After Matisse’s Back Series

I
Yesterday, I hiked a narrow
hidden path to the frozen 
waters of Lake Helen. Still, 
they were fluid, distant. I grazed 
my body along her curve and this
must have been the way you were blinded. 
Scooping earth from the waysides
of her belly, cupping it in the crescents 
of your palms, nearing so close
to your lips as to melt it with 
your breath. This way, you could lean 
yourself into the valley of her back, slide 
over the rise of her thighs 
and whisper the strokes of perfection 
like a tourist, with hiking poles and an 
oversized backpack, stunned 
by the foreignness, the relevance
of beauty.


II
Too stunned, almost, to unload
your pack and stay 
the night in its curvature, its mystified 
bend. The morning appears and the lines 
that the evening weight contours
seem more jagged at this hour. Like this, 
the trees themselves grow thick: A neck 
speared through the blades of an open back,
its leaves, folding, more than blowing, into  
themselves, out of themselves. 


III
I do not blame you for the blindness. It is 
hard to tell beauty from the backside 
of a stone, a lake, a day. I envy 
your strength, uprooting 
the tree like that, carrying the trunk 
down through the leaning path, away 
from the frozen body and evening
and dawn. The way you must 
have lifted it above your head,
thrust it with such a force 
as to rip apart the firm of her back
and leave it there.

IV
Though by now you must be 
an exhausted traveler, having already 
woken in the break 
of the day to watch the ways in which 
sunlight traces and pools, you 
are comforted in the subtleties of stillness. 
She has become two pillars and you,
an artist, unforming.

Yael Herzog

Yael Herzog: "I have received my MFA from Bar Ilan University, and received the Andrea Moriah Poetry Prize in May, 2017. My work has previously been published in Eclectica Magazine and Aurora Poetry, and was nominated for the Sundress Publications 2019 Best of the Net Anthology. I grew up in New Jersey and now live in Tel Aviv, Israel, where I teach English to middle school and high school students.



​

You'll never run out ideas for writing ekphrastic poetry with our ebook of thirty-one creative exercises. It's a month of ideas, or you can dip into a random selection whenever the urge for poetry strikes.

Back

Greener pastures I have never seen, nor such straight canals, much as rivers meandering, where surfaces ascend symmetrically in the greyer heavens up. All breathe below sea level but don't drown, won't brood, for here, here live the dunes, the dikes, their waterworks. Three seasons full of North-blue rain fall on trees, on plots, tomatoes, red and black-n-white cows. 

I used to not really think to stop and look, to admire works or flowers, my street with towers. I used to not even consider the fruits of the holy fields flooded, the cows full of heifer love, just cattle loyal, chewing-milking-meating us. Back now I bathe in the blinking lights, the waters in the sky, there are waves under bridges and I waken that I left for space to think, for silence to read like a writer. I left for spaces like lakes and oceans, still with a secret need of cities or crops. I saw a desert with volcanoes, where pride awkwardly surrounded my ears. The weeks turned to more weeks, as piles of paper to those I used to climb at home. Time and words noiselessly melted, the house such ghost of turbulence. I am losing face and details fade, much as memories stay. Mine, not yours. 
​
And so I decided it was time, forward thinking, for where there are neither dunes, dikes nor the racing clouds like ours, there is where a desert sees the sea so unlike me. I asked my best friend to tape the greener grass, the vapour sky, some underground clangour to have the fields in hand, as I erased the pictures of the cotton candy clouds, the dust from my skirts. Your number too. About time. 

Kate Copeland

Kate Copeland started absorbing stories ever since a little lass. Her love for words led her to teaching and translating some sweet languages, her love for art, lyrics and water led her to poetry ...with some publications sealed already! She was born in Rotterdam some 51 ages ago and adores housesitting in the UK, America and Spain.

A Two-Part Ekphrastic Workshop: Discovering Canada’s Art
 
When the American comedian Steve Martin curated a touring exhibition of Canadian painter Lawren Harris, it was the first time many outside experienced artwork from Canada. Yet we have untold riches in our art story! This generative writing workshop is an opportunity for writers to get acquainted with Canada’s remarkable, diverse visual culture. 
 
There will be an overview or “highlight reel” of important moments coast to coast from the beginning until today. Then we will take a deeper dive into five works selected to inspire your writing, learning about the artwork and artist and working from inspiring exercises.
 
Canadian art history has it all: kooky, quirky, flamboyant artists who did things their own way; abstract art movements; a range of different indigenous art cultures; scandalous muses and collectors; records of oppression and triumph over adversity; pioneering perspectives; multicultural art histories; and mysterious moments that keep hold on the national psyche. Come and discover a world of art that can forever inspire your ekphrastic practice.
 
Our experience this far doing these workshops is that the previous two-hour time frames seems too short. We are extending the workshop sessions to 2.5 hours as we tend to go overtime anyhow! This will allow an unrushed session with plenty of time for discussion, sharing and a short stretching break roughly halfway. We will try this out and see if it works better- we have consistently and pretty much unanimously found the two hours of our first workshops was too short! We try to be interactive, supportive, and flexible so that everyone feels comfortable.
 
Part One
Saturday, November 13, 2021
6 to 8 pm EST
 
Part Two
Saturday, November 20, 2021
6 to 8 pm EST
 
$30CAD each
$50CAD for both

                                   
Glimpses into an Abyss 

Pausing outside a Montmartre cinema in 1946,
Giacometti glimpses a woman with an astonishing shape. 

Inside the Brasserie Lipp, the head waiter’s physique
looks like the woman’s. So do all the patrons:

figures knife-edged to the point of disappearing,
pared to the heft of a shadow.  

If Giacometti moves his head slightly, 
what he sees becomes more ghastly.

In his cramped studio on the Rue Hippolyte,
the starting points are members of his family:

his wife, his brother, his models.  
All excess siphoned away. 

According to Sartre, the figures straddle
“nothingness and being,” caught in transition.

Giacometti starts with plaster of paris,
which crumbles easily. 

Like him, always on the edge
of disintegration.

Mike Ross
​
​Poems by Mike Ross have appeared in Speckled Trout Review, Great Smokies Review, The Ekphrastic Review.  His book of poems, Small Engine Repair appeared in 2015.    He teaches poetry writing at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, the University of North Carolina. His second book, Ports of Call, will be published in 2022.

Enigma

Whose Japanese vase? Whose corner table?
Hexagonal in olive green and decorated 
with twisted stems and blossom, as pale

as the faded palette of the roses it contains --
the last he painted before that final tumult
of wheat and crows.

Was this bunch in Gachet’s house with dark antiques,
Pissarro’s paintings and the nervous atmosphere
where he dined each week?

Did Marguerite arrange them — yellow
pink and blue — in the music room
before she played on the piano?

A small picture, no clue in any
letter, at a time when he completed
a new canvas every day.

His brother gave it to Gachet’s son for sitting
with Vincent the night after he shot himself
until he, Theo, came on the next-day train. 

Whose is the room and who’s is the bowl? 
Questions hover in the air of the Musée d'Orsay.
                        Why another fallen rose?

​Denise Bundred

This poem was first published in The London Grip, June 2021

Denise Bundred: "I was a consultant paediatric cardiologist and has an MA in Writing. I’m a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. My pamphlet, Litany of a Cardiologist, was published in 2020. I won the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2016, coming second in 2019. My poems have appeared Hippocrates Prize Winner Anthologies and the NHS Anthology These are the Hands.  I have poems in a number of British poetry magazines and online publications including Envoi, Under the Radar, The Poetry Shed, Prole Poetry and Prose, London Grip and Magma."