Say Never
I never planned
To add
Paul is dead
To the conspiracies
Swimming in my head.
But as they say
Never say never.
poemimage
The visual & the poetic.
Category: Ekphrastic art
April 4, 2016
When Birds Were Fish
One could write poetically concerning When Birds Were Fish.
Or When Birds Were Suns. When Birds Were Moons.
Soaring and skimming from here to there, across times, flying into the rivers of the underworld.
Emerging silently into the forbidding underworld of Jean Cocteau’s 1949 film Orphee, situated within the relic of postwar France: A modern world as silently old order as mythology itself.
Orphee, played by Jean Marais, interrogated by an underworld tribunal.
Stating his occupation as poet.
To write without being a writer.
The Princess of Death, played by Maria Casares, asking him for a pen (to sign her confession).
Her confession of love. He has no pen.
She laughs. She forgot he is not a writer.
The scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_o9l3OqPMk
Film images courtesy The Criterion Collection.
March 24, 2016
A Bridge Out of Limbo
& When you think of who you are,
The deep waters rising about you, within you,
& Within you, who you are, symbols embedded within & upon a book of code,
Like a stamp or seal upon a document, & you swim through the hollow and the false,
Bearing metaphorical code,
& When you think of who you are and what you have delivered, you realize
The brave are still within us,
& Your metaphor is reality, holding fast to your sense of balance, carrying out your mission,
& You never venture from your footing upon this precipice,
& your children walk upon dry land.
U.S. Naval Archives Photo # 80-G-238786: USS San Jacinto steaming with USS Lexington in the Mariana (Islands) area, 13 June 1944.
My father was on active duty aboard the San Jacinto (foreground aircraft carrier) when this photo was taken. I remember him as a young man, remembering also transferred memories… physical and emotional, memories flowing like water. I was thinking about DNA as well as the memory within, and of, water. In the back of my mind I was thinking about Berta Cáceres. The work she did with water. Her radiant identification with Mother Earth, the Mothership, and the water running through Her veins.
March 17, 2016
I Knew It Was Over
I knew it was over
When she came home
From work
And said
There’s a spoon
In the sink.
Images: Photographic still from director Nicholas Rays They Live By Night (1949), starring Farley Granger and Cathy ODonnell and a detail from Piet Mondrian’s (1943) Broadway Boogie Woogie.
February 28, 2016
A Quote by Hermann Hesse & Spirals Rising Above the Street Once Laid Upon a Syrian City
“I have no right to call myself one who knows.
I was one who seeks,
and I still am,
but I no longer seek in the stars or in books;
I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me.
My story isn’t pleasant,
it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories;
it tastes of folly and bewilderment,
of madness and dream,
like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
I digitally reconfigured Syrian street photos (from happier times) for non-commercial artistic purposes, photographed by Vatse: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?s=62af56d2f3036c7b81759a06c26b1f1d&t=993201
One might intuitively connect seemingly disparate elements, only later discovering threads of DNA sound (or something) opening further into a parallel, related world. For example, Hesse & Syria:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Gundert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam_literature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christians
February 22, 2016
How We Listened
Have you forgotten how we listened
to what was not being said.
The sun and the night both shining in Autumn.
Shining upon what is concealed
& beneath the crossroads,
a deeply buried wind
streaming through the empty house.
Dedicated to my (late) brother Larry, whose birthday is 2/22, who cried over his black fish floating belly up, who slipped climbing the crabapple tree & gashed his belly open with a nail. We passed through the cage of black & white TV broadcasting one Friday late into the night and throughout the weekend until a funeral on Monday.
My video poem concerning this event: https://vimeo.com/11304739
I think I found the spiral Xray online a couple of years ago. Of course , neither am I claiming any copyright credit for the photographs of J.F.K.’s funeral. A detail from a still photo of a performer riding a horse in my video poem is also in the mix. I will take some credit for that.
February 22, 2016
Mona Ono / Yoko Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci
sits at the piano
composing
‘Imagine’
February 16, 2016
A Divining Rod of Ancient Silver Divining Twin Streams
A divining rod of ancient silver divining the outlines of the future
A divining rod of ancient silver divining channels between flowers
A divining rod of ancient silver divining the stone wheel of memory
A divining rod of ancient silver divining the wind upon the fields
A divining rod of ancient silver divining the moons beneath the city
A divining rod of ancient silver divining the roots of wisdom fruit
A divining rod of ancient silver divining sea and Self, an ongoing dialogue between sea and Self
A divining rod of ancient silver divining social collapse
A divining rod of ancient silver divining twin streams:
Pottery: the Jomon (縄文) Period (Japan, c. 12,000-300 BCE) and William Blake (1794) England.
Religious calendar art showing Jesus with children and the iconographic image of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevera.
Many years ago I did a printmaking project in an elementary school. One of the students made a print of (what I thought was) a Central or South American religious deity. I was intrigued with the clay pots or possibly drums. Then I realized I was looking at it upside down. How odd such a cartoon, reversed, depicts an altogether different creature. Nothing about the ‘accidental’ image reflected the student’s cultural heritage.
Photographic still from the B movie ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space.’ And the Pietà, Michelangelo’s great work, in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Angelus Novus by Swiss-German artist Paul Klee & the exquisite Donna Summer modelling a gown.
A painting by Giotto and a photograph of the parachuting Russian pilot whose jet was shot down by Turkey. Photographed before being shot, as he floated to earth, by terrorists allied with Turkey.
Digital configuration of Blake’s art + Jomon pottery.
Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 spacesuit & the Shroud of Turin.
Goldfish and residential street in Toronto.
February 12, 2016
Sugar by Sheila Stewart
1.
Dust rises off the hot low veldt. Vast sugarcane estates: the only irrigated
land. Wide lush green fields sprout a million tiny sprinklers. The cane is
ready, burnt to make it easier to cut. Flame sweeps the fields, fierce as a
forest fire. The air black soot, a flurry of ash falls miles away, drifts in
doorways, a line of soot runs across the table in our classroom Monday
morning, mirroring the crack in the roof’s peak.
2.
How I love a dusting of sugar over a slab of chocolate cake, a script of
raspberry sauce.
3.
Give me brown sugar, white sugar, cubes and icing sugar, caster sugar,
sugar daddy, sugar mummy, sugar baby, sugar bear, sugar-beet, sugar
bowl, sugared and sugary, sugar plum fairy, Shake Sugaree.
4.
Long, open cane trucks, chains along the sides, drive past the auto-
wreck’s Jesus is Coming, into the refugee settlement, collect workers
early in the morning, return them dirty, tired at day’s end. The cane cutters
earn a little more, dressed in layers for protection, sooty as chimney
sweeps. Our students tell us, Cane can cut you. Snake can get you in the
cane.
5.
Monthly rations: maize, beans, salt, sometimes dried fish, and a little
sugar.
6.
One more lump of sugar, please.
7.
Simon learned English fast: homeland, refugee, truck. Hot and cold. Love
and hate. Past, present, future. Simon cut cane. He told us of his last trip
on the back of a cane truck. Returning to the settlement one black night,
the truck broke down at the side of the road. People got out, lay down and slept, waiting for another truck. Simon watched a lorry full of oranges
crash into the cane truck, knocking it over onto the sleeping workers,
pinning the dead and injured to the ground. The sugary smell of oranges
but none to eat. The truck carried on, cutting through the night taking the oranges safely to Durban.
Sheila Stewart has two poetry collections, The Shape of a Throat (Signature Editions) and A Hat to Stop a Train (Wolsak and Wynn). She co-edited The Art of Poetic Inquiry (Backalong Books). Sheila’s poetry has been recognized by such awards as the gritLIT Contest, the Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Contest, and the Scarborough Arts Council Windows on Words Award. She teaches in Equity Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and the Writing Centre at New College, University of Toronto. ‘Sugar’ is from The Shape of a Throat.
February 4, 2016
Faux-Beat Anti-War Poem by Luther Blissett
I have seen the greatest minds of my generation riding vacuum cleaners in the sky above Syria. George Washington’s wooden occult teeth clitter clatter in the rubble filled streets. General Sherman’s occult army empties another town on his flaming march to the sea.
Jet-diving vacuum roar sucks up intricate silver jewelry dropped upon/ into the embroidered rug. Loot! Booty! This should be worth something! Dropping beside/ into delicately curved brass dishes of fragrant food flavoured with aromatic spices. A wedding photograph framed within the ancient yew.
Great-grandmother’s sacred water-well dripping twisted rags in Springtime. Pawn shop lights blinking. Pawns on the azure-tiled cafe floor tipped beneath an abandoned chessboard. Dripping ruptured pipes drip, once it was every minute, rusted, caustic water drops staining the almost (e8=Q). Staining the almost.
See the fleet footed family fly beneath gleaming sedan billboards into the shade shadow of a brighter tomorrow. See the family scurry hurry parallel rust-flaked punctured pipes into the caustic, occult ceiling of a brighter tomorrow. A gleaming tomorrow/ flee flee Washington’s wanton wooden teeth.
Swing low sweet chariot with minus reflective surface. Aim from the plastic-wrapped heart in the gleaming plastic bowl in the chilled gleaming refrigerator darkened by a dead bulb.
Luther Blissett is a mythical figure in contemporary European art history. He works on multiple media platforms cross-referencing a multiplicity of artistic disciplines concerning identity, the body, society and the psyche.
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