love | poemimage

Tag: love

October 22, 2013

The Chosen Ones by William Michaelian

If we cannot love everything and everyone,

can we, truly, love anything or anyone?

In choosing whom or what we love (if such choice were possible),

do we not proclaim that our judgment is larger than life itself?

Is not that choice an illusion?

If we love only what we think we love, are we not, then,

defining love and placing on it certain limitations?

Would it not be better to be defined by love,

than to try to define it?

Are we so small in our uncertainty and fear that we must love

only that which pleases us, or which we think reflects well on us,

or which loves us in return? If so, how can we call that love?

It is a grave error we make in thinking that anything exists

outside of love.

Can you, in your deepest thought and contemplation,

say which part of you loves and which does not?

If you say the mind loves, or the heart loves,

or that love is harbored in various glands and organs,

what, then, of the rest of you? Are parts of you worthy

or unworthy of love? Is love necessary to one part,

but not to another?

Is love a condition that changes with history,

time, and weather?

And what of the insane?

Are we love’s orphans, love’s abandoned step-children?

William Michaelian is an American writer, artist, and poet. His newest book is the Tenth Anniversary Authorized Print Edition of his first novel, A Listening Thing. His Author’s Press Series now contains three volumes: The Painting of You, No Time to Cut My Hair, and One Hand Clapping. Two poetry collections, Winter Poems and Another Song I Know, were published in 2007 by Cosmopsis Books. He lives in Salem, Oregon.

http://recently-banned-literature.blogspot.com/

I thought my most recent painting, Royal Song (the first image), might work with the pulsing ebb and flow of William Michaelian’s poem. Love and gold work together on some mysterious level. There is a lot of air (and thought) in this poem and the painting depicts a scroll and throne (in the open air) beneath a sun. The idea of light informing the conscious mind influenced my variations on the original image.

12 Comments

September 26, 2013

OPEN STUDIO AT THE ARTISTS COLONY by Nancy Kline

VCCA, February 14, 2009

The visual artist in the studio next door is knitting stainless steel and silk. She’s disabused now, she makes prints of clothes unraveling. A dark skein stained. She’s knitting up the sleeve of care.

Electric ukelele down the hall! A white piano plays itself (we all do, here). It has no hands. The trombone-player has composed a piece starring an interstellar Po’ Boy. He slides us along. He sings us a valentine.

I’m writing flash about my mother, while the writer on the other side of this white wall knits her long narrative of the Great Silk Road.

Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments

September 5, 2013

If I Ran From You by Karen Shenfeld

Read the rest of this entry »

14 Comments

June 12, 2013

My Eyes So Soft by Hafiz

Read the rest of this entry »

10 Comments

May 25, 2013

Look by Rumi

Look as long as you can
at the friend you love
No matter whether that friend is moving away from you
or coming back toward you.

To the best of my knowledge this version of Rumi’s Look is a translation by Coleman Barks.

7 Comments

April 13, 2013

Angel by Eileen Sheehan

He said, I am old and

everything has a bitter

taint and besides

I have only these oddments

to offer; things broken,

unfinished, unused and I’m not even

sure why it is that I’ve

kept them so long.

But she saw how his body

radiated light and he carried

not just a jumble of wheels,

coils, springs but the very

ones she’d been needing to

mend the faltering

mechanisms of her heart.

And his eyes were pure

as a child’s

and she knew

from that moment on

she was his

entirely

Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Ireland. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Angel was first published in THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (ed John and Hilary Wakeman).

I found this love poem very moving, beautiful and rooted in reality. I was intrigued by deeply felt emotions relating to the word ‘Angel.’ The air and thought around the word Angel called for earth and water, both surface and interior, to flesh out the wishes and realizations being expressed and conceptualized. To create several of these images I remixed a photo of waves crashing onto a beach in California uploaded by user Tewy on Wikipedia Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/deed.en

Fragments…traces… of a mathematical formula by Nikolaos Manolopulos appear ever so faintly, unknowable, perhaps in three images, from my first gestures integrating Wikipedia Commons material with my ink drawing.

6 Comments

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.’

10 Comments