Want some gruesome, grisly art prompts that contemplate evil, terror, pestilence and death?
Trigger Warning: An Ekphrastic Halloween dark art prompts for your writing practice Here is an ebook of 20 dark prompts. Warning- some viewers may find the art inside extremely disturbing. If these prompts inspire you, submit up to six poems to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com by October 25, 2020 for a special ekphrastic Halloween showcase!
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The Curtains Downstairs Show soft red curves and green plantings Colors picking up others Inside and out When nearly closed Slight light frame radiant Slim center gutter brightening Scant green leaves Waving in breeze and hailing us all Alan Bern Retired children’s librarian Alan Bern’s poetry books: No no the saddest and Waterwalking in Berkeley, Fithian Press; greater distance, Lines & Faces, his press with artist Robert Woods, linesandfaces.com. Alan has poems, stories, and photos published in a variety of online and print publications. Alan was a runner up for Raw Art Review's “John H. Kim Memorial Short Fiction Prize” for his story 'The alleyway near the downtown library'; and he won the Littoral Press Poetry Prize in 2015. Recent photos published: unearthedesf.com/alan-bern and https://wanderlust-journal.com/2020/07/01/around-the-few-blocks-nearby/. Alan performs with dancer/choreographer Lucinda Weaver as PACES and with musicians from Composing Together, composingtogether.org. Francis and the Birds He fed them all: the crotchety geese, the pushy hens, partridges with their topknots. Waddling plovers gorged on gestating grain and swallows and sparrows stopped squabbling over breadcrumbs. They listened to him for it seemed unkind not to, though of his preaching, they understood not one word. He seemed not to mind, since they were like most folk, though they did not avoid him when he came around. His consolations reminded the birds of their own songs, the assent of his coos, chiding clucks and trrwhits. His caws needed practice, and his cheeps were too high, but at least, they admitted, he avoided those silly honks. Patiently they brought him along, attending thoughtfully, and replying softly in kind. For the air around him was gold, and this was the way they knew him for one of their own. It shimmered as it did as they dipped and looped, glided and swooped and even waddled on warm afternoons. They masked their disappointments on the hours he wasted on men, who didn’t understand a word of the language of motion, something even the trees had a handle on, deaf as they were to the birds. See here, in this image, how the cypress leans towards him, eager to offer him some gentle advice? What do you think it would be to that small dark man, wandering the hills cradling sparrows in his palms? Denise Rogers Denise Rogers teaches at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is an associate editor of Mockingheart Review. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Louisiana Literature, Mockingheart Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Texas Poetry Review, Ekphrasis and others. Her book, The Scholar's Daughter, is published by Louisiana Literature Press. Cobalt Blue Glaze Mom taught fifth graders to roll clay and crimp edges as well as how to read and spell and multiply There was a kiln at her school and that summer mom bussed to the “Y” for pottery classes One night at midnight my boyfriend and I sat kissing good night on my front porch, long past blooming time of lilacs and roses – I assumed my mom was inside sleeping until we heard footsteps on the sidewalk and straightened up just before my mom walked inside the tall hedge She said she walked the four miles home because busses had stopped running My boyfriend cautioned he would have picked her up – a woman alone at night even in our town not safe Years later, I visited her and found each clay piece from that summer wrapped in newspaper in a box in the back of a low kitchen cupboard She said she thought for all these years the pieces she had formed too thick and rough, unworthy of display She let me paint and glaze the pieces for her ten grandchildren – because she was both the rough and smooth of her children’s lives I painted vases, cups and bowls the cobalt blue she chose, rented kiln space to fire a hard shine, included mom’s note before sealing each gift’s fragile handling My husband, once that boyfriend, helped me carry boxes to the post office We considered insuring each one for replacement value Sometimes I cut flower stems to fit the thick-ribbed vase with mom’s name scored on the bottom in her perfect teacher cursive script Mary Ellen Talley Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have recently been published in Raven Chronicles, Banshee, What Rough Beast, Flatbush Review and The Ekphrastic Review as well as in the anthologies, Chrysanthemum and Ice Cream Poems. Her poems have received two Pushcart nominations and a chapbook is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. 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. The prompt this time is Medusa, by Peter Paul Rubens. Deadline is October 16, 2020. 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 you wrote down. (Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.) Please copy and paste your submission into the body of the email, even if you include an attachment such as Word or PDF. 3. Have fun. 4. USE THIS EMAIL ONLY. Send your work to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com. 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 MEDUSA WRITING CHALLENGE in the subject line. 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, October 16, 2020. 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! 12. Please share this prompt with your writing groups, Facebook groups, social media circles, and anywhere else you can. The simple act of sharing brings readers to The Ekphrastic Review, and that is the best way to support the poets and writers on our pages! Want more gruesome, grisly art prompts that contemplate evil, terror, pestilence and death?
Trigger Warning: An Ekphrastic Halloween dark art prompts for your writing practice Here is an ebook of 20 dark prompts. Warning- some viewers may find the art inside extremely disturbing. If these prompts inspire you, submit up to six poems to ekphrasticchallenge@gmail.com by October 25, 2020 for a special ekphrastic Halloween showcase! Minyan, or How to Wear a Prayer Shawl 1. Like a dead man. In the cemetery, kissed by Seattle rain, my friend’s father lies on a plank next to his open grave. He is shrouded in white linen and wrapped in the black-striped tallit he prayed in all his life, his inescapably human form announcing itself in the curvings of the cloth—rounding over his head and shoulders, flattening and narrowing down his torso and legs, rising again at his feet. The dead body of a human being, fitted with a new skin, clothed in a travelling garment. This is how a Jew prays. 2. Like Chagall’s praying Jew. In Aramaic, tallit means cloak or sheet, a covering. It’s the word the rabbis of the Talmud chose for the prayer shawl worn to fulfill the commandment of tying fringes, tzitzit, to the four corners of one’s garment, as a constant reminder of the Presence. I was nineteen when I first saw a Jew praying in a tallit. I was in Paris, at a Chagall exhibition at the Grand Palais. In a room alive with colour and crowded with luminous angels, dancing fiddlers, floating brides, and grooms carrying bouquets, a lone man in black and white stunned me. A bearded Jew engulfed in a tallit--the tallit worn by Chagall’s father, the catalogue said, worn by a wandering beggar Chagall invited in off the street. The man’s face, a face of sorrow, emerged from the opening of the tallit like a child being born from a womb of light into the darkness of the world. One long edge of his tallit was jagged, the black background devouring his white shelter, enemy incursions into territory set aside for peace. The black stripes too were advancing. They were escaping their woven edges, pushing beyond the boundaries set by the light, threatening to undo creation, threatening chaos, violence, death. Yet the man was not shaken—his body as still and solid as the squared phylacteries on his forehead and arm, his gaze fixed beyond. Trusting in his refuge of wool and its blessing: “How precious is Your kindness, O God! The children of the earth take refuge in the shadow of Your wings…For with You is the source of life; in Your light we see light.” (Psalms 36:8, 11) Echoing the prayer of the artist, that he, as he said, might express in his work “my sigh, the sigh of prayer and of sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth.” This is how a Jew prays. 3. Like a child afraid of the dark. In my early thirties, while still a Presbyterian teaching in a Christian seminary and guest-preaching in churches, I had recurring visions of being buried in a tallit. I flew to New York. In a Jewish shop on the lower east side, the clerk followed me around. “For your husband? Your son?” he asked as I headed for the large wool tallits hanging near the back. “For me,” I said. He stopped. “Look over here,” he said, walking to a rack of narrow rayon tallits. He draped one with soft blue stripes and silver metallic stitching over his arm. It was only 12 inches wide and the first three words of the blessing, Baruch Attah Adonai, were stitched near the neck. “Try it,” he urged. It was slippery and hung weightless around my neck, more like a scarf a woman might accessorize her outfit with or the courtesy tallits provided for guests in non-Orthodox synagogues. I handed it back to him. “I want wool,” I said, “white with black stripes, no decoration, large.” He returned with a traditional 64” X 76” Turkish wool tallit. It fell heavily on my head and across my shoulders, cascaded to my feet. I bent down to grasp the tzitzit, which were brushing the floor, and gathered the shawl around me like Chagall’s praying Jew. My dream tallit. “Let me get you another size,” the clerk said. “You don’t want it to drag on the ground.” “No,” I said, feeling its warmth. “This is the one.” At home, each night before going to sleep, I spread my tallit over my blanket and slept under it, reciting the words of the evening prayer, “Spread over us the shelter of Thy peace.” This is how a Jew in the making prays. 4. Like a man. When I became a Jew four years later, I began wearing my tallit in public, in Shabbat morning services. In my congregation many women, adopting the tradition once reserved for men, wear a tallit. Many of them choose not to pray in a traditional tallit but in a tallit fashioned for their bodies and lives--properly sized; made of pure silk, raw silk, dupioni silks, voile, and organza; hand-woven, hand-painted, hand-embroidered, and hand-appliqued; in pink, coral, peach, purple, teal, and gold; adorned with doves, flowers, pomegranates, stars, flames, and tree of life. They wear them around their shoulders like shawls. Not like the men, who, after draping their tallit over both shoulders, fold up one long side over one shoulder, then the other, a tidy sartorial solution for an ungainly garment. My tallit is a traditional tallit, unmistakably created for a man, and I, ardent feminist, lover of beauty, champion of art and the hand-made life, wear it like a man. This is how a Jew prays. 5. Like a woman. At home I do not decorously fold my tallit over each shoulder to pray, as I do in synagogue. When I pray alone, I unfurl it, kiss the collar as I recite the blessing, then whirl the wool over my head and around my body and let it fall around me like a shawl. I gather the tzitzit of the four corners in my hands, hold them over my heart, and sway, like a mother soothing her baby. The black stripes near the fringed ends meet down my front. Seven rivers of ink flowing across fertile blankness. Seven rivers of letters, out of which the words of my life, the word of my life, my past, my present, my unknown, has been written, is being written, will be written. Seven lines of text waiting to be read. Our lives, too, are texts, say the mystics. It is not enough to expound the words of Torah, says Rabbi Leib, one of the Hasids of the Baal Shem Tov’s circle. We must become entirely a Torah, in our habits and our motions and our motionless clinging to the One. Standing tall, wrapped in my tallit, I become a living text waiting for its meaning. This is how a Jew prays. 6. Like a desert dweller. Desert peoples, men and women, wear an all-purpose outer garment—an abbaya or aba or keffiyah—that is kin to the four-cornered garment the Torah commands the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness to tie tzitzit to, the four fringes that remind one of the surrounding Presence that accompanies one everywhere, fringes of remembrance. One garment—a cloak to shield one from the blazing sun by day and the bitter cold by night, a covering that is armor against sandstorms, a bedsheet, a blanket for the fevered, a carrying sack, a guardian of one’s modesty, a baby carrier, a wedding canopy, a winding cloth. Shelter, protection, remedy, blessing. Garment of survival, garment of life. Garment of remembrance, garment of death. This is how a Jew prays. 7. Like Jesus on the cross. At the Chagall exhibition in Paris, after my encounter with the praying Jew, a second painting held me captive: White Crucifixion. A dark scene in blinding white, with Jesus at the centre. Not the Jesus I knew, bloodied saviour of the Gentiles, wrapped in a loincloth and flanked by two criminals being crucified with him. But Jesus a Jew, hanging on a crossroads of light, wearing a tallit and surrounded by Jews. In the heavens, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob grieving over him, and Rachel weeping for her children. And on earth, Jews fleeing the Nazi extermination, carrying food, babies, menorahs, a Torah scroll, prayers, fear. His suffering their suffering. Their suffering his. The body exposed, the spirit at risk. His tallit covering his intimacy, his humanity, his dignity, his awful vulnerability. Theirs. The black and white stripes like waves of sorrow, the fringe like tears. His tallit a shield of light against the darkness, spreading light to the cross and the four corners of the world. This is how a Jew prays. 8. Like a faqir drunk on the Beloved, a wandering dervish who secludes herself in a cave to be alone with the One she loves, to remember, to be reborn. Sometimes at home, in the hours before dawn, when darkness lingers, hanging heavy on my soul, I kiss my tallit, swirl it over my head, saying, “My soul, bless the One! Wellspring of Life, Fountain of Light, Dwelling of the World, You have garbed Yourself with majesty and splendor. You wrap Yourself with light as with a garment; You spread the heavens as a curtain” (Psalms 104:1- 2), then let it fall over me. I gather the tzitzit together and sit cross-legged on the ground, the four corners meeting in my lap. Enclosed in my cave, my womb of light, I sigh like Chagall, a sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, the cry of rebirth. The silence strips me bare. Tears fall. Anger flares. Joy rises. Whatever has been hiding. The wool traps my body’s heat, warming me and giving off a sweet animal smell that comforts and arouses me. It lies heavy on my hair, my head, my shoulders, arms, back, legs, spirit—a steadying embrace. Golden light seeps through the woven threads. I close my eyes and the cave expands to the ends of the earth and beyond, into nothingness. I am a speck of the universe, but a speck held by love. My fingers find one of the tzitzit to trace the name of God written there, the tetragrammaton, Y, H, W, H, the four letters spelled out by eight threads knotted ten times with thirty-nine wraps of the longest thread to set the name in motion, send it flying beyond the limits of language. The name of the Unamable. The knotted name of God. The knotty name of God. The fringe of the Unknowable. My fingers rub over each knot, each wrap, following the threads, touching the hem of what is holy. This is how a Jew prays. With her hands. With her body. With her wild spirit. 9. Like a dead woman. Like a whirling dervish, one of Rumi’s dancers. At home, alone, when I stand to pray with my tallit over my head and sway and sway under the weighty wool, arms outstretched, fringes flapping, I dance with the poet and his Mevlevis, who whirl and whirl, like the planets, like the cosmos itself, under their tombstone-shaped hats, their white shroud-skirts spinning wide. A dance to slay the ego, to “die before you die.” A dance to be reborn in truth. And when my dancing days are over, when my breath ceases, my body will lie on a plank next to my open grave, alone, shrouded in white linen and wrapped in my black-striped tallit, my new skin, my travelling cloak. This is how a Jew prays. 10. Like a newborn. Swaddled. Wrapped tight. Head to toe. As if back in the warmth of the womb, once again one with the mother. Womb of mercy. Womb of love. Womb of light. This is how a Jew prays. Mary Lane Potter Mary Lane Potter is the author of the novel A Woman of Salt and Strangers and Sojourners: Stories from the Lowcountry (both Counterpoint Press). Her essays and stories have appeared in Parabola, Witness, River Teeth, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Rogue Agent, Minerva Rising, Feminist Studies in Religion, SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Women Studies Quarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, North American Review, Tampa Review, Tiferet, SUFI Journal, Spiritus, Leaping Clear, and others. She’s been awarded writing residencies at MacDowell, Hedgebrook, and Caldera, as well as a Washington State Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowship. http://members.authorsguild.net/marylapotter/. |
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