poemimage

The visual & the poetic.

Tag: blue period

GIF Experiments: 29 (Goodbye, a painting)

I said ‘goodbye’ to a painting this week. Sprayed it with four sweeps of archival varnish half an hour between on a warmish day and packaged it the next. I wanted to write the title on the back but couldn’t find it. So I just started calling the painting ‘Goodbye.’

The canvases with blues I’ve done the last couple years psyched me for using blues on the 5′ X 33′ roll (scroll) of Italian paper I began in late April. That work is now 70% complete. There is no chance of forgetting the title because I rework it often. One word is Druidica.

As for Photoshop 5 and troubles with ‘scratch discs’ – if I save a simple GIF to Web & Devices at the first warning the program won’t shut down on me. But no large files and nothing tricky! So it goes.

The World Screened by John Oughton

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The world through your window

is screened into rows of tiny cubes 

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that means we can remake

the world by shifting them

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a pure pane of sky shines

from the pine’s arthritic roots

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the library is strewn along the walk

which itself winds over

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branches, bedrooms. Shadows of things start

elsewhere and cross where they might be cloud

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the pedestrian’s two left eyes

regard the sun strolling on her leash

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as they move cube by cube over the clear blue lawn

her heart is (not is like) a bird

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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.

rrrrrI 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.