Ekphrastic art | poemimage

Category: Ekphrastic art

October 22, 2013

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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October 21, 2013

The Sorrow of a Brown Hat by Steven McCabe

Crumpled fading newsprint

As yesterday’s armies march

Into tomorrow

A future we predicted

We accepted sleep standing upright

Sleep never understood;

A chapter of blank pages: my darling, your wrist hanging

Over the bed

Your blood a confusion

Your heartbeat the black window

Swallowing my hands

Fingers forming a circle

Bottom of a fleet casting shadows across the seabed

I toss my hat overboard

from my book Hierarchy of Loss (2007) Ekstasis Editions

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October 4, 2013

Winter by Linda Woolven

Bruises

smudge the countryside

in winter blue and purple.

As shadows steal

the winter white.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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.