poemimage

Where text meets image. Where the visual intersects the literary. Often posting 1st drafts and editing in (almost) real time.

Month: June, 2014

Inner and Outer Worlds Permeate Poetic Pulse and Melody

afternoon in paradise 3afternoon in paradise 4.afternoon in paradise 5

The streetcar stops beneath a railroad overpass

Snow still on the ground.

Melody stirring a pot of homemade soup

In the apartment she shares with her mother

Near the courthouse.

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A scratchy sofa

Something forgettable on TV

afternoon in paradise 6

I pass through her kindness like a boat cut loose.

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How can I prevent

What I don’t know will happen?

afternoon in paradise 13

Her eyelids lower

Contemplating a surreal image,

Her laughter like the northern lights,

Her smile

A Maya Deren film.

afternoon in paradise 9

 Jealous ghosts

Lay in wait on darkened country roads

Rising against immortal young gods

Speed-yearning into the future.

paradise

Does one simple gesture reconfigure a timeline?

Take the second bowl. The cauldron of vocation.

Leave town with her though you hardly know her.

Study poetry or dowsing,

Wash the ghosts away,

Listen to the northern lights sing into her,

Singing blacktopped roads into a charcoal labyrinth.

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Creative Literacy in the 21st Century

visual literacy 3

Sandra Dee & Bobby Darin at the Oscars, 1964, with ice cream and a Camus quote.

visual literacy 1

Sandra Dee & Bobby Darin at the Oscars, 1964.

Insanity

American warplanes spray the jungles of Vietnam with chemicals, 1960s.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
– Albert Camus

camus

Albert Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our time.” Source: Wikipedia.

Bobby Darin performing his hit song ‘Dream Lover’ in 1959.

Bobby Darin singing his antiwar song ‘Simple Song of Freedom’ in 1969.

ice cone
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Marie Noight A’Shunning by John W. Sexton (with S. McCabe)

6m aria

Freckled with sparrows

Thrushes for tresses

7foreground

The hedge-girl turns

The dial of the moon

womb ocean 2

Marie Noight A’Shunning

Through the rushes running

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Call her name

When the night is long

the montagethree faces of

Then she’ll shout

the stars down

warming tomorrowmarie light strawmarie 3

 John W. Sexton’s mind was poured into his body in 1958; since then his life has been dedicated to poetry.

marie 14

How Marie Noight A’Shunning came to be is a transatlantic astral event (Canada, dreamtime, Ireland). I heard this name in my sleep and in my half-sleep wrote it down. I posted on Facebook about being puzzled; who she was, what she represented. When John W. saw her name he felt an immediate response. Translating these feelings into poetry. My images create a parallel narrative exploring Marie’s identity.

tomorrow

14 not 20

foot in a cast

Replacing 20 framed ink drawings with prints for my upcoming book launch & a small exhibition while simultaneously disintegrating thousands of pages and surfaces & putting out the final clear bags on Thursday & rushing to teach art classes Saturday morning/ my mind a blur flipping between channels like an old TV & slipping on a stair-top landing, immediately knowing (and seeing and feeling) the obvious while wrenching back & ribs/ instinctively the body ‘autocorrecting’ a dangerous backwards fall.

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Cell phone/ front pocket dragging my prone body to collect the charger/ beginning this brief journey through paramedics, technicians & doctors, nurses & aides performing occupationally with good cheer & diligence (Merlin serving a favoured mead) & as insistence loudly replaces numbed haze they bring me white pills & your face appears softly like Visions of Johanna, watery tears streaming down my cheekbones/ a young physician equating the emotional to the physical.

book launch single

Sanka instant coffee the next morning at breakfast, almost Hippocratic, like the reflection of a temple with seven new screws holding my reconfigured ankle together.

foot print