tapping Roots, from Aldrich Press in 2018, and soon to be published, Get Up Said the World, 2020 from Červená Barva Press. Publications include Kudzu House, Room, Stone Boat, Postcard Poems and Prose Magazine, Bluestem, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, SWWIM, Rogue Agent, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She’s an an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet, teacher, and photographer. More at gailgoepfert.com |
The Ekphrastic Review
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August 2020
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