poemimage

The visual & the poetic.

Category: Poetic & Visual Narrative

GIF Experiments: 2 (Five Works)

 

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I appreciate the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Originals Program support for this project.

 

GIF Experiments: 1 (Four early works)

 

 The Canada Council For the Arts ‘Digital Originals’ grant program has funded my project creating GIFS using text from my recent book Meme-Noir.

 

 

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You Told Me You’d Be Home By Ten

Original

It Predicted Everything

mystery word

The poem about Minoa

wasn’t about Minoa only.

Another word.

A mystery word.

Not mother of Minoa,

 medicines of Minoa

or

magic of Minoa.

No.

Although

any of these

seem valid,

perfectly fine.

Yes.

I’ll stash them someplace.

For the event, in the event, of requiring

a possible, future

mystery word.

Prologue by Luciano Iacobelli

To create angels

Is to slice pie and name wedges:

difficult angles of light preserved in heart’s jelly

teenaged crushes trapped diagonally

undirected love felt in the presence of music

infatuation without object

movement in the skull

turtles waking in the mind’s mud

grape cluster the past becomes if artfully remembered

not images

but the script under them

negative space written in spelling errors

negligence that amends the soul

a family of perspectives driving a cumulative death

into the oncoming traffic

whole note in a black triangle on a blue background

disappearances denting the air

weather not noticed by the self absorbed

ignited visions

kissed ashes

barrel in the cellar

parallel fermentation of grape juice and darkness

the strong red taste of every humanizing event

stolen hour at the church dance

when a hard father’s daughter meets the one

who steals her from home

mines and quarries dug with the eyes

dream’s mailman

slipping letters through the slot

the white surrounding this

word

Luciano Iacobelli is a Toronto poet, publisher and editor. From 2007 to 2019 he was involved with Quattro books as both publisher and editor. He still runs a micropress entitled Lyricalmyrical press, specializing in hand made poetry chapbooks. As an author, he has published 6 full length books of poetry, his most recent book DOLOR MIDNIGHT was published in 2018 and deals with the subject of gambling. His next book, NOCTOGRAMS is due to be published in the fall of 2020 and deals with the subject of night and transformation.

Prologue begins THE ANGEL NOTEBOOK (Seraphim Editions, 2007)

‘Miro and Klee Influence a Painting’ by Tom Gannon Hamilton

Yes and the form once liberated from the laws of physics

and the conventions of decor can create its own ungrounded, untethered place

in the viewer’s imagination…

stimulating synaptic firing and creating new neuropathways

with much the same vitality as lyrical music and dance.

The discovery of, as well as through, Klee and Miro

thus frees the apprehending subject from the representational,

its associative shackles on the one hand, while on the other,

offering refuge

from the psychological desolation many people suffer

when confronted by pure abstraction.

My mother, forever painting under great tutelage:

Arthur Lismer, Kryunsic, Toppham-Brown,

introduced me to both Klee and Miro

before my soul-crushing experience of grade school.

I found as well in Calder’s mobiles, a similar approach to the form,

at once animated and authentic.

I like in your work, the agreement between image delineation and colour choices.

I too am drawn to the language of blue, an entire lexicon unto itself.

Its relationship to white and near-whites — eggshell, plaster, bone

in juxtaposition with material expressions of light such as mustard and yellow ochre,

generate a synergy of comfort for the viewer so the eye feels at home and lingers,

as one might on a desert retreat.

Founder/Curator/Host of the Toronto Urban Folk Art Salon, TG Hamilton has been published in numerous Canadian and international lit.reviews/anthologies. His poem suite El Marillo won 1st prize in the 2018 Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Contest; his book Panoptic (Aeolus House 2018) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Gerald Lampert Award; The Mezzo Soprano Dines Alone was selected for the distinguished John B. Lee Signature Series (Hidden BrookPress 2020). Dr. Hamilton’s MA Thesis (Inside the Words 1984) and PhD dissertation (A Poetics of Possibility, 2001) reflect his lifelong passion for poetry.

Painting by Steven McCabe, done the other day. Water-soluble graphite pencil & acrylic paint + watercolour paint in an 8.5″ X 11″ sketchbook. The Naples Yellow turned ochre-ish blending with graphite.

 

 

In the Temple of the Cauldron of the Garden of the Sun

I did a new painting. With acrylic paint and water-soluble graphite. The size is 30″ X 30″. The day after it was finished I made three changes.

Working the woman’s body it became a tree body with a bird. To break up the vertical line of the cartouche I added a bird (looks like a blue jay) entering from the left. To delineate the ‘leaf-flower’ zapping the tadpole-comet-sperm sphere with its tongue I gave it a serpent’s eye, added a white line to the tongue and reworked the sphere.

A friend of mine from Romania refers to the accordion book above as a ‘cartouche.’ I feel like an archeologist discussing the cartouche in my painting. This cartouche contains a number of diagonals that lead the eye to her arm. The white of the cartouche jumps from her arm to the white of her face.

These photos are not professional quality but they do show decisions about content and composition.

In ‘real life’ the painting is not quite as turquoise but it’s also more vibrant with texture and depth. It shines brilliantly.

I will return to a regular posting schedule on this blog soon. My plan is to create linocut prints and small paintings on paper to go with poetry. My computer is slow now, older, and not syncing well with WordPress. I will put Photoshop files on a thumb drive to increase computing power.

 

Wind

 

 

When the Situation Hits Reverse

When the situation hits reverse
When you sleep and the situation speaks in tongues
When you don’t have a seatbelt and you don’t have a car

Going backwards off a cliff is not such a bad plan.
You might start dancing and you might change hats
You might introduce yourself as somebody new


But you don’t have a car and you don’t want to steal
So you rise from the dead just to try it out.
And you’re not such a dunce – as you feel your way –
And you spin even more – and feel even more new.

I wrote this in a couple of minutes to the tune of Fates Right Hand by Rodney Crowell – sort of a country rap song from years ago. I always like personal transformation stories. Not that Fate’s Right Hand is a personal transformation story. But I guess the juxtaposition of these images signifies such a possibility.