 Schöpfungsgeschichte II, by Franz Marc (Germany) 1914. Creation It began in the mud a million fathoms away, when dark fingers worked, from mysteries and murk, the deep sea horse-fish and whale-cats, dolphin-swans and eagle-eels. Mud made the earth squirm and slither, gallop and flutter with life that ocean-poured and rain-washed through great forests fronded and garlanded with shining mud-mysteries. Trotting the forests and skimming skies heavy with tropical rain, they pissed us out, naked microbes. Perhaps it was the primal mistake, the original sin, a misstep in the orgiastic dance. We were the worm in the apple spawned from joy and trust. We grew, spread like bacteria on a corpse, like the foxholes and shell holes that pock the fields pitted with steel shards, where death hangs on rolls of wire. Perhaps there are no more mysteries left in the mud, but perhaps the beauty that was shredded on razor wire and dismembered in the sucking clay still swirls and twists in seashell whorls, waiting. Perhaps, at the end, we will turn to the befouled and violated ocean and see blue horses galloping in the rising tide to the symphonic clamour of grieving for lost children. At the end, I hope white dolphin-swans will bear me away. Jane Dougherty Jane Dougherty is Irish, living and writing (not necessarily in that order) in southwest France. She writes novels, short stories, very short stories and poetry. She has been published in several magazines and web journals including Enchanted Conversations, Eye To The Telescope, The Ogham Stone, Literally Stories, Hedgerow Journal, The Bamboo Hut, Visual Verse, Three Drops from a Cauldron, and Lucent Dreaming. Her website:https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/
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 Windblown, by Marianne Werefkin (Russia) 1910. On Seeing Marianne von Werefkin’s Windblown To be able to draw the blue curve at the hip, the strength of the arm holding the washing, the tension of the sheets in the wind, the whip of the line. The women are taking in the laundry, struggling before the incipient storm, rain falling on purple hills, the pitchfork tree. Such a distance to cover across the wide grass, the red barn so far away. When you shot yourself in your right hand was it really an accident? You could paint with four fingers better than any man. One appropriated your ideas, another flaunted his women. Why were you faithful? What good did it do you? In an exhibit devoted to Kandinsky, you are given such a small room. Ronnie Hess Ronnie Hess is a journalist and poet who lives in Madison, WI. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks (the most recent, Canoeing a River with No Name) and two award-winning culinary travel guides (Eat Smart in France, Eat Smart in Portugal). ronniehess.com  Still Life With Cabbage and Clogs, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1881.
Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs Nights, the artist and the cook dream the same dream of blooming roots in simple vessels, of blood pudding, pails of cool water, cold milk. All winter the chirr of the artist’s scissors, his pencil marks erased, mistakes on creamy Ingres paper. The cook wears handkerchiefs, feathers of earliest birds too weak to fly. When the sharpened cleaver meets the groove between stalk and flowering head obsidian clouds thrust forth. Small particles coat the frosty air. The cook warms herself with brandy. Her granite fingers sigh. She closes the shutters, mutters strains and tosses, peels potatoes, then staggers fireside, serves with honey and salt on baked clay platters. She thrusts her feet into wooden clogs, removes her tattered linen apron and steps outside the doorframe. Each evening she feeds scraps to hogs crisscrosses cow paths tousling tufts of onion grass. She walks past the cottage on the heath the meadow, the elm trees in the churchyard, the barn with the thatched roof while the artist studies how layers peel, bones discard, and patterns of fields appear in the eggshell cabbage sprawled wide. Elisabeth Weiss Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University in Salem, MA. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She’s worked in the editorial department at Harper & Row in New York and has an MFA from The University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, the Birmingham Poetry Review, the Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016 and was a runner up in the 2013 Boston Review poetry contest. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.  Women in Black, by Marianne von Werefkin (Russia) 1910. Ekphrastic Writing Challenge
Join us for biweekly ekphrastic writing challenges. See why so many writers are hooked on ekphrastic! We feature some of the most accomplished influential poets writing today, and we also welcome emerging or first time writers and those who simply want to experience art in a deeper way or try something creative. Thank you to everyone who participated in our last writing challenge featuring the work of Jenn Zed, and guest edited by Jordan Trethewey, which ends today at midnight. (Click here to see the Jenn Zed challenge.) Accepted responses for the Zed challenge will be published on April 26, 2019. The prompt this time is Schwarze Frauen (Women in Black), by Marianne von Werefkin. Deadline is May 3, 2019. The Rules 1. Use this visual art prompt as a springboard for your writing. It can be a poem or short prose (fiction or nonfiction.) You can research the artwork or artist and use your discoveries to fuel your writing, or you can let the image alone provoke your imagination. 2. Write as many poems and stories as you like. Send only your best works or final draft, not everything. 3. Have fun. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to [email protected]. Challenge submissions sent to the other inboxes will most likely be lost as those are read in chronological order of receipt, weeks or longer behind, and are not seen at all by guest editors. They will be discarded. Sorry. 5.Include MARIANNE VON WEREFKIN WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line in all caps please. 6. Include your name and a brief bio. If you do not include your bio, it will not be included with your work, if accepted. Even if you have already written for The Ekphrastic Review or submitted other works and your bio is "on file" you must include it in your challenge submission. Do not send it after acceptance or later; it will not be added to your poem. Guest editors may not be familiar with your bio or have access to archives. We are sorry about these technicalities, but have found that following up, requesting, adding, and changing later takes too much time and is very confusing. 7. Late submissions will be discarded. Sorry. 8. Deadline is midnight, May 3, 2019. 9. Please do not send revisions, corrections, or changes to your poetry or your biography after the fact. If it's not ready yet, hang on to it until it is. 10. Selected submissions will be published together, with the prompt, one week after the deadline. 11. Rinse and repeat with upcoming ekphrastic writing challenges! NEWS We have been featuring occasional guest editors for the ekphrastic challenges. We're hoping this will inspire us in unexpected ways, add new flavours and perspectives to the journal, foster community, and widen readership. Upcoming guest editors include Kyle Laws and Joan Leotta. We're excited about this and about having a whole year of challenges, now that we've found an ekphrastic prompt system that is working in terms of consistency and longevity. Many great poems are about to be written!  Madame X, by John Singer Sargent (USA) 1884.
The Paradox Within You, Madame X, the woman of mystery and yet known to all, have become the representation of a modern paradox. You are traditionally noble and apparently fragile, yet you are also strong and progressive. You give us is nothing and you give us everything. There are no wall decorations in your world, no still-life props, no patterned floor-work. You have deemed that your elegantly simple black dress needs no accompaniment except an Empire table that creates a subtle curve which echoes your feminine shape. Your contorted arm continues a line from one of the table legs. It supports you as you prepare to assert your own space, but this table is not defiant, it is not thinking about change and the challenges that might lie ahead. The stripped back setting might speak of frugality, but your tiara hints at station. Your pose is demure yet statuesque, suggesting that you are looking forward to a different future. It retains and reveals at once. You turn away but do not wither. In fact, with your tightly fitting dress and exposed flesh, your stance is unmistakably sexual, even for Paris in the late 19th century. Yet your confidence flows from the image. You tell us to take you but as your face turns as if to bathe in our admiring gaze, in so many more ways you are unavailable. Aware of yourself, you dare the world. Henry Bladon Henry Bladon is a writer of short fiction and poetry based in Somerset in the UK. He has degrees in psychology and mental health policy and a PhD in literature and creative writing. His work can be seen in Potato Soup Journal, Forth Magazine, Mercurial Stories, thedrabble, Tuck Magazine and Spillwords Press, among other places.  Peacocks They’re everywhere in the Book of Kells, eating grapes with lions, perched on the heads of snakes, contorted in roundels, crammed inside letters: languidly draped on an H or painfully squashed in a U. The pale host appears on their tails instead of extravagant blue/gold/red eyes. The monks thought their flesh incorruptible, symbol of the resurrected Christ. Sometimes their feet are twined in grapevines growing from chalices. Sometimes, the cup’s upside down, and flowing vines spill over. Sometimes, we’re startled into beauty: the flare of blue fire when they open their fans. Once, driving back north from Florida, the world returned to black and white, we were forced off the interstate by an accident. A foot of snow on the ground, and more still falling. Suddenly, as if conjured, a peacock flew across the road in front of us, its exclamation of blue-green iridescence all the more startling in this colourless world. Did we really just see that? we asked each other, but then the road turned and we were back on the highway, safely delivered, on our way home. Barbara Crooker This poem is from Barbara Crooker's recent book, The Book of Kells (Poeima Poetry, Cascade Books). Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry; The Book of Kells is the most recent. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, The Poetry of Presence and Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. www.barbaracrooker.com  Je Vous Attends, by Yves Tanguy (France) 1934. Poem after Yves Tanguy’s Je Vous Attends Run along from existing to where the two ends touch. Ideas rise into air, assume nameless shape. Like hammered copper, bodies still unselved, and skewered by their own spines, form an architecture above the ashy pit to which all things are drawn. From here, a vast procession appears, peripherylessly. David Capps David Capps received his PhD in philosophy from University of Connecticut and an MFA in poetry from Southern Connecticut State University. Recently his poems have been featured in Peacock Journal, Mantra Review, Cagibi, among others. He lives in New Haven, CT. When I Shout, Freebird! Play Freebird!! I’m really saying, Make me feel like I felt when I felt up Melissa’s shirt back in ’98 when we were bouncing around the back of Travis’ microbus, traveling to a Memphis musicfest. Sure, the song is overplayed, but Goddamn when they hit that first lick, the one that sounds like tweety birds, man my eyes close I fall back to the time I went down on Melissa after the concert in the woods by Horn Lake Cutoff. October no mosquitoes, only the park ranger, 70 something — 10 years past giving a fuck — so we were safe and young and free, free as a bird which is a line from Freebird which was the song pouring out of the VW’s windows like smoke in a Cheech and Chong movie. We started laughing -- got up, naked, Slow-dancing --even did a little spin -- and the moon reflected off her teeth and we were free, free as birds and playing it pretty pretty for Atlanta Scott McDaniel The work of Pushcart Prize nominated poet Scott McDaniel has been featured in the San Pedro River Review, Deep South Magazine, Oberon Poetry Magazine, Common Ground Review and The New Guard. He has read throughout his home state of Arkansas as well as Manhattan and Castletowneroche, Ireland. Scott began writing poetry at an early age and was encouraged to do so by his cousin, award-winning inaugural poet Miller Williams. He lives and works in his hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas; a city outside of Memphis that is highly influenced by the culture of the Mississippi Delta. His writings reflect the unique hues, quirks and broken promises of the modern south.  Landscape Near Moret, by Alfred Sisley (France) 1880. Jeu de Paume Yes, yes, I know this is Tucson, downtown, the Old Pueblo. But may I please have one moment, just one, to pretend. Let me imagine that it's Paris the Jeu de Paume museum my mother at my side Michelin guide in her right hand another book in her left, a history of the impressionists. As always, she teaches me. As always, I listen. Janet McMillan Rives Janet McMillan Rives was born and raised in Connecticut and spent her early adulthood in Tucson, Arizona, her current home. She retired as professor of economics from the University of Northern Iowa. Her poetry has appeared in Lyrical Iowa, Sandcutters, The Avocet, Unstrung, The Blue Guitar and in the anthologies Voices from the Plains (I and II) and Facing West.  Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp (France) 1917. Duchamp’s Urinal Virtually anything can be deemed art when the artist says it is. Armed with pen not sword Duchamp signed his fabled urinal, and named it. From that time on for all artists the self has reigned de facto God. Thomas Piekarski Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly and Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry and interviews have appeared in literary journals internationally, including Nimrod, Florida English Journal, Cream City Review, Mandala Journal, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Quarterly, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Boston Poetry Magazine. He has published a travel book, Best Choices In Northern California, and his epic adventure Ballad of Billy the Kid is available on Amazon in both Kindle and print versions. |
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