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The visual & the poetic.
Category: Poetry
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
July 2, 2013
Soon by Steven McCabe
Soon I will
Have a new muse
That is all
Of my news
© Steven McCabe 2013 — For some reason writing this little poem has given me a new approach as I develop material for new manuscript.
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.
June 2, 2013
Stop Being So Religious by Hafiz
What
Do sad people have in
Common?
It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past
And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.
What is the beginning of
Happiness?
It is to stop being
So religious
Like
That.
Translation by Daniel Ladinsky
The animal figure was originally a shadow puppet created last year by a Grade 8 student in a small Ontario town. I delivered a poetry and shadow puppetry workshop & we created a quite striking multi media production. I decided to experiment with a photo taken during the workshop. Simultaneously I discovered this Hafiz poem which follows the previous post by Rumi very elegantly.
May 19, 2013
Beulah Hill: Slideshow. by Michael Gallagher
Crescent Moon hangs loose from sparkling Venus,
Blinking satellite hobbles through cobalt sky,
City silhouettes haunt low horizon,
On a garden bench, frozen crystals
Reflect the hidden stars,
Robin song greets nascent dawn,
Chimney crow steals dregs
Of last night’s heat.
Sudden gust stirs the stillness,
Threads the willows dangling tresses,
Scrapes the bones of a dying oak
And drives snow-clouds over
Croydon Town.
Mike Gallagher’s collection ‘Stick on Stone’ is published by Revival Press. His poetry has been published worldwide and translated into Croatian, Japanese, Dutch, German and Chinese.
Before deciding to address Beulah Hill: Slideshow. I had been creating images of an eBook Reader in the future, discovered as temperatures shifted, revealing a poem covered with soil and frost & still mysteriously visible. I decided to adapt those visuals and, befitting the poem, layer earth-tones with space images from the NASA Goddard Photo and Video files @ Wikipedia Commons.
May 3, 2013
O Christ Cedar by Susan McCaslin
You among emerald drapery
from your wind-
stormed outpost
plank and plane
vertical-horizontal world pivot
sprung from coastal seed
humming core
flaking bark
woodpecker’s grail
growing a wilder carpentry
taller masonry
more commodious poem
Be in us the world’s resinous heart
hung in a spackled sky—
forest green
hoist and balance
equipoise and reach
sylvan singer song
Susan McCaslin, author of Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011), initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project in November of 2013, a union of the arts and activism to save an ancient rainforest in Langley, British Columbia. http://www.susanmccaslin.ca
Artist Stasja Voluti generously allowed me to reconfigure and manipulate her photographs of cedar trees and ‘things cedar’ including crows visiting cedars. To learn more about her work visit: http://talonbooks.com/meta-talon/surrealism-in-text-and-image-a-conversation
Nest and Three Eggs of Cardinal in Cedar Tree photographed by W. L. McAtee in 1905 as part of the series Birds of the Vicinity of the University of Indiana.
April 21, 2013
Of by Steven McCabe
As if the drip of machinery oil
And of knowledge of musculature
Were enough
In the search of room after room
Coinciding with the rediscovery of sculpture
Coinciding with the sculpture of rediscovery.
Originally published in my collection Jawbone (Ekstasis Editions, 2005)
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