Join us on Monday, December 9 from 2 to 4 pm eastern standard time, for a discovery workshop on the Madonna in art history.


We will look at the history of the Virgin Mary in visual art around the world, and learn the secrets of the symbols that accompany her, the meanings of different renderings and styles, and much more.


The first half of this workshop will be a tour of visual images and discussion of the art and artists. In the second half, we will use some of the imagery to inspire contemplation and creativity, with prompts for poems or short fiction.

Click here to sign up, and to see other sessions coming up soon. You can also get gift certificates for your friends!

​https://www.ekphrastic.net/store/p149/The_Madonna_in_Art%3A_a_Discovery_Workshop.html

​Anamorphosis
  
Look how the globes, sextant, and lute--
Luxurious artifacts, all—cannot
Undo their expressions of tedium.
Kinetic by objects alone, the ambassador and bishop
Stand like totems of opulence and supplication.
 
Surreal memento mori, challenging
Narrative and composition:
Is Holbein’s distorted skull
Emphasizing their knowledge, or does it
Beckon ours alone? Adventurous viewer,
 
Lean down to the left, peer up to the right.
Observe the activated cranium and sockets.
How clever to bring us all to our knees.

Sascha Feinstein

Sascha Feinstein is the founding editor of Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature (1996). He is the son of two abstract-expressionist painters and has long been drawn to the relationship between poetry and other arts. His dozen books include Misterioso (winner of the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press) and Ajanta's Ledge. Individual poems have appeared in APR, North American Review, The Georgia Review, and scores of other venues. Honours include the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Artist of the Year. His next book, Writing Jazz: Conversations with Critics and Biographers, is due out in March.

​Holding a Mirror Up to Van Gogh’s Crows
 
A blue-black beaten sky,
gold-ochre wheat waving 
as he parted it
like the sea of some god
with nothing more than his hand,
a palette knife. 
Ready to reap what has been sown.
Why didn’t he finish
the path through it?
Maybe he saw
the end by then,
had grown his own black wings.
Maybe he could already feel the lightness
of laced bones, 
the hollowing hallowed.
Crows are known to hold funerals
for the dead. Like us.
 
For the dead, like us.
Crows are known to hold funerals,
the hollowing hallowed.
Of laced bones,
maybe he could already feel the lightness,
had grown his own black wings. 
The end by then?
Maybe he already knew
the path through it. 
Why didn’t he finish,
ready to reap what has been sown?
A palette knife,
with nothing more than his hand
like the sea of some god
as he parted it.
Gold-ochre wheat waving,
a blue-black beaten sky.

Sharon Tracey

Sharon Tracey is a writer and author of three poetry collections--Land Marks (Shanti Arts 2022), Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts), and What I Remember Most is Everything. Her poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Terrain.org, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. Find some of her work online at sharontracey.com.

​Not/My Story
 
Not me/Not mine
 
Not moon water
Not buffalo 
Skin
 
No woman 
I know
 
Bitterroot blood
Hands/Not
 
Names of twin stars
Of mustangs
Of salt\rivers
 
No names 
I know
 
                                    Murdered
                                    
By everyone
I know
 
Everyone 
We were
We are
 
Me too
 
No more\Invisible 
Wolf

Nancy Murphy

Nancy Murphy is a Los Angeles based poet whose work has been published in The Baltimore Review, Sheila-na-gig, SWWIM, Anacapa Review and others. Her first chapbook, The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence, was published in 2022 by Gyroscope Press.  In addition to poetry, Nancy enjoys a weekly improv class and mentoring of teen writers through WriteGirl LA.  More at www.nancymurphywriter.com

Saturday Night, 1935, Archibald J. Motley
​
after Gwendolyn Brooks
 
Saturday Night, the Golden Shovel, we owe
June big-time, doomed jazz players. The song we sing:
‘I can’t live without my Kitchen Man’, the sin
of Madam Buff, she’s quite a deluxe breed. We
play ‘she got what it takes’. Tall glasses of thin
gin are carried by waiters; hard liquor, gin.
 
At her table, Bessie Smith slugs a pink gin;
she shouts, ‘Man, can that girl sing. What’s her name?’ We
say June, she’s the Harlem Dancer, there’s no thin
gin here, saves all her dollar tips, then losing 
the lot gambling on the low rent south-side; we
move into black and tans, the cheap dives, the sin-
 
ners’ bars, Saturday nights — the doors close on sin,
the feral dogs, the Harlem Cabaret, gin, 
invisible, the round tables, tall stools. We
seven long-headed jazz men still play on. We
are June’s eyes, we are Bessie’s, we are bold sing-
ers, dancers, touchers — she lifts a dress of thin
 
silken gold. Archibald J. Motley, with thin-
ly disguised leers, devours the shape, the sin.
In praise of youth, the young guns, is what we sing --
Langston Hughes strikes a shadow and dies for gin,
shape-shifts with the swaying daughters, the girls we
die for — Claude McKay blows through like Dizzy. We
 
play long and hard, late into the night, then we
tend to the bar, to pin-striped bosses in thin
suits and hats, to talk of corporations we
know nothing about. We speak of school, the sin
of leaving, not saluting the flag, begin
to feel we are hollow men who cannot sing.
 
Like caged birds, we repeat old mantras, we sing
and sin again. We jazz-up old routines; awe-
some encounters with June. The girl is singin’
her heart out, singin’ for nothin’, for the thin
stripes and suits, the money-men, the landlords sin-
gled out, selected for their enterprise. We
 
jazz with June. We sing sin. We know these cruel thin
dukes whose hands stray when we ain’t looking. That’s sin,
to blame it on the gin, then we die in awe.

Ian D Smith

Ian D Smith  "I'm from Manchester in the UK, but now living in Wiltshire. I’m a state-educated poet and traditionally under-represented in UK publishing. Despite that poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Icefloe Press, Stand, Eratio and others."

Best Small Fictions is an annual anthology since 2015 dedicated to honouring small fictions such as flash, microfiction, and prose poetry, nominated by literary journals around the world. The anthology was founded by Tara L. Masih. The series editor is Nathan Leslie. The series is currently published by Alternating Currents Press.

Please join me in congratulating the following writers for their outstanding stories. Read them, and share them far and wide!

Huge congratulations to our amazing writers!

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Liberation, by Christine H. Chen

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/nine-lives-marathon-prose-responses

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A Postcard from the Museum Gift Shop. by Epiphany Ferrell

www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/gustave-guillaumet-ekphrastic-writing-responses
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(scroll down)

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The Woman in Cobalt, by Marsha Masseau 

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/marie-bashkirtseff-ekphrastic-writing-responses

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The Mystery of Sea Foam, by Cheryl Sadowski

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-mystery-of-seafoam-by-cheryl-sadowski

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The Virgin Martyr Speaks, by Jane Yager

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-virgin-martyr-speaks-by-jane-yager

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Chagall’s Kite   

The man in the yellow hat
flies a kite from the top of a barn
and is so askew, leaning back
on one arm, I’m sure he’ll fall,
land in the corral 
where a few ghostly chickens stand.
The fowl will be aflutter,
wings flapping, feathers floating
in the air. Nearby, perched
on a red roof, another fellow.
Arms outstretched, he looks
like he’ll catch the kite, ride it
a short flight to the yellow-hatted man.
So they can sit together and chat
about the weather, the dill
the neighbour sows, the giant
carp lying belly up to the sky. 
And he can ask him a thing or two
about the carp with the red mouth
and the white goat with heavy eyelids
that lies in the blue grass
and dreams. Yes, dreams,
and how to make the improbable true.

Robin Rosen Chang

First published in my poetry collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books). ​

Robin Rosen Chang is a 2023 New Jersey Council on the Arts poetry fellow and the author of the full-length collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Plume, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Montclair State University. 

​And the Makings of the Sublime 
 
Is he the Monk by the Sea,
where monumental blue and black and white horizonal swaths speak
to the future of Rothko colour fields and Barnett’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis.

Is it chromatic wonderment that conjures
a redemptive sadness when I stand before such grandeur
at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie,

Or is it the moment of disengaging my own consciousness
that carries me back to Friedrich and toward his soma-psyche 
when in 1808 he reached for another paintbrush. 

He asks to be spun within his chrysalis--
a chrysalis that hangs within its hardened shelter
away from feelings of transience where nothingness is the unknowable
liminal space mediated by his paintings.

Here is a contemplation of both the terror and the awe,
the wrath of nature as it untouches us as we sit wrapped
tightly in an armchair in a corner of Kant’s towery library.

Is he the monk who is carried under the arch of the Abbey in the Oak Forest,
where black figural vertical smears are scattered
in the foreground of those who redeem a sadness
now put to rest and of those lanky lamenters further lost
within the murky mist of pigmented oil and varnish.

The crescent moon, barely finding the mourners.
Jagged branches barren of their spring and summer lushness,
put forth their crooked umber fingers, lengthening each year, arching with stiffness,
reaching out into the ether as the Abbey slowly crumbles.

As amor fati, he asks to leave it to time to decide
if he becomes a brilliant butterfly or a maggot,
as it is the sublime that arises when Friedrich becomes the fluttering warrior
with its transformed beauty in his afterlife rather than the thing that devours dying flesh.

Tahkouhie H. Antaramian

Tahkouhie H. Antaramian is an Armenian-born American artist and writer in Fresno, California. She is a PhD candidate and teaches art history for several colleges. Antaramian is a member of Fig Tree Gallery. She received the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grant for Stream of Light: Art and Ethnography of the Post-WWII Repatriation to Soviet Armenia. She has authored  journal publications on post-WWII diasporan studies of the Nerkaght. Her last show on the subject was Imaginary Letters to Vasily Grossman in Paris. When not visiting her life companion in Italy, Antaramian lives with her two sons, sister, and a menagerie of animals in California.

A big congratulations to our wonderful writers on the occasion of these nominations for Best Microfictions.

​The Best Microfiction awards anthologies were founded by the wonderful Meg Pokrass and the amazing Gary Fincke. They serve to honour very small fictions under 400 words as a unique literary form.

Without further adieu, join us in congratulations these writers for their ekphrastic microfictions.

​**

Dream – The Aggañña Sutta, by Saad Ali
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/ekphrastic-writing-responses-norval-morrisseau
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Apertures, by Karen George
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/apertures-by-karen-george

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Interior Design, by Barbara Krasner
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/october-18th-2024
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Birth of Spring by Bayveen O’Connell
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/jacek-malczewski-ekphrastic-writing-responses
(scroll down)

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​
The Incident, by Cheryl Snell
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/jacek-malczewski-ekphrastic-writing-responses
(scroll down)

​The Forest Has Ears and the Field Has Eyes
 
I see and hear all about me
And about me sees and hears the Forest all.
 
She lies below, safe in the hollow of the tree.
 
Above, they sing or screech in the near-dark.
 
I am the duke of the Forest
In the Forest of the Duke
 
I am the evil observer, awake in your presence.
 
‘s-Hertogenbosch. The Duke’s Forest. The ears of the forest and the eyes of the field. Yes, I know you, how you operate, the painter thought, stepping over a broken branch, the crack an indictment of his human activity. 
 
Looking up, Jeroen saw the rather large owl perched on a dead tree, in a hollow, its swivelling head turning in the direction of Jeroen’s home, as if the animal, and not Jeroen, decided the route.
 
He tried to divert his mind. Tomorrow, I will take my nephews and their friends on a barge through the town. It will be a treat.
 
It was dusk, his favourite time of day; it also scared him a little, even at his advanced age. When the light was this dim, the natural shapes he saw started to change, aided especially by the agglomerations of weeds, which often presented themselves as pachydermal beings, the kind he had seen in others’ paintings and even tapestries. But beyond this, he noticed all manner of creatures, odd in themselves, in a way, foxes, snakes, bats, some insects, and sometimes he would see parts of their bodies transposed onto each other. Yes, he would actually see them. And sometimes they would parade in front of him and put on some performance or other, often a dance. He would not necessarily think of hell, rather of God’s creatures, but they would whisper to him to be careful, to trust his eyes and ears above all, but distrust others’, and to keep his counsel. Those earlier, more violent visions that he had had as a child, that had so often kept him and his brothers up late at night, had subsided to the point now where he was in almost complete control and did not consider them as what others might think of as an abomination. He had vowed long ago never to use his talent as an adult to scare or harm others, rather to warn.
 
Many times, however, these metamorphoses were harmless enough, as when, as a child, he mistook a tadpole for a small fish with a long tail. He had forever been playing around ponds in those days as often as not after being warned by his mother that such places were inhabited by devilish sprites. He realised eventually, of course, that it was just a way to steer the child away from natural as much as spiritual danger. Yet it did not stop him at night dreaming feverishly of every kind of benighted creature that inhabited the riverbanks or canal sides. 
 
As a boy during lessons, he would often be woken from some reverie by another pupil’s prank and, often as not, Jeroen was strangely grateful and would smile, like a simpleton, confusing his bully, who would turn away, at a loss. Yet, they knew him to be intelligent and soon he was capable of his own pranks, which bordered on the dangerous, when he eventually came around to exact mild revenge, such as dropping some semi-poisonous toad down another pupil’s neck.
 
“Wait,” he heard now. 
 
It had come from somewhere in the mid-gloom, but from where? And from whom, at this hour? He observed that the owl was still there, staring straight at him.
 
“You know nothing of me,” a voice said. 
 
Jeroen could not be sure where the sound was coming from. Hardly from the owl. But maybe from its direction. It was not as if he could see its mouth move, and couldn’t have, even in the near dark.
 
Then it came again.
 
“You’ve had an illustrious career, sir!” 
 
“Wha…?” was the only possible reaction.
 
“Oh, you have nothing to be modest about,” the owl asserted. 
 
There was no doubt now. 
 
“But I for one,” it continued, in high dudgeon, “resent your depictions of my brethren.”
 
“You mean owls?” Jeroen replied, trying not to contort his voice into a surprised squeal.
 
He was speaking now directly to the bird, but convincing himself someone was in the undergrowth throwing their voice, just like his friends had done in his youth, once.
 
“You have demonised us too long,” it went on, imperiously puffing out its chest in indignation.
 
“How so?”
 
“Come, come, sir,” it hooted. “You have had it in for us from the start!”
 
As it said these words, Jeroen was aware of how the last rays of the sun slipped away and cast the bush where the owl sat in its tree into shade and then of how a great number of birds, mostly owls, even types he had never seen before, swept in and took up various positions on the branches of the surrounding trees and bushes as if it had been planned like that. 
 
“Well, I am not really sure…” he began.
 
“Silence!” 
 
At this stentorian outburst, there was a general voicing of approval, through muttering and even a few chuckles, from all the birds around.
 
“Yes, you know what I, we, are talking about. Even going back to our sweet brother looking balefully out at the viewer as he is perched on the tree branch in that work dedicated to your namesake patron Saint Jerome. The rather tame-looking lion’s presence is as nothing compared to the threat given off by the owl. Even the fox has been sated and wants nothing to do with your little drama.”
 
“But how…”
 
“Silence! What is there to say that the bird on the opposing branch is not in its sights?”
 
“But… but…” uttered Jeroen in exasperation.
 
The master of ceremonies started to spread his wings in excitement, ignoring Jeroen’s protestations.
 
“The one that gets me is that cunning one in the The Adoration… that sidelong glance at the Baby. You had to do that, didn’t you? You couldn’t just let an Adoration be an Adoration! And you did it in paint not once, but twice!”
 
Jeroen had lost patience.
 
“Are we to go over all my painting like this? I’m an old man, and I have…”
 
“Let us see,” the owl continued, oblivious. “How many of your so-called paintings contain one of my brethren, in actual fact?”
 
Jeroen bristled at the pedantic addition of the last three words, but he did not have to think long.
 
“Almost… almost…”
 
“All! Almost all, I’ll give you that,” shouted the accuser, and cackles and calls of derision burst out all around the forest.
 
It was true. He had included one in almost every painting and in many a sketch.
 
I’ve had enough of this, he concluded. There’s no way out.
 
“Well, sirs,” he said, respectfully addressing the birds and all their other friends who had continued to gather during the interrogation. “I have really enjoyed speaking to you all.”
 
For sure, they could see through his lie, a state of affairs evidenced by a few cackles, he thought from wolves, in this instance.
 
“You have given me a lot to think on.”
 
This was followed by a muted hissing.
 
The owl looked suspiciously at him for a while, leading Jeroen to wonder if he was in danger, but finally he broke into a half-smile.
 
“We did not intend to trouble such a fine painter as yourself. Please continue with your invaluable work and think of us, but not as lowly owls,” the leader said, seeming to soften his stance drastically.
 
Hah, Jeroen thought, nevertheless, Not so lowly. More like high-and-mighty.
 
“Rather,” the leader continued, “think of all of us, as you see us, like this, in all our variety and seeming menace, and, of course, beauty.”
 
“I will, I will,” Jeroen acknowledged reluctantly, half-turning away to see a sea of stippled eyes glowing at him through the gloom. 
 
He turned fully away now, only to look back one more time, and realise that, without their having made one sound, they were gone, the wood having meanwhile reverted to the comforting buzz and accompanying eerie susurrations of those unseen monstrous creatures, the crickets, lizards, moths, even the cicadas, who all continued on, embroidering the forest’s darkening cloak.
 
Brian Howell
 
Brian Howell is an author and teacher living and working near Tokyo, Japan. He has published three novels and two short story collections since 1990. His novels focus on artists with an interest in optical devices, his short stories exploring more contemporary topics, often touching on magical realism and the weird. The Man Who Loved Kuras was published by Salt, U.K., in 2022. His short story, Pictures of Yukio, was published as a chapbook by Zagava, Germany. Forthcoming in 2024 from Raphus Press is a collection of previously published stories entitled The Study of Sleep and Other Stories on art themes, as well a reprint of his novel about the painter Vermeer, The Dance of Geometry (originally published by Toby Press in 2002) by Zagava.