Ekphrasis | poemimage

Category: Ekphrasis

April 8, 2015

Letters From Attica [an excerpt] by Sam Melville (1934 – 1971) & the Frederic Rzewski Composition ‘Coming Together’

sm27

I think the combination of age and the greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time.

18. See?

it’s six months now and i can tell you truthfully few periods in my life have passed so quickly.

19. city

i am in excellent physical and emotional health.

Detail 2f

there are doubtless subtle surprises ahead but i feel secure and ready.

Detail 4f

As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis, so am i dealing with my environment.

fleck

in the indifferent brutality, incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, i can act with clarity and meaning.

strident
i am deliberate–sometimes even calculating–seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others.

15. Taken Aback

i read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

66sm

Sam Melville (Letters From Attica)

Above is how the spelling appears on more than one site.

I narrated this text four years ago or so with professional musicians performing Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together & Attica.

Sounding this text to the music was one of the most emotional things I’ve experienced: hypnotic, exhausting and exhilarating.

Frederic Rzewski selected this body of text for his composition.

A performance featuring narration by stage actor Steve Ben Israel with Frederic Rzewski on piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSuuwJFw4wU The video opens in a new window so you can follow the text here if you wish.

prison 2

Credits and information about this recording: http://incessantnoise.blogspot.ca/2009/08/frederic-rzewski-coming-together.html

19 Comments

October 22, 2014

Rays of an Ancient Light Driving You Home

birdlandia

Did you possibly imagine (you couldn’t have)

On that youthful, sun-dappled afternoon,

The rays of an ancient light caressing your skin & inspiration, when you were

A skipping stone striking at the perfect angles & gaining your balance,

Amusedly & perfectly crossing a warm stream at the edge of town,

The water fresh and the fences down,

ochre

Driving home after closing time…

The years marking your skin in ways the Great Depression & the

Enemy marked your psyche, past an abandoned brewery,

Seeing the quiet streets coming up fast like a flood, silent as a submarine,

Balancing on wet stones, laughing as you splashed & driving home

After closing time, to a lonely house, impervious to depth charges,

Past the dislodged bricks of the abandoned brewery,

Imagining that sun-splashed afternoon & shallow, sparkling water,

truly

Your children crossing streams within darkened rooms,

Finding their balance, in ways the enemy

faintly

Marked your psyche & warm afternoons caressed your inspiration,

An ancient star illuminating quiet streets, starlight splashing,

Streaming into and beyond abandoned spaces,

Rays of an ancient light driving you home.

birdlandia

18 Comments

September 8, 2014

I Know The Way You Can Get by Hafiz

coffee face on lid

I know the way you can get

When you have not had a drink of Love:

Evidence B coffee stain 1

Your face hardens,

Your sweet muscles cramp.

Children become concerned

About a strange look that appears in your eyes

Which even begins to worry your own mirror

And nose.

orig

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness

And call an important conference in a tall tree.

They decide which secret code to chant

To help your mind and soul.

touch of blue coffee overlaid on black and white

Even angels fear that brand of madness

That arrays itself against the world

And throws sharp stones and spears into

The innocent

And into one’s self.

duotone deluxe two types of ecstacy

O I know the way you can get

If you have not been drinking Love:

coffee face on lid

You might rip apart

Every sentence your friends and teachers say,

Looking for hidden clauses.

coffee mountain

You might weigh every word on a scale

Like a dead fish.

coffeeism

You might pull out a ruler to measure

From every angle in your darkness

The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once

Trusted.

I know the way you can get

If you have not had a drink from Love’s

Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of

The vital need

To keep remembering God,

So you will come to know and see Him

As being so Playful

And Wanting,

Just Wanting to help.

blimp and lid in the desert morphed

That is why Hafiz says:

Bring your cup near me.

For all I care about

Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

cinematic shadow the tomorrow

All a Sane man can ever care about

Is giving Love!

coffee face on lid

From: I Heard God Laughing – Renderings of Hafiz

Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

28 Comments

August 10, 2014

1981 (The Phantom of Liberation)

phantom of

In 1981

The Phantom of Liberation

Paid me a visit

81 heads

Commanding

A sketch

twin egg

I obliged

Thinking that was all

That was all

There was to it

burn blur copy

Hello and goodbye

To the Phantom of Liberation

centre eye

But the Phantom

Must have said

Eat my body

blue monuments

I complied

Thinking that was all

That was all

There was to it

blue conte

Hello and goodbye

To the Phantom of Liberation

dream section

They found a foreign body

In my heart

And said it’s spread

To your brain

And your wings

new ore

I said I don’t have

Any wings

face of the phantom

They said I was covered with wings

Beating ferociously

Refusing to stop

And bothering the neighbours

geo2

I asked if I should move

To a cemetery

something

They wanted to know

If I was trying to escape

Liberation

Or the conditions that require

Liberation

intersection

I listened to their question

Thinking that was all

That was all

There was to it.

the conditions

14 Comments

May 24, 2014

Young Woman With a Goldfish (on Dylan’s 73rd Birthday)

The transistor radio beneath my pillow

Like a Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan making something new

ancient again.

photp from 1901

A Study, No.1

1901

Rudolph Eickemeyer (American, 1862-1932)

Medium: Gelatin silver print

Accession Number: 1972.644.2

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Toronto street, March, 2014

all was still

3 Comments

May 6, 2014

Tasting the Light by Ellen S. Jaffe

I taste the light

coming through the window.

(from “Odysseus and Circe,” Anne Simpson)

yyy

Pouring, like you,

into my heart,

washing over my skin

falling

through glass

lightly

flowing waves and circling particles

currents of surprise, delight.

I am water, and I am a gull, flying …

mona x

a gulf wide and deep as Mexico

replenishing after spills and spoils

mona v

You fish me, for stars

for pearls

lost boys and missing girls

fallen into the hole of our fears

O is an open mouth,

mmmmnmmmn

one closed eye,

and one open

mona s

a black hole where light cannot flow

out

mona j

now light from the window of opportunity

swallows us whole

and we shine

mona round

shine.

amber

Ellen S. Jaffe’s most recent book of poetry, Skinny-Dipping with the Muse (Guernica Editions, 2014) has recently been launched. Tasting the Light is a new poem, not yet published. Ellen lives in Hamilton, writes poetry and prose, and teaches writing in schools and community centres.

swirls

13 Comments

April 19, 2014

Pilots Nobody Believes (in homage to Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Thinning my studio

I discover your unlined face looking into the future,

sketched with charcoal on lightweight paper.

partial face

My memory of you

totemic

a weak pulse

sealed away like a forgotten dimension.

the half the half

I drop clear, blue, plastic bags to the sidewalk

i copy

like fallen

darkly

sections of sky,

fadeout 1 copy

reported by pilots

nobody believes.

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

A (forgotten) charcoal drawing digitally contemplated.

8 Comments

March 31, 2014

Crown Island by Catherine Graham

crown island 1
I am surrounded by Crown Island,

a weave of rock and sand; the waves

lap against me, sizzling white strings.

crown island aa Read the rest of this entry »

24 Comments

March 14, 2014

Brume by Cristina Castello (translation Pierre L’Abbe)

and always the calling twoo

The planet is a little outraged girl

With its days without dolls and its eyes without pupils

Her bundle awaits on a strange train platform

Next to millions of sadnesses without reply

A train that will carry to the tomb her gloveless heart

depth organn and and french tunnel

A plucked nib on my chest, this is the world

Stone hole, empty gap

All the chalices converge on my blood

I am a fountain positioned to offer

But the wound passes through the mouth of the poem

Abandonment resists the sky

And rattles the soul of the earth.

Or perhaps, is God dead?

All abandoned

Abandoned

and textured double and old gold

Why do they, my eyes, look at them inside?

And why do they inside these beings look at my eyes?

No one but the Absolute answers.

Crystal and steel I am, but everyone sees the sword

And no one could imagine my crystals in shards

and alabaster

I will resist in an armour of poetry

I will resist swinging from the murmur of the stars

I will resist perched on the peek of a blade of grass

Attached to this moon of snow sailing through the mists

Who stare at me from the branch of the tree, that they cradle.

I can still open my hands to Those about me

village woman xx

I will not die without seeing that in the bundle Christ sings

I will not die before the compass foretells an epiphany.

and loyoro and overlap

Cristina Castello is an Argentinian poet and journalist now living in France. Her work is committed to peace and beauty against all social injustices. Her poems are always a commitment to the dignity of life, beauty and freedom. They have been translated into several languages. Her books include, Soif, (L’Harmattan 2004); Orage, (Bod 2009),Ombre (Trames 2010) and “Le chant des sirènes” / “El canto de las sirenas” (Chemins de plume, 2012).

and where you are

Pierre L’Abbe is a Toronto translator, publisher, ebook designer and author of both poetry and short story collections.

and full scale

20 Comments

February 13, 2014

Spherical

book of mirrors

Curving a slow corner

twin eyes

You pass through

your own

history

papery

Your mirror image

original spiral ink

Picking up speed

flattoo

Speaking in code

ghost crest

Spirit animals

beneath the northern lights

drag what has fallen

meter bird spirits

Absorbed

and flung

simultaneously

A spherical puzzle

delivered you

Does the wind agree

new bird meter

***

I was reflecting on personal things with this post. Changes, new directions, letting the past go, that sort of thing. There was no poem to begin with simply ideas & words I’ve been thinking about.

***

My attraction to twinning these two images was in discovering similar design motifs. A centre circular repetition. The lines on the sides of the meter resembling folded wings. The art deco, industrial perfect for a prison design of the meter contrasted with the wild bird hemmed in by a border & religious orthodoxy.

Although I suspect the early illuminators of manuscripts had druidic sensibilities and conveyed within their images the beauty of pagan relationships with the earth I can’t find anything similar to say about the parking meter. Although it does have a certain Dracula’s Castle type charm.

The parking meter imposed order upon free space. We might even say ‘wild’ spaces occurring in a common setting if we want to draw an analogy with pagan spirituality being ‘tamed.’

***

The first parking meter in the United States was installed in 1935

(during the Great Depression & dust storms)

in Oklahoma City.

***

The Book of Dimma is an 8th century Irish illuminated manuscript now

housed in Trinity College, Dublin

featuring the symbol of an eagle

representing

John the Evangelist.

***

10 Comments

Category: Ekphrasis