Ekphrasis | poemimage

Category: Ekphrasis

50th Anniversary of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show

do this

The

black and white

television

flickers

reconfiguring

now

Flowers blooming

with

signs & symbols

reconfigure

flickering

My father

on the sofa

refolding

the creased and worn

shaking his head

new double

Step forward

sideways & back

physical education class

repeating the Fox Trot

with L

again Jingle Bell Rock

she quivers and laughs

flat feet she offers

we were rocking

no reason

to watch the clock

my friend

fingers aglow

his urgent hand

Introducing The Beatles

I was torn

in steam the flowers were worn

C & L

exhaling

into the frosted black air

cloaking almost touching

one another

oceans of diamonds

rolling overhead

I couldn’t make out every word

the album cradled like an

illuminated manuscript

under his arm

My gloved finger

drawing in white snow

uncovering the dark metal

of a late model sedan

I Want to Hold Your Hand

roll on John

A dinner party ceremony for

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Cellophane flowers

dissolving

in crystal glasses

Comets curving

free fall

a sign

B, D & R asleep already

I walk beneath

into

awakening sparrow song

tiny electric sitars flitter

through branches green & brown

Translucent animals bounding leap

The solstice pulsing in waves

a pushing tide

subsides

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in

to stop my mind from wandering

Aluminum & ink folio

jukebox affixed to the counter

Strawberry Fields Forever

T dressed in black

opening a black umbrella

hitchhiking after dark

Living is easy with eyes closed…

cometo

What a trip to travel

through space & time emotionally and imagistically

enhanced

by these Liverpool musician/storyteller

icons of the cultural landscape

***

Introducing The Beatles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFWXBn2d1d8

***

Jingle Bell Rock (Bobby Helms)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itcMLwMEeMQ

***

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYRSgbDw7xA

***

Strawberry Fields Forever

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nehRB1FTeTo

***

I Want to Hold Your Hand

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipADNlW7yBM

***

Photo credit: CBS photo archives – Comet: Visoki Decani Monastery, Metohia, Yugoslavia, 1330 (approx)

I do not own the copyright to these works have simply reconfigured for non commercial purposes of commentary

***

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Doing the trick by Chris Pannell

There’s a breach

in the line, where the soldiers have fallen back

and my mother has fallen back on her bed too

her face out of sight, she can no longer speak.

This opening might do the trick if anyone could muster

the steps to walk through, but

we’re so exhausted, it would be a mercy

to die here and now, be done with palliative care —

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The Chosen Ones by William Michaelian

If we cannot love everything and everyone,

can we, truly, love anything or anyone?

In choosing whom or what we love (if such choice were possible),

do we not proclaim that our judgment is larger than life itself?

Is not that choice an illusion?

If we love only what we think we love, are we not, then,

defining love and placing on it certain limitations?

Would it not be better to be defined by love,

than to try to define it?

Are we so small in our uncertainty and fear that we must love

only that which pleases us, or which we think reflects well on us,

or which loves us in return? If so, how can we call that love?

It is a grave error we make in thinking that anything exists

outside of love.

Can you, in your deepest thought and contemplation,

say which part of you loves and which does not?

If you say the mind loves, or the heart loves,

or that love is harbored in various glands and organs,

what, then, of the rest of you? Are parts of you worthy

or unworthy of love? Is love necessary to one part,

but not to another?

Is love a condition that changes with history,

time, and weather?

And what of the insane?

Are we love’s orphans, love’s abandoned step-children?

William Michaelian is an American writer, artist, and poet. His newest book is the Tenth Anniversary Authorized Print Edition of his first novel, A Listening Thing. His Author’s Press Series now contains three volumes: The Painting of You, No Time to Cut My Hair, and One Hand Clapping. Two poetry collections, Winter Poems and Another Song I Know, were published in 2007 by Cosmopsis Books. He lives in Salem, Oregon.

http://recently-banned-literature.blogspot.com/

I thought my most recent painting, Royal Song (the first image), might work with the pulsing ebb and flow of William Michaelian’s poem. Love and gold work together on some mysterious level. There is a lot of air (and thought) in this poem and the painting depicts a scroll and throne (in the open air) beneath a sun. The idea of light informing the conscious mind influenced my variations on the original image.

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September 26, 2013

OPEN STUDIO AT THE ARTISTS COLONY by Nancy Kline

VCCA, February 14, 2009

The visual artist in the studio next door is knitting stainless steel and silk. She’s disabused now, she makes prints of clothes unraveling. A dark skein stained. She’s knitting up the sleeve of care.

Electric ukelele down the hall! A white piano plays itself (we all do, here). It has no hands. The trombone-player has composed a piece starring an interstellar Po’ Boy. He slides us along. He sings us a valentine.

I’m writing flash about my mother, while the writer on the other side of this white wall knits her long narrative of the Great Silk Road.

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4 Comments

August 24, 2013

A Visual Poem by Steven McCabe

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August 14, 2013

In the Streets Beneath the Ocean by John W. Sexton

in the streets beneath the ocean

on her coral chair

the fishes whisper secrets

beneath her seaweed hair

she’s got a tumour in her head

that’s a glowing pearl

she’s a strange strange strange

underwater girl

in the streets beneath the ocean

she combs her seaweed hair

the dolphins bring her children

that have drowned down there

and she makes them coats from sailors’ skin

gives them gold from sailors’ teeth

taken from the sunken ships

wrecked upon the reef

I caught her in a dream one time

or maybe she caught me

took me from my sleeping brain

into the deepest sea

gave me seven kisses

and seven cups of wine

promised me promised me

that she’d be mine

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9 Comments

July 16, 2013

Library by Steven McCabe

A skin of tree species

no longer

existing

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July 2, 2013

Soon by Steven McCabe

Soon I will

Have a new muse

That is all

Of my news

6 Comments

June 29, 2013

The World Screened by John Oughton

The world through your window

is screened into rows of tiny cubes

that means we can remake

the world by shifting them

a pure pane of sky shines

from the pine’s arthritic roots

the library is strewn along the walk

which itself winds over

branches, bedrooms. Shadows of things start

elsewhere and cross where they might be cloud

the pedestrian’s two left eyes

regard the sun strolling on her leash

as they move cube by cube over the clear blue lawn

her heart is (not is like) a bird

The World Screened was previously published in Time Slip (Guernica Editions, 2010). John Oughton is a Toronto poet with five books published, and a professor at Centennial College.

I wanted to capture the sense of real/unreal within this poem’s surrealism. The piano motif relates to background music, or a composition, in which the poem seems to move… I juxtaposed pictorial elements playing off the poem’s (in part) bright, Miro-like mood as well as the more subtly expressed romantic, melancholy yearnings.