Kaaterskill Clove
Joseph Stanton
Shanti Arts, 2025
https://shantiarts.co/uploads/files/stu/STANTON_KAATERSKILL.html

or, on Amazon:
​https://www.amazon.com/-/fr/Joseph-Stanton/dp/1962082768

Thomas Cole’s The Titan’s Goblet, 1833
 
Thomas Cole’s cup runneth over,
as a landscape within a landscape,
a dream within a dream.
In an immense goblet lives a world,
a Roman palace on one side,
a ruined remnant of aqueduct on the other.     
 
The rim of the cup
and the rim of the cup’s base 
are trimmed with forests,
the stem of the goblet
is the trunk  
of a gargantuan tree.
 
This absurdity 
is calmly accepted
by those who sail the ships
and those who live,
within the buildings
perched on the rim
 
of the goblet 
and those 
who occupy 
the tiny city
that lurks below 
the falls of water,
 
the odd, unavoidable
spillages.
All seems natural
within this stilled life
semblance
of a garden ornament
                                                                                                                        
set within 
an exquisitely finished landscape
that features                                                                                                    
the Hudson River flowing
in the background,
enormous and inevitable.

Thomas Cole’s View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, 1838
 
Cole loved this hillside overlooking a creek,
a picnic spot, a short walk from his home. 
He shows us his wife and child at play.
Maria has left her bonnet on the grass
 
and has picked some flowers that she carries
towards the baby, who laughs
and opens his arms to receive them.
In the distance we see the mountains 
 
that edge the Hudson River.
Approach within a few inches
of the canvas and you can spy
the smokestacks of the growing village
 
that crowds the far side of the river.
By the time Cole painted it,
this view could no longer be seen
because a railroad had cut through it;
 
hundreds of trees beloved by Cole
had been chopped down to clear the path.
But in this picture Cole has tucked himself,
happily, into a recently lost world.
 
You can glimpse him stepping through
a broken fence, wearing his familiar garb--
tan hat, red shirt, and blue coat.
He has a rifle on his left arm,
 
but he carries no game. He has, perhaps,
just been out on one of his long walks.
He gazes tenderly towards his wife and child,
his face breaking into the brightest of smiles.  

Frederic Edwin Church’s The Icebergs, 1861
 
In 1859, Frederic Church 
chartered a ship for risky passage up 
“Iceberg Alley,”
from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland 
to Labrador then back to Halifax.
 
He sketched angelic wonders of white light,
boulders profoundly cold, complacent,
moving massives,
deathly, deadly, 
in an absurdly austere North.
 
This other sort of wilderness
offered no green leaves, 
no exotic birds, no mountain trails,
no volcanoes exploding fire and ash.
These spectral mountains of crystal, 
 
rub and crash against each other, 
and against unwise boatmen
who may, of a sudden, find their ships
entrapped and unmoving
or broken and sinking.
 
This is Church’s 
most peculiar masterwork, 
and, despite its frozen grandeur, 
it seemed, to early critics, 
to lack moral force.
 
For us today, we can see
Church’s islands of ice
as memento mori,
understanding them, as we now must, 
as more endangered than endangering.
 

Frederic Edwin Church’s Cotopaxi, 1862
 
Church imagines the volcano 
as a mouth of God, 
speaking His earth,
fiery and neverending,
 
but Church also grasped 
from Humboldt and the rest
that the majestic fires
need also be geologic. 
 
For Church, Cotopaxi was ideal:
Ecuadorian, resplendent,
and plausible to science.
The allegory, too, suited the times,
 
troubled as they were by War.
Despite the perfect form 
of Cotopaxi’s divine cone,
a dire darkness spews forth 
 
and drifts in front of the rising sun,
an eye of God that sees through 
the smokey dark and casts a cross of light 
on the waters of the lake.
 
We must also note that the light, 
lovely blue of the sky to the left 
speaks of reborn day,
and that the waterfall’s 
 
shimmering
red reflection of fire
is overwhelmed
by a vividly transcendent, 
 
surrounding flow 
of blue, blue, blue.

Sanford Gifford’s A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove, 1862
 
Gifford gives us a cluster of birches
on a precipitous ledge at far left.
The birches and the ledge are vivid,
sharp-edged in detail in the gleam
of the late-afternoon light of a sun
that shines center-cut directly at us.
 
Below the ledge a hunter and his dog
struggle upward towards this amazing
view of a vast ravine, bright
and golden, dazzled by delicate
mists rising from lakes and ponds
and creeks and the dimly visible
 
line of white that is, we know,
the tumbling falls of Kaaterskill.
Along the bottom of the ravine
and up the mountainous steeps
on all sides hazed autumnal trees
glow golden and green.
 
We cannot quite make out the disk
that is the sun, it’s a near-white,
a pure, unrelenting intensity.
A clearing in the deep distance
holds a small house, tiny 
from where we stand.
 
Smoke rises from its stack,
speaking of a fireplace,
where a stew is cooking, 
for the belated hunter, 
whose return is,
perhaps patiently, awaited.
 
Joseph Stanton

"Thomas Cole's The Titan's Goblet, 1833", "Thomas Cole's View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, 1837", "Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs, 1861",  "Frederic Edwin Church's Cotopaxi, 1862", "Sanford Gifford's A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove, 1862" appeared in Kaaterskill Clove, copyright © Joseph Stanton 2025, and used with permission of Shanti Arts Publishing [www.shantiarts.com].

Joseph Stanton’s ninth book of poems, Kaaterskill Clove, a sequence of poems inspired by the Hudson River School, has just been published by Shanti Arts. His previous book, Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, was also published by Shanti Arts. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, The Ekphrastic Review, and many other journals. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

​Noose or Needle 
 
Two dozen, 2022’s thin harvest’s
not nearly enough to satiate
the hunger for the harshness we call justice.
The empty nooses anxiously await
 
the go-ahead, the warden’s secret smirk,
reprieves denied, the shattering of hope,
the dead weight dropping till a sudden jerk,
the tautness of an unforgiving rope.
 
Waists chained, the silhouettes all seem the same
except the fabrics’ varied colours – white
black, silver, brown, and red – with each one’s name
and date of death preserved in threads stitched tight.
 
We kill with needles now so there’s no pain
and tell ourselves this makes their deaths humane. 

Carl Kinsky

Carl Kinsky is a sonneteer masquerading as a criminal defense lawyer in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a quirky old town on the west bank of the Mississippi River.  He fancies himself a modern-day Pudd'nhead Wilson.

A Ceremonial Apron Made by My Great-Grandmother Flora Decuir Vallet for a Cousin's Graduation in New Roads, Louisiana, 1958

Now done with the schooling of this town, unto
other roads carry this. Its holes will not protect
from steam or stain, nor its ties fasten steadily.
It serves its purpose without clenching a waist.

Remember those wizened women behind you:
adorned with aprons through domesticity, both
tenderly betrothed and to this ox bow enchained,
as you quit this caustic warren of stifled plans.
​
Its colors bright, clearly stated, neither calico nor
plaid, will call to mind your boldest fervid dreaming.
Out East you won’t hang your auntie’s’ castiron
in the hearth. Let this remind you, on your shelf.

Jeffery U. Darensbourg

Jeffery U. Darensbourg grew up in Itta Homma (of which “Baton Rouge” is a translation) and currently resides in Bulbancha, what others call “New Orleans.” He works with words, crafting essays, poetry, academic articles, and public talks intertwining traditional academic research with autoethnography and memoir. He is a Louisiana Creole and member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation. Louisiana’s deep histories of ethnic mixing between European, African, and Indigenous Peoples are reflected in his ancestry and work. He was a 2024 United States Artists Fellow, He holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science, something reflected in the strong linguistic focus of his work.

​The Art of the Forest

This pine is alive, in motion, imbued 
with emotions in each brush stroke 
thick with her theology of colour and connection, 
rhythm and reverence, abundance and benediction.
Picture her smiling as she brought it to life
grounding it in mahogany, sepia, bronze, 
then the tree itself - yellows and greens, teal, 
champagne all aquiver all boughs bending up, 
reaching, rejoicing, beseeching and blessing 
the sun whose rays render some of the needles 
almost translucent.
The trees in the background in shadow 
are swirling. The forest is dancing 
to the beat of its heart.
She heard it.
She saw it.
She danced.

Susan Whelehan

Susan Whelehan believes that rhythm and words are medicine covered by God’s Socialist Health Care Plan for Humanity. Her collection, The Sky Laughs at Borders, was published by Piquant Press in 2019. A runner-up in CBC’s Canada Writes, she has been published by Novalis, Knopf/Random House, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. A member of the League of Canadian Poets she facilitates writing workshops on-line, at the Haliburton School of the Arts, St. Michael’s College U of T Continuing Ed. and in her home in Toronto.

Lemon Cake 
​
That morning, I left. 
We cut thick slices 
 
of lemon cake and I hid
a chocolate egg 
 
in my coat pocket, wrapped
in gold foil. I couldn’t stand 
 
the taste of butter.
That first pregnancy: two 
 
pink lines. My hands
on my belly. My belly not
 
swollen. I walked 
to the water: low tide, 
 
open mouth of the sea. 
A child at the airport, 
 
waiting. Across the street, 
a clinic and a cafe 
 
where he and I once met 
for cake. The small table 
 
now a circle, holding
my mother’s silence. 

Strawberry Ice Cream 

I crave strawberry ice cream 
for the second time. Afternoon  
 
heat pressed against me,
I walk towards Mister Softee’s
 
at the edge of West Harlem 
and Morningside Heights. 
 
Almost forty weeks 
pregnant, I am induced 
 
the final stretch 
of summer before 
 
Labor Day. Cubes of ice 
in paper cups, epidural 
 
cold against my spine. 
Soon, the baby’s body 
 
warm against mine. I drink in
her newborn scent: 
 
sweetness of berries 
washed in heavy cream.

Elanur Williams 

Elanur Williams is a teacher who has taught in elementary schools and most recently served as a GED/Pre-GED teacher at an adult learning centre in the Bronx. She wrote these poems inspired by her love for sweets and as an homage to the pregnancies she experienced in her twenties. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, Quail Bell Magazine, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Door is a Jar, and 3Elements. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing, an M.Phil. in Children's Literature, and an MS.Ed. in Literacy Studies. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.

​Speaking of Dreams… 

​after Langston Hughes, d. 1967
 
I never dreamed of a two-room walk-up                                                                    
with its shared bath at the end of the hall.  
never saw it coming.  how could I imagine
bright neon lights that colour black nights so blue?
 
what reason would I have to invent an old black man 
singing from his fire escape a tune no one learns?
 
young, it didn’t matter that most dreams 
popped like water drops on a hot pan-- from hard metal 
to thin air, in less time than it takes to ask who cares?  
but after years of long days and endless work, 
even delayed dreams just decay and melt away. 
no good dreams follow on years of sneers, 
jeers and icy contempt, on denials and outright deception, 
on the phony facts and fairytales of idiot ideologies…
caged birds, we sing the sting of dreams, 
see the face of race
and watch our hopes fade to black and white, 
to nightmares, 
delusions, 
hallucinations
and, often, at the very bottom of this pit, 
smack and crack, 
the rack and ruin of gangster death.
despair and violence thrive in this rot, 
in the prejudice and poverty that persist, 
in the boot and shoot of the slumlord’s rooms 
and star-like bullet holes 
around yet another new, black moon.

John M. Davis

John M. Davis currently lives in Visalia, California.  His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Descant, The Comstock Review, Gyroscope Review, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Constellations and Reunion: The Dallas Review. The Mojave, a chapbook, was published by the Dallas Community Poets. 

The Resonance of Solitude; Still in the Neighbourhood

When I am twenty yards from my destination I feel like you, Quinton.
I see you walking with your stick to your house.
There are a million ghosts in Salem,
Yours is a silent gentleman going home.

Meeting you, Quinton, was not planned.

Salem sidewalks still require walking
Sticks, much like the New Hampshire whites
And as I rock hop down Essex Street,
Careful winter walking, I feel
The public library off my port rear
Quarter and spy the Athenaeum
At one o’clock starboard.
      Tonight’s snow will swirl, slo-mo
      Then real time, to slo-mo
      Magnetic magic in this same
      Quadrant I walk in. I can
      See it now, though it will be then.

I always see the air I live in. Always.
From cut crystal to jazz lines to
Slapping puffs, kissing muffs and 
Sometimes, just sometimes, jack knife
Blades shot from cannons manned by
Angels. You must know what I’m 
talking about, Quinton:
I saw your painting, The Resonance of Solitude
It was six feet away from the wall,
Not hanging, it was floating
The Holy Ghost maybe, to visit you
And cast his glow, grace in the room,
A spirit glow, he specializes in
Creativity, you know?

I see shading clouds enfolding
The perfect butter sun clouds and
Holding them inside for the night,
A warm, creamy centre.
Look again. Clouds?
Banderoles snap snap flying
Streaming from the stand of virgin pines.

Gonfalons, pennlons, guidons
PINSELS, PINIONS
It’s there, look. Quinton flies his flag at the
Last of the day, the gloaming taking
Over, bringing quiet to the winter scene,
Letting the snow be snow and
Show its glow, the night light
To hold the resonance, wrap the
resonance in the little valley, letting
the little pond lap, lap, lap melting
the soft softly gentley melty lapping
tongue touches of the lakey lake
deep deep blue black iron insistent
prodding the edges to melt, soften
what is soft, delivering offering allowing
a sweet deliquescence in the lap
of the valley.

Oh my God, you just showed up. 
While looking I didn’t see you, while
Staring I did. Your visage paid me
A visit. You are the resonance most
Surely and squarely.
It is a shroud, the painting is
A shroud. The Shroud of Salem!
Hi, Hi, Hi, Quinton!
Each resonant facial line is painted
Drawn and painted, no cheating brush dabs,
No splatter, no splish, each picture making a 
Picture, see the tongue tip on the 
Hill behind the house, noses and eyes
And cheeks and hairs, maybe a wink,
Each was painted to mean. With love
And sadness and everywhere you moved
Your brush I see/feel desire way
Down deep deep deep deep desire.
A man who once thought of loving
Like the cumulation of clouds, nearly
Cirrus but more serious.

​Kevin McCarthy

View The Resonance of Solitude, by Quinton Oliver Jones (USA) 1977, here:
https://www.quintonoliverjones.com/art/resonance-of-solitude/

​A shorter version of this poem appeared in Soundings East, published by Salem State University.

​Kevin McCarthy, a retired actor and member of SAG-AFTRA, has performed in over 40 plays, including four productions at the Apollinaire Theatre Company in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He is also a writer and painter....of houses. He lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

​Face Off
   
Spent, I sink into my snowcapped
comfy chair when

I’m confronted by that Audubon print
of two cautious owls

perched on slick limbs on a splotchy  
stump. I rest my gaze

on an unblinking owl in the foreground
with mottled markings

shaped like bats in flight. Penetrating
eyes clock me as if

I’m easy prey. Who I think, who is
predator, who is

prey? I can’t break away. Each waits
out the other’s blink.  

​Anytown, USA

Fella, quit drilling for insects
on my grille, your guttural readle-eaks
a perfect rusty gate soundtrack.

I detect a wee swagger. Flaunt
those purple highlights in your deep green
tail feathers. The naturalist Audubon

wrote of Purple Grakles chased,
stolen upon, and killed in great numbers,
yet here your plague congregates

nearly two hundred Novembers since,

tracking the ground for crumbs
from crosshatched power lines in a dense
intersection. That’s where I perch,  

see, the fiftieth floor, all that glass
making me glassy eyed. I want grub too,
soft corn tacos you might scarf up,

only flat, pulverized. I challenge,
only two miles away as the crow flies,
tossing a bite from my lunch sack.  

​Extinction

Audubon feared for the exuberant Carolina Parakeet--
parrots he called them— its vibrant plumage sport
for sportsmen preying on targets, reducing it by half,
half its size in five short years. Tell me, what sport in
supporting massacre, kindness confused for weakness
as weakly the parrot tended its injured flock who fell when
felled from cocklebur branches, the irksome squawking
in fact squawks warning the others. Steer clear! By half!
Half remaining in five years’ time. Forced to migrate
as swarms of migrating honeybees settled in their trees,
teasing from the trees thinning flocks railroaded
by railroad cars, reduced agriculture, and city life
citified. And by 1918, the native parrot, extinct.
​

Devotional
      
Audubon, did the sudden snap of a
bird-laden limb quicken your pulse?
Could you remain calm during forty-mile walks
despite unexpected rumblings in dense brush,
elephantine in girth, instilling fear in
flocks? Many shed feathers that carpeted  
growth. What were you made of then?
Hopefully stalwart, peppered with a curiosity
I lacked when, heart in reed-thin throat,
John James, I panicked, rushing in circles
known, clearly marked, along a one-mile path.
Loops a small child could walk, eyes closed.
Mercy, I have embarrassed myself, but
not before I tripped and tumbled
over sawdust –pulverized wood, John--
pulp that I feared bears, a mother and cub, no
question, would soon make of me. Couldn’t  
rest until I stood in the open, on concrete
surface –a rock hard layer atop earth--
terrifying as a coffin lid if boxed in
underground. Which returns me to the
vultures I kept a few ungainly flaps ahead of.
What I could only hear magnified ten-fold.
Xyst be damned. I flew, from where? to?
yearning for a safe pathway. Oh, ground me
Zenaida Dove in grasslands. Gentle, love.
​

Marauders

The male red-tailed hawk
fights with its mate over a hare
as if the two don’t share eggs
in a nest built from twigs
and moss in a massive nearby
Oak. Fair game, each screamer
presumes, that hare hanging
in the female’s talons. She won’t
give in or up, soft white breast
exposed to his prowess. Nest
and eggs soon to be found
upended, the massive oak
felled by a Creole farmer
fueled with short-lived revenge.
That grand mangeur de poules
had swooped down and lifted
the farmer’s fattened chicken.
Before that, squirrels for stew
then their duckling. The farmer
must slaughter the hawk else it
pluck up Emile, his petit fils. 

Margo Davis
​
Editor's note: John James Audubon lived a life obsessed with the natural world, especially birds, and his ornithology and artistic work are an important legacy. His life inspired the story of bird conservation efforts, with women at the forefront, starting the Audubon Society in 1905 with that purpose.  Audubon was also a slave owner, a morally repugnant act. The Audubon people today do not dismiss this reprehensible fact as a matter of the times, pointing out that many people chose not to participate in slavery, or spoke up for abolition. Learn more about Audubon's life at https://www.audubon.org/. 

Margo Davis is a poet who loves to photograph. Or is that the reverse? Many of her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review. Both poems and pics were featured at a 2024 artists' exhibit at Buinho Residency in Portugal. A recent poem was featured in Passager and a photo, in Equinox Journal. Her forthcoming poetry collection Uncoupling (Lamar Press), is due out in 2026. Margo barely unpacks before planning her next trip. 

The ekphrastic marathon is now upon us. It is coming up this Sunday.

​Join us for the epic event of the year.

You won't be sorry. It is wild, exhilarating, exhausting and wonderful.

A day of pure creation. Play. Brainstorming. 

​Join us on Sunday, or do it on your own time over the following weeks.

This year, to celebrate ten years of The Ekphrastic Review, an optional Champagne Party follows the marathon on zoom.
​
Details are below. Scroll down to register.

Perfect Ten: an Ekphrastic Marathon
 
Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating ten years of The Ekphrastic Review. 
 
Join us on Sunday, July 13 2025 for our  annual ekphrastic marathon. This year we are celebrating ten years!!!!!

This is an all -day creative writing event that we do independently, together.

Take the plunge and see what happens!
 
Write to fourteen different prompts, poetry or flash fiction, in thirty minute drafts. There will be a wide variety of visual art prompts posted at the start of the marathon. You will choose a new one every 30 minutes and try writing a draft, just to see what you can create when pushed outside of your comfort zone.
 
We will gather in a specially created Facebook page for prompts, to chat with each other, and support each other. 
 
Time zone or date conflicts? No problem. Page will stay open afterwards. Participate when you can, before the deadline for submission. The honour system is in effect- thirty minute drafts per prompt, fourteen prompts. Participants can do the eight hour marathon in one or two sessions at another time and date within the deadline for submissions (July 31, 2025). 
 
Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site.
 
One poem and one flash fiction will win $100 CAD each.
 
Last year this event was a smashing success with hundreds of poems and stories written. Let's smash last year out of the park and do it even better this year!
 
Marathon: Sunday July 13, from 10 am to 6 pm EST (including breaks)
(For those who can’t make it during those times, any hours that work for you are fine. For those who can’t join us on July 13, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.)

Champagne Party: at 6.05 pm until 7. 30 on Sunday, July 13, join participants on Zoom to celebrate an exhilarating day. Bring Champagne, wine, or a pot of tea. We'll have words from The Ekphrastic Review, conversation as a chance to connect with community, and some optional readings from your work in the marathon.   
 
Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2025
Up to five works of poetry or flash fiction or a mix, works started during marathon and polished later. 500 words max, per piece. Please include a brief bio, 75 words or less
 
Participation is $20 CAD (approx. 15 USD). Thank you very much for your support of the operations, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review, and the prizes to winning authors.

If you are in hardship and cannot afford the entry, but you want to participate, please drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll sign you up. 
​
Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September.

​Sign up below!

America Windows
 
Chagall’s bicentennial glass
thanked in blue our country
near fifty years ago in panels
glowing here in Gallery 144,
a long, dark, recessed room
in Chicago’s Institute of Art.
Spread across three windows
and six blue pages, he raised
in joy the freedoms of music,
art, words, drama, and dance
above a jagged city, people
in pain, asleep in their beds.
But look in the middle glass!
A dreamer awakens, holds up
her pen like Liberty, writes
in moonlight page after page,
sails on a ship, bird in a tree,
songs to a yellow sun shining.

Laurence Musgrove

This poem was first published in Vox Populi.
 
Laurence Musgrove is a professor of English at Angelo State University, where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing. He is the author of four volumes of poetry: Local Bird (2015), The Bluebonnet Sutras (2019), A Stranger’s Heart (2023), and The Dogs of Alishan: Poems from Taiwan (2025). ​