Click on the painting to view the selected responses for this ekphrastic writing challenge. If you are new to this Review, we have bimonthly ekphrastic prompts. You can click on "Ekphrastic Writing Challenges" on the menu up top to find prompts, responses, and our challenge archives. It's great fun writing with others from around the world, and just as much fun to read the variety of inspirations from a single artwork. Our current prompt is Starry Night by Van Gogh. Click here for details. Deadline is one week today!
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THROWBACK THURSDAYS: Selections by Alarie Tennille I chose to revisit past Februarys for inspiration. This shortest of months can seem like the longest, but we can have spring, summer, or the tropics anytime in the ekphrastic world, so I decided to look at what inspired other writers in gray winter. My Life with Matisse, by Sheila Wellehan https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/my-life-with-matisse-by-sheila-wellehan I love the frolicking, galloping pace of this poem and how Wellehan makes readers think of her as the woman in the portrait. She uses one poem to celebrate Matisse and all of his work, from his complete palette of colour to how he brightens her life. Chagall’s Poet with the Birds, by dl Mattilla https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/chagalls-poet-with-the-birds-by-dl-mattila Here’s another selection that celebrates shimmering colours and dancing rhythm. It makes us crave spring and summer. I suspect Matilla sees herself as the poet on the canvas just as Wellehan moved in with Matisse. Both these poems appeared six years ago, but haven’t lose their power to lift my mood. Lascaux II, by Neil Creighton https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/lascaux-ll-by-neil-creighton From poems about bright colours and flowers, we slip into the dark caves of Lascaux. Isn’t it inspiring to see how our earliest ancestors felt and respected the mysterious power of art? Whenever you need a day brightener, art, poetry, music, or a good book can give you a break from your worry du jour. At the Guggenheim, or Working-Class Girl Meets Rothko, by Nancy Hewitt https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/at-the-guggenheim-or-working-class-girl-meets-rothko-by-nancy-hewitt Talk about being lifted from winter blahs, this Rothko canvas could easily take the place of an S.A.D. light. I love how Hewitt takes us with her to meet the painting at the Guggenheim and then builds on our intimacy when the narrator invites us into her life. Since the author is a psychotherapist, she knew she was giving us insights we could use. Liminality, by Janina Aza Karpinska https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/liminality-by-janina-aza-karpinska Hopper’s paintings often have a stark, lonely, wintry quality to them, but Karpinska sees this work differently. She sees a young woman in a noisy train station finding her own respite where the clamor “doesn’t touch her.” And we sit soundlessly watching her, letting the racket in our heads quiet down, too. Alarie Tennille is a longtime contributor to The Ekphrastic Review, a guest judge and guest editor, and a prize nomination consultant. Her ekphrastic book, Three A.M. at the Museum, was recently named Director’s Pick at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Call for Throwback Thursday selections!
Be a guest editor for a Throwback Thursday! We occasionally post this feature on Thursdays and would love to do so more often. Pick around 10 favourite or random posts from the archives of The Ekphrastic Review. Use the format you see above: title, name of author, a sentence or two about your choice, or a pulled line from the work, and the link. Include a bio and if you wish, a note to readers about the Review, your relationship to the journal, ekphrastic writing in general, or any other relevant subject. Put THROWBACK THURSDAYS in the subject line and send to theekphrasticreview@gmail.com. You sharing your favourites or making a random selection for discovery helps writers get readers. We have over 5000 pieces of ekphrastic literature on this site and at least 1000 different writers. Show us the ones that moved you over the years. Along with your picks, send a vintage photo of yourself, too! Let's have fun with this! Claire’s Cosmography The pale blue ribbon creates the figure, pulls her out, a night-sky-blue silhouette against night-sky blue ground: a forehead and two outcurves, cheek, nose, then a chin-angle. She bears a cloud or nebula where the cheekbone might lift a wing. Another streamer parallels her, red-striped, wavy, a sugar-cane snake that makes another woman, ultramarine too. The maybe hair of first woman flies behind both, yellow orange gold. Does the encaustic technique’s heat evoke fire-hair, unburnt, behind the blue forewoman? But there is no jury, no common law. Four yellow bubbles or worlds rise through her, and more squiggles in red and gold like vertical handwriting––maybe the lore this painting imagines, women made of women made of night sky, a cosmology which doesn’t care to make common sense. Perhaps the origin fires blew them, arcs, streamers, snakes for company. The idea of order here? Confetti’s spray and fall, unruly colours like the legend of women’s unreason, or this discipline that may look like none. Mary B. Moore Mary B. Moore’s poetry books include Dear If, (forthcoming, Orison Books); Flicker (Dogfish Head Prize, 2016); The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State UP, 1997). Chapbooks, both prize winners, are Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys 2017) and Eating the Light (Sable Books 2016). Recent poems also appear in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Birmingham Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, ekphrastic.net, Nelle, Terrain, Georgia Review, 32 Poems, The Nasty Woman Poet anthology, and more. A retired professor, she lives in Huntington WV. Join us to write and sip online, just like meeting at the pub to talk shop, but from anywhere in the world! Painted Love: Wine and Art Write Night Saturday February 12, 6 to 8/8:30 pm EST (We end our workshops organically rather than abruptly at 8 pm.) The subject this time is in celebration of Valentine's Day, and we will examine several intriguing artworks from art history on the theme of love. Come ready to write! We'll be using some fascinating love-themed artworks for discussion and as writing prompts, along with creative exercises to inspire your ekphrastic writing practice. The following day, we have Love Stories, an afternoon session. You can come to both events- the artwork and prompts will not overlap. If you're new to ekphrastic writing, join us and find out why we're hooked! In addition to Painted Love and Love Stories, we have upcoming sessions on African-American artists for Black History Month, Women Artists, an ekphrastic flash fiction workshop, and many more. Our workshops are single session events with affordability, flexibility, and diverse schedules in mind. This way you can mix and match. Every workshop is unique (unless otherwise stated) so similar themed events will have different exercises, prompts, and visuals. Morning Breath How many times had she laid in a morning bed, trying to match her breathing to the lungs that worked like bellows just inches away? In the inhales, she has breathed the shallow, quick breaths touched with the smell of cigarettes he just couldn’t quit--the ragged breaths that reeked of grease and denim, flung there over a nearby chair; the contended, deep breaths sour with the open-mouth, open-body smell of sex, or the uneven breaths catching on love wanting to be spent or said, but waiting; lungs pulling and pushing with the smell of clean sheets, soiled sheets, and the wide-window odor of autumn, and the toasted-corn smell of the loyal dog, his breath quick, even in sleep, their animal hearts beating in time together. Here, the yeasty, bready smell of the son, her own curdled milk smell, a perfect pair, a pauper’s supper laid out on linen, which will need a wash soon, cleaned of the crumbs spilled from these mornings. She reaches her hand out to shield the tiny torso, her fingers curved like a second set of ribs, finding the heartbeat in her palm, trying to match the two, mother and son: she must be calmer; she must breathe, and know that she is safe in the way that little heart believes it is safe in its double-ribcage, floating in the the white room, the goosedown-packed comforter warm as a mother’s womb. A heart the size of a plum stone that beats like a caged thing. Her overripe mango of a heart could learn a thing or two; a hand laid on her own chest (how long since a hand laid on her chest?) as if checking for firmness, solidity in that throbbing fruit could break the skin, and sweet syrup drip down to pool at the elbow’s crease. Remember to breathe, remember that, for now, the world is out there, you are here, a hand between that hard little heart and everything else. And though the world would crush it, recall that your heart, too, has endured so far. Goddfrey Hammit Goddfrey Hammit was born and raised in Utah, and lives in Utah still, in a small town outside of Salt Lake City. Hammit has, most recently, contributed work to Neologism Poetry Journal, The Loch Raven Review, and Riddled with Arrows, and is the author of the novel Nimrod, UT. Website: goddfreyhammit.com My Mother Read Szymborska after Light, by Alexander Zyw (Poland) 1957 My mother read Szymborska for Great Books, turned to me the poet, not because she couldn’t comprehend the words she who taught me to read and not because one thing stood for others-- she simply wanted to borrow the book with its grains of sand for an assignment. She had her own window with its own view of a walkway and on the other side, a roof with wild turkeys congregating, and she’d point and laugh at their uneven landings as she stood in the closed porch hands on hips, her hair newly shorn, bangs a bit short, her brown eyes in the afternoon finding the tall tree beyond as it showered itself onto the driveways and carports. She knew from the works of literature what details meant from Ovid to Ray Bradbury she who inhaled languages for opera thirst, yet to our surprise, she pronounced words differently like gulf instead of golf. She would hitchhike through one tome in a night, her appetite uninformed and servanted as if I needed proof of the well laden bookcase in our house Danish modern covering a wall with built-in desk and record album sections. She was like a grain of sand herself yet took almost 88 years to become and pass. And even now she still falls grain by grain for me, even six years after her departure her voice in fragments falls on my shoulders. Laurel Benjamin Laurel Benjamin has poetry forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review, Black Fox, Limit Experience, Word Poppy Press. Find her work in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, Trouvaille Review, The Ekphrastic Review (challenge finalist), California Quarterly, Midway Journal, MacQueens Quinterly, Wild Roof Journal, Tiny Seed, and more. She is an Oregon Poetry Association honourable mention, and is a Sunspot long lister. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Twitter handle: @lbencleo More at https://thebadgerpress.blogspot.com Catch Struck by sun your white-hot heron beak slashes clouds in half separates sky from sea beach from waves water from spray from air the dying from the living Black eye unblinking you fish among us for breath to feed the light You lay us gasping in rows on the sandy shore to dry then fly away when we stand spared Jan Seagrave Jan Seagrave's work appears or is forthcoming in Panoplyzine, San Pedro River Review, Gyroscope Review, Eunoia Review, Reverberations II (ed. Pendergast), Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Redwood Writers Poetry Anthology, Amore: Love Poems (ed. Tucker). Jan has been a writer for universities, a storyteller, and a librarian. Her Planet In the fields, the ground sprouts men. Men in conductor coats water the fields where the ground sprouts men. Men in conductor coats behold a flapping symphony. The fields sprout more men in conductor coats who water the fields. Floods come and deserts dry and men grow gills and men birth scales. This proceeds for thousands of years. Mountains house tombs. Feathers, volcanoes, lakes. From the fields, a woman is born with a book in her hands. She opens the book and from the binding unwinds a star. The star rises to the sky and for the first time, the men in conductor coats halt the watering of the fields and watch. The woman flips through the pages, stargazes. When she reads, her cape shakes. By morning, the men in conductor coats no longer water the fields. They wait in line for the woman to sleep. They bring balloons on strings to tie to her teeth. Those that pop launch floods. Those that float know God. The more the woman reads from her book, the faster trees sprout out of her mouth. The first cloud appears inside of her house. She is alone eating dinner. She tries to write on it with chalk. Everything is leaking, she writes. It's how she likes to see. Benjamin Niespodziany Benjamin Niespodziany's writing has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50, Fence, Salt Hill, The Indianapolis Review, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. He works nights in a library in Chicago. Meg and Lorette have an animal themed ekphrastic microfiction workshop coming up! This one is a four day, asynchronous workshop online. Click here for more information or to sign up!
Membrane With Veins My body retained the palmaris longus. Hers didn’t. “I’m more evolved,” she laughed, putting our hands next to each other, tapping on the tendon with the tips of her fingers – “You know they will take it out, if you ever need spare parts?”. Other than that, we were analogous – both in height and in weight. Our marathon BPs were only two minutes apart. After one year, we decided to move in together, and we hung the image of that couple from Bosch’s painting over our bed. But then, we couldn’t agree if the sphere is made of glass with cracks, or if it is a membrane with veins. From that point on, I asked her to sleep on the side closer to the door, which, to my disappointment, brought us both more comfort. Michał Choiński Michał Choiński (he/his/him) teaches American literature at the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland). He has written two academic books - his latest monograph, Southern Hyperboles came out with LSU Press in 2020. Choiński's debut pamphlet Gifts Without Wrapping was published by Hedgehog Press in 2019. His poems and translations of poetry were published in journals in Poland, in the UK and in Canada. In 2022, he'll be at Yale University, as a Fulbright Fellow, writing his next book. |
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