 The Ekphrastic Review: Talk to us a bit about Kay Sage. Who is she? How did you encounter her? What led to your decision to immerse yourself in her work to create this book of ekphrastic poetry? Nadia Arioli: Kay Sage was a surrealist painter who lived in lived 1898 – 1963. I encountered her painting I Saw Three Cities at the Phoenix Art Museum circa 2002, when I was around twelve years old. I looked at the plaque and committed to memorizing her name—which, thankfully, is pretty easy to remember. I then forgot for fifteen years. One day, I thought, who was that painter again? And dug around in my memory until I pulled her out. The reason I decided to write about her was that no one seemed to know about her or care. In that surrealist exhibit from my childhood, she only had one painting in the whole thing and that was the one I remembered. I wanted people to know who she was. It was also important for me to write about something I love—and I really love her paintings, the stillness, the precision. How would you describe Kay Sage’s art to someone who hasn’t seen it, and who hasn’t yet read your book of poetry? Like I said above, she’s a surrealist painter. She uses precise brushstrokes to create landscapes. Her landscapes are often dreary—with signature gray-green light. Her paintings often have architectural elements in them, such as scaffolding or pyramids. Like a real landscape, there are often a horizon and shadows. But her paintings are too still, too frozen to be mistaken for photorealism. Her paintings are places you would want to visit but wouldn’t want to stay. Tell us about your process in writing ekphrastic poems, and in creating this project as a whole. The funny thing is, I only meant to write one poem—the poem for the aforementioned I Saw Three Cities. Things got wildly out of hand because I fell in love with her other paintings too. I wrote poems for her paintings I could find online. When Stephen Miller published her Catalogue Raison (Sage’s complete works), I spent more money than I had on that book. I picked out the paintings that spoke to me the most. It was important to me to vary the poems in style. Rather than being purely descriptive of the paintings, I wanted to include Sage’s biographical details, some personal details, comments on the time period, and larger themes. I adore ekphrasis (clearly), but I know I would get bored if I told the truth straight. I also wanted there to be a kind of arc to the book. But I didn’t want to do a purely biographical arc (this happened to Sage, then Sage did that, roughly at the same time this was painted) but more of an emotionally complete story—like how a well-constructed album has a beginning, middle, and end. What was the moment for you when it all came together? I would say when I was writing one of the last pieces, actually. Fittingly, it became clear to me what I was writing about was time-travel. Is what we leave behind a kind of time-travel? Are paintings souvenirs of the past? That is when I realized the overall shape of the book—it’s a Mobius strip! How does this collection differ from or compare to other creative work that you do? Do you usually write about art and artists? Having a singular hyper-focus is par for the course for me. I like to make collections that follow an arc. I had a chapbook on animals, a chapbook on road signs, and a forthcoming chapbook on television shows. My full-length was called Juice and about, you guessed it, juice. But this is the first time I’ve written about an artist or other historical figure. Tell us about a poem here that was especially challenging in some way. Why? What happened I would say “No Passing,” which you graciously agreed to publish. The painting has this wonderful recurring motif of upright concrete beds. I wanted to use a poem with a repeating structure to echo the painting. A villanelle or a sestina felt too benign or lyrical for how ominous and crushing the painting is. So I set out to invent my own MAD LIBS-style formal constriction to see what shook lose. I must say, I’m very pleased with the outcome. Tell us about a poem here that is especially meaningful to you, and why. My favourite poem I wrote for the collection “Bird in the Room” (published in As It Ought to Be). Sage painted this one right after her husband, fellow surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, died of an aneurism. The weird thing is, the previous day, a bird entered their home, and, according to superstition, if this occurs, someone who lives in the home will die. I wanted to explore how grief shapes perception of time. The casualty of the poem is backwards. The year the speaker’s husband dies, she stops eating fruit. Her house fills up with fruit pits, which causes a bird to get lost in her house. The bird kills her husband. This is, of course, a paradox, but I have found grief truly does work that way—beginnings and endings get all kinds of jumbled. What do you hope the reader takes away when they close the last page? Oh! That’s a big question. I would say I hope they realize Sage’s significance as an artist. She really is amazing and grossly overlooked. But that is the sort of takeaway one might get from a biography or exhibit, not specific to my book. So, I would say, I hope the reader realizes that everyone who has survived trauma are time-travelers. And that’s okay—the world can still be full of miracles and tenderness. You just have to hold yourself still. We can be still, together. What’s next for you? Are you working on something that you want to tell us about? I would like a big nap. But also, I am working on a sequence of poems called Grendel’s Mother Considers. I have a few coming out in Mom Egg Review, Saltbush, 1-70 Review, and Ocotillo Review. There is a particular loneliness that comes with being a mother. There’s a particular loneliness that comes with being a monster. My subject happens to be both. ** Pick up a copy of Be Still at Kelsay Books. Pick up a copy of Be Still on Amazon.  No Passing, by Kay Sage (USA) 1954 On No Passing by Kay Sage All liminal journeys come to an end, a point through which there is no passing. I have pillow imprints on my cheeks. Death isn't what it used to be. I would know. I've been there before. I have come to an end, a journey through which there is no passing. I have point pricks on my cheeks. Pillows aren't what they used to be. Death would know. Death has been here before. All death has come to an end. I am that which there is no passing. I have pillow imprints on my journeys. My points aren't what they used to be. My cheeks would know, having been there before. All pillows come to an end. Death there is no passing. I have my own imprints on the inside of my cheeks. Journeys aren't what they used to be. I don't know the point of changing. All points come to an end, a pillow through which there is no passing. I have death imprints on my cheeks. I am not what I used to be. Journeys are not just for the unknown.  South to Southwesterly Winds Tomorrow, by Kay Sage (USA) 1957 On South to Southwesterly Winds Tomorrow by Kay Sage I am dumb and heavy and not at all like the ginkgo tree. The leaves fan out like a two-headed boy I saw in a museum once-- two faces attached by jaw. The trees go in pairs too, male and female with acorns and ovum. The branches are high, punctuated by light. Their genome has more than ten times the DNA pairings than we do. It is no surprise, then, they survived Hiroshima, atoms holding firm to bark, roots, and leaves. All one place, not moving. * I am dumb and heavy, and not all like your beehives, motion pressing into light. I thought they were filing cabinets given over to hill and brush, but you said to come closer and I will show you not you, a hundred thousand not you. When a beekeeper dies, you must tell the bees when the ground is still fresh. But all over, the workers are leaving, and there is no ceremony for that. I take my leavings slow, and leave no sweetness, no remembrances of light. * I am dumb and heavy, and not at all like filing cabinets in police back offices, filled up with cards of missing children. On Christmas Eve, five siblings stay up, too excited to sleep. Their other four siblings go to bed. Their mother answers the telephone late at night. A man's voice asks for someone no one has heard of. Then the voice laughs and hangs up. The mother thinks she hears footsteps on the roof, but doesn't think anything of it. The house with twelve people inside catches on fire, and the five siblings who had stayed up all disappear. * I have tried to find things to ache into, like putting down a hearty root or pouring honey from a box, or leaving a record no one believes or reads. But nothing fits into grief frames. They hang empty and overhead like unblinking vultures. South to southwesterly winds tomorrow will blow them away, no doubt, and nothing will be left of my face. Nadia Arioli Nadia Arioli is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Thimble Literary Magazine and a multi-disciplinary artist. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and can be found in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, San Pedro Review, McNeese Review, Whale Road Review, West Trestle Review, As It Ought To Be, Voicemail Poems, Bombay Literary Magazine, and other publications. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, Angel Rust, and elsewhere. Collages and scribblings have been featured as the cover of Permafrost, as artist of the month for Kissing Dynamite and Rogue Agent, and in Poetry Northwest. Arioli has chapbooks with Dancing Girl, Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, and Spartan, and a full-length with Luchador Press.
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 The Birth of the World, by Joan Miro (Spain) 1925 Ekphrasis: a Cadralor 1. Miró’s The Birth of the World stymies me. In his genesis, is that a kite or a bird? Balloons or faceless heads? A spider stalking a question mark? Squiggly lines or horizons, mountains, waves? Real or surreal? What’s the difference? 2. Backgrounded by The Shepherd Star, Breton’s peasant girl steadies a potato sack on her head. Practiced weariness guides her home. I want to know who will meet her at the door? Who will wash her dusty feet? Who will brew her tea, butter her chunk of bread? 3. In Jesus’s painting, the table is round. Magdalene sits on His right amused by the Matthew/ Mark/Luke fight over narratives and the Peter/ Andrew/James row about the largest fish. John passes bread around. The title? Judas asks. Jesus gleefully replies, The Boss’s Dinner. Everyone nods. No surprise. 4. Oil on canvas, 1925: O’Keeffe’s New York Street with Moon. Ground-level view. Skyscrapers in solid browns, precisely edged and windowless. No movement in or around. Cloud-banked moon, haloed streetlamp, red traffic light: a cityscape conceived, the artist insists, as felt not is. What is the feel of miles of time away from mountains and desert blooms? 5. Colour-pencil on creamy white: Self- Portrait of a Poet Aging as She Writes. On her lap a child laughs. Beside her desk, a teen practices confidence. Slips of questions slide across the sun-drenched floor. Outside, maple buds whisper the calendar’s turn. They’ve arrived to revitalize her slowing down. Carolyn Martin This poem was first published in POETiCA REViEW. Blissfully retired in Clackamas, Oregon, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. Since the only poem she wrote in high school was red penciled “extremely maudlin,” she is amazed she has continued to write. Her poems have appeared in more than 175 journals throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. See more at www.carolynmartinpoet.com.  The Shepherd’s Star, by Jules Breton (France) 1887  New York Street with Moon, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1925  Two Studies of a Seated Nude with Long Hair, by Gustav Klimt (Austria) 1901 or 1902 Object Permanence The first time I saw her, I recognized her—recognized her the way I discern my own features in the face of my grandmother. And what is it, exactly, that I recognized? Initially, immediately, it is the roundness of her hips, the softness of her body. Round. Soft. These are the kinds of words I use—on my best days—to describe the abundance of my own body. ** Object Permanence after Klimt’s Two Studies of a Seated Nude with Long Hair She listens to the bluesilver wind as he rails against the iron smolder of arthritis in his joints. He wouldn’t believe it, but she fantasizes about singed fingertips, cracked thumbnails, bruise-jaded knuckles—all these commonplace tortures. ** Viennese painter Gustav Klimt completed the sketch Two Studies of a Seated Nude with Long Hair between 1901 and 1902. The sketch, done in black chalk and red pencil, served as preparation and scaffolding for his painting, Goldfish. Klimt’s signature contains the only straight lines in the piece. The figure herself is edgeless, soft as night. ** Most days, my body is more metaphor than muscle, more broken promise than bone. I heard everything you said—and everything you didn’t say. And I believed you. I believed that if I policed my body well enough, if I tamed and cultivated my body, I would be granted some protection. Some grace. And I, knowing discipline like I know breath, held up my end of the bargain. You didn’t. No protection, no grace. I have never been and never will be unassailable. My enemy keeps me close. Closer than I would like. ** Nothing is known about Klimt’s model. We can guess only that she was of limited means and posed for Klimt for a fee. For $39.68, I could own her likeness. Hang her on my wall. Critics often compare her—the graceful fluidity of her limbs—to water. I keep reminding myself that she is not a landscape. ** There is a kind of dark satisfaction in listening to a medical professional explain that you are, in fact, as fucked up as you think you are. Bulimia, I’ve realized, is one of those words that sounds like it feels, whose curves and proportions mimic its implications. Mental health professionals now recommend that we talk about eating disorders in terms of affliction rather than condition. It is the difference between, “You have bulimia nervosa,” and, “You are bulimic.” I recognize and appreciate the logic. And yet, on my worst days, I feel bulimic. I experience it as condition, as nature, as mode of being. I tell my partner, “It’s a hard food day.” What I mean is, “I only look like the person you love. Today, I’m something else entirely.” ** A bird’s nest unspools in the back of her throat. She has never once asked him for a glass of water. For one thing, it is sacred: silence—this pretty, doomed impermanence. For another, she is waiting to see what will hatch. ** Klimt is said to have fathered fourteen children, of which six were officially documented. Those six children were born to three different mothers, all of whom originally modeled for Klimt. All this to say, it’s possible that this particular model may have, at one point, slept with the artist that sketched her. And none of this is significant, except to say that she had a lithe, live body, about which she made choices. ** I could blame magazines, models, my mother’s bathroom scale. But it feels more mythic than that. I come from a long and storied line of women undone by food. Did Eve sin the moment she bit down, the moment she swallowed, or the moment her digestive enzymes finished their work? Is hers a sin of ingestion or absorption? If Persephone hadn’t swallowed the pomegranate seeds, had rolled them across her tongue and then spit them out, would she have been allowed to leave the underworld for good? ** It is, in some ways, deeply arrogant to fantasize a connection with this woman. I know nothing about the day-to-day realities of her life. What did she think of while she posed? How often, afterwards, did her mind turn back to the studio, to the artist? Did she remember his face any better than he remembered hers? How arrogant, too, this desire to read her mind. She doesn’t owe me that. We owe each other, at the end of the day, so very much and so very little. I am tempted to make up a name for her. But she doesn’t owe me that either—the comfort of a name. ** At this point in my recovery, I know shame better than anything. The shame in eating. The shame in not eating. The shame in un-eating. The shame in rebellion and the shame in compliance. Weights and counterweights. On my best days, I find balance. On my worst days, I nap through the hours during which I would otherwise have had to make a choice. I can never, it seems, get enough sleep. I will never be able to explain this to a medical professional. It's not simply that my perception of my own body is distorted. I see double; I see my body through both my eyes and yours. My vision is multiplied into infinity—one time for every person that has seen, appraised, loved, hated my body. The eye of a fly consists of at least 3,000 individual lenses. The fly experiences the world as mosaic, as patchwork. I have never felt such kinship with the housefly. What am I doing if not crashing against the same windowpane over and over again? I am dizzy, drunk on an overabundance of perspectives. ** She burns like incense in this light. How long will the sheet remember the heat of her? She stands, each vertebra a prayer bead. She is a waterfall moving in reverse. The only thing to be regretted is that she cannot watch her heart pump. Her first instinct, always, is to maroon her clothes, to move through the world nude. With long hair. ** I find that I don’t have middle-of-the-road days. I slide along a rosary of best days and worst days. Body and landscape. Shame and shame. Perhaps I should have been praying for middle-of-the-road days all along. Tomorrow, I will pray for all things gentle, neutral, and moderate. Tomorrow, I will pray for a swatch of sunlight in which to sit. Caroline Taylor Caroline Taylor is an MFA candidate at the University of Oregon (and is thrilled to now be able to call herself an 'Oregonian'). She is a graduate of Truman State University, where she served as editor-in-chief of the campus literary magazine. Her work has appeared in Storm Cellar, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Outrageous Fortune, among others.  Composition Vll, by Wassily Kandinsky (Russia) 1913 Composition VII, Kandinsky, 1913 I had my first art crush at 12 years old A volunteer, a mom maybe, brought “fine art” to our public school, big floating canvases against the blackboard during homeroom and she talked and talked. I have no idea what she said but I remember how she came and flashed fields of color inside a small morning of all gray walls, gray carpet, gray lockers, they might as well make the grass gray too but at least the track outside was red. Staring, I felt an opening, like what 12-year-old me imagined it was to be high enough to spot insight from spiderly marks and wobbly angles. A space with no more rules no more rules inside a space where spontaneity flew unbridled, where lines improvised inside of themselves until they flushed a new silhouette. Catholic and young, I wanted to be inside of it. To curl up and bounce my limbs against laughing triangles. Cassy Dorff Cassy Dorff’s poetry is published at Terrain.org, Rust + Moth, Black Bough Poetry, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Texas, Cassy currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, serving as a volunteer naturalist, riding horses, and working as an assistant professor of Political Science. Cassy’s academic research publications can be found at the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of Peace Research, and other outlets.  Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music, by Alma Thomas (USA) 1976 Suite in Red Red is the engine of pattern and feeling, a cardinal mosaic of brush-strokes and paving stone, scarlet and white in a closely packed dance. When the rhythm gets looser, the silhouettes part and the feet shuffle backward, the hips bob and bump so the air can get in, so the laughter can breathe. And last of all the pieces move away; the bits of tile break off, and scatter out beyond the bounds of field, of view, of ken. Hope Coulter Hope Coulter loves wandering through art museums and trying to capture some essence of what she sees in words. Her work often involves the visual arts; for example, her poetry collection The Wheel of Light (Brickhouse Books, 2015) opens with a seven-part poem about a California painter at work early in the morning. Coulter teaches and directs the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.  Three Medlars and a Butterfly, by Adriaen Coorte (Netherlands) 1696-1705 Three Medlars & a Butterfly On this same block of dense-grained stone Adriaen Coorte has sometime set out Walnuts, seashells, peaches, plums, And again and again, bundled stalks Of pale asparagus. Now, Three new-plucked medlars Laid side by side in drowsy light, Their tawn skins drawn tight still About the hard, acidic fruit—not yet In this small, immortal moment Grown rotten-ripe— And there above them, a butterfly, A Cabbage White, late In his season, that has come Just in time, and still Too soon. Blake Leland Blake Leland is a teacher at Georgia Tech, a Pushcart nominee who has published in Epoch, The New Yorker, Poetry International online and a few more places. He thought once he might be a painter but now expresses that impulse in poems in which he tries to bring together vision, music, thought and feeling. Discover our single session workshops on art and writing. A great lineup ahead. Connect with other writers and readers and learn more about craft and art history. We have Brent Terry as a special guest in one session, and will be adding more with special guests soon. Stay tuned! We strive to make these affordable at $35 Canadian dollars or approximately $25 USD for each two hour session. Thank you for supporting The Ekphrastic Review. Click here for more information or to sign up for any of these.
Lyric State the box contains a spirit heart ball in hand smudged with dirt gray from wire up to the ear from tossing and missing the box made of wood and sweat the box contains a spirit heart move any ball to an open spot walk back and forth, box turns gray from wire up to the ear recline upon an ocean bed, pink listen to waves and earth the box contains a spirit heart it’s not easy to leave the water return to the box we must see gray from wire up to the ear look for invisible drawings as fast as the mind conjures the box contains a spirit heart gray from wire up to the ear Maryann Gremillion Maryann Gremillion is a quiet writer whose essays, poems, and short memoir pieces have appeared in Glass Mountain, The Sun, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. She lives in Houston, Texas with two cats, Axel and Simone, who run the household. She loves long walks beneath trees with her husband. |
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October 2024
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