Picasso, Caravaggio, Anderson, Colville Thursday, Sep 4 2008

The more ekphrastic poetry I read in books and journals, the more I’m convinced that it would be easy to compile several collections of poems inspired by single categories of images. For example, it would be easy to compile a collection of poems inspired by landscape paintings, or portraits, or religious iconography. It would be easy to compile a collection of poems inspired solely by the artworks of Picasso.

So, too, would it be easy to compile a collection of ekphrastic poems inspired by equine art. This week I’m reading a new anthology of poetry entitled Cadence of Hooves : A Celebration of Horses, edited by Suzan Jantz. Scattered throughout the 487 pages in this voluminous paperback are seven conventional ekphrastic poems (inspired by individual works of stationary art). Also included are three poems responding to ordinary photographs.

And what’s on the cover of the book? What we might expect : a lovely painting of three horses by artist Valerie Mejer.

The ekphrastic poems in this anthology are:

“A Painting at the Met” by Danielle Georges (artwork not identified)
“Neon Horses” by Dorianne Laux (Martin Anderson’s neon horses)
“Horses of San Marco Venice, 1989″ by Deborah Fleming (bronze statues)
“The Rope” by Alice Friman (Picasso’s BOY LEADING A HORSE)
“Conversion of Saint Paul” by Rebecca Dunham (Caravaggio)
“Even With No Hand To Hold It” by Margo Berdeshevsky (Picasso’s CABALLO CORNEADO)
“The Eyes of a Dark Horse” by Laurelyn Whitt (Alex Colville’s painting HORSE AND TRAIN)

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Joseph Cornell Monday, May 19 2008

I’ve been reading two books about the assemblage artist Joseph Cornell: Jonathan Safran Foer’s A Convergence of Birds, an anthology of poetry and fiction inspired by Cornell’s series of bird-related boxes; and Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy, a collection of sixty short pieces (poetic prose) which encapsulate many different aspects of Cornell’s life and work.

Both books are labors of love, homages to a talented but reclusive man who, like Emily Dickinson, created astonishing, original art from within the restricted circumference of his life. And both books are beautifully made, incorporating color reproductions of several of Cornell’s boxes.

The two poems which have provided models for my own poem about Cornell are from the Foer anthology: “Nine Boxes” by Siri Hustvedt and “Song” by Robert Pinsky. “Nine Boxes” is a poem of nine parts, each with ten lines, and each describing a different box. “Song” is a three-stanza rimas-dissolutas (abcde, abcde, abcde) inspired by “the parrot / Art, mortal in its cornered sphere.”

After reading these two books, I’m convinced that many more poems about Cornell could be written. One poem per box. Let’s all get going. I’ve already started my poem, entitled “Ballerina To Joseph Cornell.” The first line is “Seven encores last night…”

(A fine essay by Debra Allbery which discusses how Emily Dickinson influenced Joseph Cornell, and how Joseph Cornell influenced Charles Simic, can be found HERE. And poet Alan Catlin considers Cornell in his collection Self-Portrait as the Artist Afraid of His Self-Portrait.)

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Alan Catlin Saturday, Apr 5 2008

Today’s post comments upon the newest chapbook by a local poet, Alan Catlin.
I have Alan’s consent to post this commentary.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE ARTIST AFRAID OF HIS SELF-PORTRAIT
(March Street Press, 2008)

Alan Catlin of Schenectady, NY, has been writing poetry for more than thirty years, steadily publishing his poetry and fiction at a local level as well as in nationally-circulating journals such as The Bitter Oleander, and earning some Pushcart Prize nominations along the way.

I think that his most recent release, the poetry chapbook SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE ARTIST AFRAID OF HIS SELF-PORTRAIT, certainly deserves some kind of prize. While reading this collection’s fifty poems, I was reminded of the book SIXTY POEMS (2007) by our current Poet Laureate, Charles Simic. The poems in Catlin’s chapbook–like some of Simic’s–are brief and surreal, reeled out from a hallucinatory mind detached from any strong emotion: cinematic rather than lyrical or narrative. And as with some of Simic’s poems–but much more frequently in Catlin’s–the prevailing mood is disquietude, a post-traumatic displacement from the shocks of war, violence, or psychic disintegration.

Almost all of the poems in Catlin’s chapbook are assigned titles that begin with “Self-Portrait,” suggesting that the poems are ekphrastic or, at the least, modeled after that mode of painting, revealing some aspect of either the outward appearance or inner state of the artist-poet. And yes, many of Catlin’s poems are direct or indirect responses to works of art by real artists (Chagall, Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Stan Rice, etc.) However, the personal pronoun “I” appears in only two poems (and therein merely within reported dialogue).

In these poems, then, an integrated, fully-developed projection of self is missing. Catlin replaces that self with thickly-textured conjurings of numerous different characters, historical episodes, and cultural icons: phantoms which might be totemic for both the poet’s personal identity as well as for his situation as a citizen of the troubled 21st century. Catlin’s subjects are strange bedfellows indeed: Francis Bacon, Hamlet, Mae West, and even some Hell’s Angels taking Christ down from the cross. These disjunctions make the collection as a whole unnerving, but also unforgettable.

I recommend reading the chapbook straight through from front to back. There’s an uncanny necessity to the sequence of these poems, as if some space-time coordinate within each poem were opening into a wormhole leading to the next poem. I read the chapbook three times non-stop while strapped to an airplane seat for eleven hours over the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by strangers from around the world speaking foreign languages. Exactly the right place to encounter the works of Alan Catlin, a dedicated, experienced, and talented poet.

(If you would like to order a copy of Alan’s chapbook, email this blogger at theresebroderick AT yahoo DOT com)

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Paul Villinski Sunday, Feb 3 2008

I’m back from New York City where I attended the 2008 AWP conference. After arriving at my hotel last Wednesday, I took some time to visit the nearby Museum of Arts & Design on West Fifty-third Street. I entered the museum just in time to join a tour of the current exhibition, “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery,” one of a series of exhibitions which explore how contemporary artists are incorporating tangible materials (both traditional and innovative) into their artwork.

The piece which I found to be most memorable was Lament by Paul Villinski, a construction shaped as an enormous bird with outstretched wings mounted on a large wall. Villinski created the bird’s menacing wings out of brown, black, and dark blue gloves which he found on city streets and stitched together; and he created the bird’s headless rib cage out of a discarded backpack frame. Sewing needles hang vertically from the gloves on strands of thread.

Already, I’m writing a poem about the piece. For me, Lament evokes the Angel of Death, the fall of Icarus, the ominous descent of a vulture, the great wingspans of the albatross or eagle, or the Nike of Samothrace. It may take me another few days of writing to know which way my poem will go. But I’m already deep within the initial stages of creation, using some strategies which I picked up while attending the AWP conference (and also the recent Williams College Museum of Art training). For example, I’m sketching the wings in great detail; I’m drawing some imagined “before” and “after” scenes; I’m putting on and taking off my own gloves; I’m rotating a photo from the museum catalog; I’m free-writing on the word “lament;” I’m looking for other poetic elegies; I’m seeking out musical equivalents.

So this will be my AWP poem.

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