poemimage

Lough Ree by Colin Carberry

A trout flares at dusk,
silver scales
in the heron’s ears.

Colin Carberry is an Irish-Canadian poet and translator and the director of the Linares International Literary Festival (Mexico).

I am struck, reading this haiku, by the heron hearing silver scales. I imagine sunset splashing chaotically on thin, reflective surfaces and the heron’s acute sensors turning and tuning. I remember summers (it seems long ago) driving cross-country, through the night, listening to the radio. Car radios were manually operated. With your free hand you would find the spot where there was no static, bringing in the station clearly. Adjusting the dial frequently to receive the perfect reception. Ambient static would slowly creep back in and you would fine tune again listening carefully. Though, unlike the heron, your aim was enjoyment not survival. Surely our ancestors knew the life and sounds of water, within and without, like a heron. The poet, crafting this poem, brings us to the edge of our deepest memories.

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March 14, 2013

Paul Klee by Paul Eluard – translated by Nancy Kline

On the death-dealing slope, the traveler makes use

Of the favor of day, the slippery frost, no small stones,

And eyes blue with love he discovers his season

Beringed on all fingers with stars.

On the beach the sea has relinquished its ears

And the sand digs the spot for a beautiful crime.

Torture is harder for hangmen than victims

Bullets are tears and daggers are signs.

Capital of Pain, Black Widow Press, 2006

translated by Mary Ann Caws, Patricia Terry, Nancy Kline

originally published 1926.

I was apprehensive about applying my images to a poem about Paul Klee. Klee is one of my favourite artists for many reasons. He used line masterfully. His sense of colour and texture was both magical and visceral. He was intellectual as well as full of child-like wonder. He experimented imaginatively while rigorously creating an expanding body of work. This poem by Eluard is like a prism capturing various realities & dimensions one might encounter in Klee’s art. I wanted to depict the sensibility & feel of the poem but I wasn’t sure how I felt about making images about somebody who made images. And I didn’t want to copy Klee in any sort of obvious manner. I shared this concern with Nancy Kline, the translator of this poem & many of the poems in Capital of Pain. Nancy suggested that one visual artist interpreting another might be an worthwhile experience yielding interesting results. And with this encouragement in mind I worked on composing images that hopefully come near the boundaries of ‘Klee-ism.’

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March 10, 2013

The Pageant by Penn Kemp

On the Moon after Solstice
you dream of hiking contours
to cathedral carol service.

Singing in the cavern of nave,
omphalos to the world, you curve
on rounded meridian of joy to outer
space, linking with others of like mind.

You race to catch the authors
to know the next act. Old tales
are told and tell themselves new.

You connect fragments, dropping
your lines, dropping me a line
in the cheer of retrieval.

Rings of companions collaborate,
not wanting to recapitulate
events of the day merely or
invent night’s happenstance.

Something’s given, something
larger than the single self.
Presently you’ll know the story
as it is happening to you.

Singly or together our dreams
direct us, as if night-given leads
to true script. What is real
agitates dream into action.

Penn Kemp is London, Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate.

In 2012, Penn Kemp and I published the chapbook Dream Sequins with Lyricalmyrical Press in Toronto. The title refers to Penn’s poetry manuscript. My contribution consisted of 18 ink drawings. I sent Penn a number of scans which I thought related or tangentially connected to her words and she made the final selection. Drawing can be an automatic process, as spontaneous as dreaming, with line unfolding connections not crafted by the conscious mind. My body of drawings 2009 – 2011 expressed a number of intertwined themes & at a certain point Penn and I connected. We were independently working in close enough proximity to our ‘source’ materials that text & image, both floating on a warm parchment paper, felt synonymous. This post was inspired by the idea of using Penn’s words as a design element in constructing digital images while referencing one poem & drawing from the chapbook.

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March 3, 2013

K.C. by Steven McCabe

Seeing the unseen between my eyes and outer space

I was a boy painting my sparkling new bicycle

With house paint

Squinting in the shade of a sunflower

Wiping soil and lumps of melted star off the brush

Aiming for that white-as-a-skeleton-invisible-sky-hourglass

Concept of two gods becoming one

Me and my bicycle at the intersection –

Red lights fading my pupils dilated

from Jawbone – Ekstasis Editions – 2005

When I was a boy in Kansas City, one summer, I studied the sky. It was a dull white far off in the distance, and yet up close ‘it’ was invisible. So it dawned on me to paint my new bicycle white; up close the bicycle would be invisible, at a distance everything would seem normal. My mother was more than happy to keep me busy and found the paint and a couple of large brushes. I threw myself into the task, painting the seat, the chain, the handlebars…everything! Sadly the next day the paint flaked off and my experiment failed. Several decades later I was reading a creation myth about two gods battling in the sky. One god lost a foot to a sharp knife and black ‘blood’ (night of course) filled the sky. I remembered painting the bicycle, and decided to harmonize both ‘sky’ narratives, intertwining them in a poem. My editor reviewed my work and, being a minimalist, took out her pen; underlining, crossing out, and circling lines. In the end I had a nine line poem.

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February 26, 2013

constance by Joanne Arnott

when i was pregnant, she told me

reaching back more than twenty years

for the memory

i put sunflower seeds on my belly

i used to read aloud to my son

so he could hear our bones

i love our voices, she said

chickadee & sparrow flutter down

lured by the seeds and undisturbed

by our voices

i put your hand on my belly

i invite you to read this aloud

i want to listen to our bones

& to love our voices, for a little while

Joanne Arnott is a Metis poet living on Canada’s west coast.

10 Comments

February 14, 2013

No Hard Feelings by Paul Eluard – translated by Nancy Kline

dddd-s

Tears in the eyes, the sorrows of the sorrowful,

Dull sorrows, dreary tears.

He asks for nothing, he isn’t unfeeling,

He’s sad in prison and sad if he’s free.

del-love-d-s

The weather is sad, the night so black

You wouldn’t put a blindman out. The strong

Are sitting, the weak hold power

And the king stands near the seated queen.

haze2
Smiles and sighs, insults grow rotten

In the mouths of mutes and the eyes of cowards.

Think nothing of it: this burns, that blazes!

Your hands fit in your pockets and against your brow.

transforming

A shadow…

All the bad luck in the world

And my love above it

Like a naked beast.

warmed temple

Capital of Pain, Black Widow Press, 2006

translated by Mary Ann Caws, Patricia Terry, Nancy Kline

originally published 1926.

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February 5, 2013

[The image of man] by Paul Eluard – translated by Mary Ann Caws

The image of man, not now underground, is resplendent. Plains

of lead seem to assure him that it will no longer be reversed,

but this is only to plunge it again into this great sadness which

gives it an outline. The former strength, yes, the former strength

used to suffice unto itself. Any succour is useless, it will perish by

extinction, a death gentle and calm.

She enters the dense forest, whose silent solitude hurls the soul

into a sea whose waves are lamps and mirrors. The lovely star of

white leaves that, on a more distant level, seems the queen of the

colors, contrasts with the stuff of gazes, leaning on the trunks of

the incalculable incompetence, of harmonious plants.

eduard b

Not now underground, the image of man wields five raging

sabres. It has already unearthed the hovel housing the black reign

of the enthusiasts of begging, lowliness, and prostitution. On the

largest ship displacing the sea, the image of man sets out and

recounts to the sailors returning from shipwrecks a story about

brigands.: “When he was five, his mother gave him a treasure.

What to do with it? Except calm her down. She crushed with her

hellish arms the glass container where the poor marvels of man are

sleeping. The marvels followed her. The poet’s carnation sacrificed

the skies for a blonde mane of hair, the chameleon lingered in

a clearing to construct there a tiny palace of strawberries and

spiders, the Egyptian pyramids made the passerby laugh, because

they didn’t know that the rains slake the earth’s thirst. Finally, the

orange butterfly shook its seeds over the eyelid of the children

who thought they felt the sandman going by.”

The image of man dreams, but nothing more is hanging on

his dreams than the unparalleled night. Then, to recall the sailors

to some semblance of reason, someone who had seemed drunk

slowly uttered this sentence:

“Good and evil have their origin in a few errors carried out

to excess.”

Capital of Pain, Black Widow Press, 2006

translated by Mary Ann Caws, Patricia Terry, Nancy Kline

originally published 1926.

9 Comments

January 24, 2013

WATER CHILDREN by Ellen S. Jaffe

Buddhist women may sometimes have special prayers and shrines for babies

who are miscarried or aborted, whom they call “water children.”

Water child, I bring you

chrysanthemums, ripe pears,

coloured ribbons to tie up my prayers.

You live, still, floating in some sunless sea

out of reach out of reach.

I call you by name, but you

are too far away

and you have not yet learned

how to hear.

II.

I am the water child.

I am a lump of sugar dissolved in a bowl of green tea,

next to these white chrysanthemums and red ribbons.

I am a small pool, with one goldfish swimming in circles.

I am a humming-bird’s tongue, double-dipped in nectar.

Do not be sad.

I am not angry at you.

See, I will kiss you there, there,

nectar-wet kisses so another child

can begin.

My kiss is a tiny moth,

a mayfly that lives only one day.

Someday, you will forget me

but not yet, not now.

I need you to water the white chrysanthemums.

I need the red ribbon connecting us, heart to heart

as it did once,

while I lay sleeping underwater

inside your skin.

III.

I will sing you a lullaby,

braid the prayer-ribbons, red and green,

around this pear.

You could be the child inside the peach-pit

who accomplishes great deeds,

kills the raging monsters causing havoc

in the kingdom of my dreams.

Timimoto, Tom Thumb, Thumbelina

my bushel of tears my water child.

Ellen S. Jaffe writes poetry & fiction and teaches writing, and makes her home in Hamilton, Ontario.

8 Comments

January 15, 2013

Down The Pipe by Angye Gaona

I follow the way of the sternum,
I search for the origin of thirst,

I go to the bottom of a pipe of silver walls,
solid due to time,

moving when the flood,
when childhood, was freezing.

I collect the rootlets of thought.
I carry them on my eroded back
next to the wild oblivion falling from me.

spark 2

They look out
from small caves,

newly

the signs of pain,
and fast elude the looks
and hide again in the skin of the pipe.

Inscribed on the walls
are the undecipherable coordinates
of the prehistoric ray
that formed my face.

It is a time of depths,
a time without syllable,

when I am only a sound
in transit to fatigue.

I search for a spring
to bathe the question affixed on my history.

I search for a new-born life
and I find thirst.

I follow the way of the sternum.

Translated by Nicolás Suescún

Angye Gaona is a Colombian surrealist poet facing politically inspired legal difficulties.

3 Comments

January 8, 2013

“How goes the night, boy?…” by Michael Hartnett

10a

The night before Patricia’s funeral in 1951
I stayed up late talking to my father.

16a

How goes the night, boy?
The moon is down:
Dark is the town
In this nightfall.

How goes the night, boy?
Soon is her funeral
Her small white burial.

She was my three-years child,
Her honey hair, her eyes
Small ovals of thrush-eggs.

How goes the night, boy?
It is late: lace
At the window
Blows back in the wind.

How goes the night, boy?
Oh, my poor white fawn!
How goes the night, boy?
It is dawn.

Michael Hartnett (1941-1999) is an award winning poet from County Limerick, Ireland. Poem courtesy of Niall Hartnett.

11a

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