Poetry and Image challenge
 

To celebrate the art forums, here's a Poetry/Image match challenge.

Have you a poem which yearns for an image to accompany it? If so, then the challenge is to either create an image yourself which works with your poem, or find an image that works with your poem and share it.

This isn't a reverse ekphrastic challenge - it's more about you choosing an image that you think adds to your poem in some way. Think about it in the same way that you'd choose cover art for a chapbook or the image accompanying the work in an online journal!

Once you've chosen an image, please post a link to the image to the thread in the art forum, with your poem.

(Note about copyright - if you take from the web, please credit your source and post a link to the image rather taking a screen grab and uploading it. If you want to upload an image into the thread, then there are some great sites out there like pixabay who have beautiful free images - you just need to credit the image holder if required (it tells you by the picture if this is required or not)

Tango
 

OK, Sarah-Jane, here's a poem which I feel requires an image like the one I link to. Folks may remember this. My link is from liveabout.com:

https://www.liveabout.com/top-tango-songs-2141927

Cheers,
John


Rooftop Tango

I danced a tango once at MIT
on some lost rooftop. This was in my prime
and dawn of ease and possibility.
The patient work I’d done – was there a time
for it to flower? I could hardly see
how life can turn. My search for the sublime
might be what brought me on to LSD
so open-eyed. How high can one man climb?
Quite high, I guess. Some trigger in my brain
was jostled, and across the ticking years
it came to fire. We all have our careers
and hope that we can keep them. There is pain
when that must end; we touch, we step apart.
We dance the tango if we have that art.
 

Yay! Thanks for starting this, John.

I remember your poem - it stands alone nicely without an image but I think the image you've chosen brings out the passion and the intensity in the dance on the rooftop - and brings a sense of passionate youth to the poem which, although it's implicit in the 'MIT' and 'lost rooftop', isn't highlighted as much in the poem as your choice of image.

It's interesting, as there are so many ways you could have gone with the poem - I'd have thought of silhouetted illustration - but that wouldn't have heroed the human dance, the push and pulls of passions quite so much.

(I liked and still like the poem very much, btw)

Sarah-Jane

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Hi Sarah-Jane, Great project!

I will attempt to corral the two and join them here. (I’m oh-so-tempted to pick an image from the great online source Pixabay you’ve shared here and sneak in an ekphrastic, but of course I won’t….:))

I’ve often thought poetry books/poems have the potential to be multi-dimensional. For me, a completely satisfying unit of art would be a poem, an image and music intertwined — with the words being the driving force. (you did something similar here awhile back).

I’ll see what I have that might work and be back... Ideally, they would be facing pages.

This kind of project would also be conducive to calligram poetry.

.

Thank you Jim!

It is so good to have a fellow explorer at the edges of text and image to work with. I think there's more outside spaces that like this kind of work now, too. Spaces like Sugar House (Sugar Suites) are looking for work that blend text and image (they're print and online but use QR codes in the print to showcase the image/text - very cool way of blending the two).

I love the idea of calligram poetry (I am not great at making calligram poetry - I don't think that I have the right kind of mind for it - but I love reading/engaging with it)

I'm now very excited to find out what you come up with!


Sarah-Jane
(maybe we can do a cross-forum ekphrastic challenge later or some kind of bouncing of words and text, as that is exciting too)

Based on what we did on D&A perhaps?

That's exactly what I was thinking : )

- for the first challenge I wanted to be very low-stakes though, to encourage people to feel comfortable and get involved. But I bet we could do some amazing collaborative work.

Any thoughts you have as to what you think would work would be much appreciated!

Sarah-Jane

Sunken Poems
 

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V2
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V1
I spend many hours these days in the Eratosphere, plunging in to sate my need to be refreshed in poetic waters. It is always something of a fishing expedition, but often enough I come away enlightened; and fishing is a noble profession—especially in the metaphorical sense. I while away for hours when I have obligations elsewhere — in the garden, on the road running errands, making visits, caring for grandchildren, being of service to causes I care about, cooking, sleeping, hopping down rabbit holes. But I find, for the time being at least, I often need to go into the Eratosphere to breathe.

Sometimes I like to venture down to the bottom rung of the ladder on a board to give one last read to a poem that has sunk to the precipice. I like to do that. Sink or soar? I think to myself, like I’m the sole arbiter of its destiny. I take one last look at a poem I’ve long moved on from, just to see if, in the light of the dire circumstances, it might deserve to be bumped back up to the top; that I might see something not spotted before that I feel compelled to comment on, even at this late, final hour — at least here in the Eratosphere one has the power to do so. Does the poem, now dangling by a string, I think to myself, deserve one more ride to the top, and down again in the swift waters to inevitable oblivion? Like this, which I am writing now, might be worthy of when its time comes down to nearly nothing, and it is dangling, ready to go? I spend many days these days in the Eratosphere.

I will not likely bother to clean this up before posting it somewhere there.
Perhaps it is a prose poem that would thrive on the Non-Metrical Board.
Maybe it is more suited to the obscure Board of Fiction where prose languishes in an echo chamber .
Perhaps, now that the Art Boards have been resurrected, I could find a way to place this there.

In my imagination there is a beautiful atoll somewhere teeming with life. I want this to go there. So it will go.

Off the coast of Isla Mujeres there is an underwater reef of statuary that passes time in silent evolution.
Nothing floats.
We sink into sediment.
We soar into stars.


EDITS
Changed word color to white: Eratosphere
.

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Ideally, I would have liked an image to appear at the top, beneath the title. I couldn't get it to link to the page, so the closest I could come was to post the Youtube video of the underwater museum. (I once braved scuba gear and dived to see it and am glad I did.)

The specific image I selected from the website to be the visible graphic representation of this prose poem is here. Look for the one entitled "Silent Evolution".

.

Jim, thank you so much for posting.

I love how it speaks to me directly - the Sphere as an island, a space we all inhabit. And within that I love the ‘obscure board of Fiction, where prose languishes in an echo chamber’. That sentence is superb writing, I think.

I love how your geographer’s description of a digital space allows the geographer agency - agency in saving poems, or not, from drowning. I like the narrator’s description of themselves, too, particularly the ‘rabbit holes’ and how this works with the image - reading the poem with the image brings an entirely new dimension to the poem.

For me, the image is ambiguous - it is aesthetically lovely, but it is also ‘The Tempest’ like - rich and strange - half-real, half not. The video works with the poem to both suggest the Eratosphere as a magical, transformed place, but also as a submerged, half-dead space. The video adds another dimension again - it shares a kind of geological dreamscape, a striving to reinvent the more mundane world.

The poem beneath the prose-poem (the form reminds me of a haibun, - the longer descriptive passage and the short imagistic poem) is beautiful - and it works with the short imagistic poem to describe the picture but also point out, very concisely, how the image and art is a wonderful metaphor for humanity.

Formative points (I will always have formative points, it is in my nature) for me would be to detach the prose poem from the specific place of the ‘Sphere and consider, instead, making it more general a title - an imaginary planet or place.

I’d also consider centre-indenting the prose poem parts, perhaps so they squarely fill the lines and echo that sense of contrast with the imagistic poem.

And, honestly, I’d contact the artist and start a collaborative conversation, at the very least see if you can use the image you've chosen to send off as an ekphrastic piece, as the dimensions of art, video documentary, prose poem and imagistic poem are exciting, and completely rich and strange. Kudos.

Sarah-Jane
(Forget to say 'wow' that you dived to see it too, but that's a very non-poetic aside!)

Thanks, Sarah-Jane, for taking on the Art board.

Normally, with your Ekphrastic101 ekphrastic poem you start with an obect or a scene, and write a poem about or around it. I'm doing this the other way around, and having trouble. The poem is below. It's an oldie from my first book that I always liked, and always thought of as "ekphrastic", although there was no specific painting or object I had in mind - but I always thought it was calling for one. But I'm a writer, not a painter. The poem is below, and below that are links to a few paintings I found in my wanderings (through the internet, not through Europe). Each relate to the poem in some way, but none perfectly. Whaddya think?

The Man Who Painted Women

We watched you as you limned a woman’s face
and body – got it right – the half-held breath,
the promise seen implicit in the eyes,
the tension of the shadows on her flesh,
and yet you seemed unpleased. You gave her pearls,
then scarves, to try to capture and reflect
an essence – stepped back further, further,
inserting dark green dabs to form a bed,
and built on that until you’d filled the space
with tables, bureaus, bottles, fresh cut flowers
lying in the fragments of a shattered vase –
a note, a spill of wine, a twisted mirror –
added windows and a door – and finally you
stepped out of one of them to freeze the view.

https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/im...w=173&m h=119

https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/im...w=173&m h=119

https://www.studiointernational.com/...w-2011/2-b.jpg

https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upl...-s1600-c85.jpg

https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/im...w=173&m h=119

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.Michael, superbly articulated poem, as usual... I don't find any of the links to do it justice. Could it be that you need to take up painting, too? Ha! In my eyes, your poem seems to invoke a Van Gogh-like splash of clutter and intrigue. None of the links do that for me. But the poem is gorgeous...

In my humble attempt, I wrote the "poem" (more of a journal entry as is) before I began upon the task of attaching a visual to reflect it. It needs a heap of work.

I will say again that poetry and imagery go hand-in-hand and so it makes perfect sense to pair the two. After all, look at Blake's work. Not every poem would benefit from visual overlay, etc. but it is a form that I think Sarah-Jane is well-versed/immersed in, and I am glad to be engaged in it.

..

Hi Michael, and thank you for posting and sharing your poem. I like your work (I’ve browsed your website). For me, you have a very clear style which is uncomplicated but manages to convey complex ideas without labouring them. And I like this poem very much so I’m grateful for the chance to read it.

I’ve been at work today but spent some time with the poem this morning and thought about it hard over lunch. I like the meta-qualities of the poem - the fact we don’t see the picture, or the man, or the woman, but they are instead defined by the things around them. I like the frames, the view - mentioned, explicitly, just as the poem closes and the moment is released, in a sense. I wonder who ‘we’ are, too - the narrator.

I haven’t got as far as looking at the images youv'e linked to yet (apologies, this is because I spent too long with the poem). I’m going to do so in a second- I’m really interested what your choices are. I know that mine would be to go for the frames/things angle - maybe Braque. Not an image of a woman. If I were going for an image of a woman - very straight link with image and poem - it were it’d be from that period - Modigliani, maybe. Or you could go for Tracey Emin’s bed, and that would bring a whole new set of meanings to the poem. I know! Rachel Whiteread’s Due Porte. That would bring out the ‘things’ angle.

Anyway, I’m excited to explore your links, and I’ll be doing this next, and will post later once I have done so!

Sarah-Jane

Hi Michael,

I have just looked at your images and I think they're all fab. For me, they work with the idea of inside/outside, the picture as representation (the ideas of the poem rather the furniture of the poem).

I'll come back again, and I can see the rationale for all the choices, all of which dialogue with the image, again for me, in slightly different ways, but for now, I think the final image is the one I love with the poem, because it brings in something new - the woman as onlooker. The woman as onlooker, framed. Looking outside. That really works for me with the poem. Which one is your favourite?

Sarah-Jane

Sorry about the delay, but none of them really work for me - which is why I posted so many in the beginning. I would normally ask my wife to help - she's spent her life working as a graphic arts director and illustrator, and does my covers - but it's gardening time and she's got compost coming out of her ears. Hopper and Modigliani call to me, but nothing works perfectly. Here's my present favorite.

https://images.collections.yale.edu/.../0/default.jpg

Tell your wife good luck with the gardening! I don't know what the climate/season is like where you are but over here everything is growing and growing, and mostly in inconvenient places (I am not a gardener - the best word to describe the garden is 'wild' - but it does have lots of life and colour in it).

To pictures. I can see that the openness - the lack of clutter in the latest image works with the poem's dissatisfied list of objects. So it adds weight to that reading.

Thinking about Hopper and Modigliani and the poem took me to Vanessa Bell and Charleston (not sure why, possibly the gardening snuck in).

https://emuseum.aberdeencity.gov.uk/...8/vanessa-bell

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/si...?itok=UpHPWvuN

https://chariswhiteblog.files.wordpr...6/image20.jpeg

Is there a particular meaning that you want the image to draw out?

Sarah-Jane

Sorry, Sarah-Jane, but those don't do it for me. I think the open window - and possible reading of a hint of a spat and a suicide - the spill of wine, the shattered vase, the twisted mirror - are what I'm trying to capture in the graphic. A sense of foreboding. Your choices are good art, but too pleasant for me, and they are all a step further from the poem than I want

Here's another one from the same book that's crying for an illustration - a Hopper, of course, but darker than the one above.

For Trudy, in New York on Business

You came and went in dead flat Hopper light:
encounter at the Whitney; swift affair
that we, both married, knew would lead nowhere -
but all each wanted was the one-night
stand of sorts; late afternoon-lit flight
to your hotel; a lamp, a desk, a chair,
a bed on which to stumble, fall and share
the satisfaction of an appetite

for unexpected sex. No mysteries,
no chiaroscuro worked to mask the sight
of loose and mottled flesh. And did we care?
Was there more there than Edward Hopper sees?
You filled the window, stark, unshaded, bright;
I watched your shadow paint the soot-choked air.


Maybe this one: https://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsI...a43cd3812d99e9

Don't apologise - that's fine - I hadn't read that strand in the poem so much, so actually, for me, it saves me from the burning question; 'does this need an image at all', because clearly it does if you want to bring out that story for this reader at least ( I read it very much from the sense of a painter who 'couldn't get it right' so kept adding things to the picture, until the central figure disappeared in the clutter.)

I'll have another look tomorrow, but to be honest, I think the image you've chosen is a spot-on illustration for the image. It works with, without being overwhelming. If this was/is a 'real' project (I hope it is, I think there's a market for illustrated poetry) would you want them all to be Hopper?

Wildcard, and it's Friday night, but how about a Rothko for the first one?

https://d2jv9003bew7ag.cloudfront.ne...othko-No-2.jpg

Sarah-Jane

Hi Sarah-Jane,

Here's a painting I'm rather fond of from the Musee d'Orsay (and wikimedia), and a poem to accompany it.

Cheers,
John

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...%27s_Curse.jpg


Cain’s Song

I serve an unforgiving God.
He tells me high. He tells me low.
He is above and I below.
It is His job to poke and prod
me into betterment. I plod
from Spring to Winter, seed to snow,
as if I had someplace to go.
I am acquainted with the rod.
Though not a supple man, I bend –
but never far enough to mend
our broken covenant. His thumb
is on the scale, world without end.
If my voice lifts, let us pretend
I'm singing. Let the angels come.

 

I like both the poem and the painting, John, but I'm not sure they work well together. I think the painting would go well with a louder, less controlled poem; and the poem with quieter, more controlled work of art.

Oh God, Sarah, we're on different sides of the fence. I love Rothko's work - those massive blocks of color - but you picked the two Rothko paintings that I don't like, and are totally different than most of his work. Here's my Rothko poem (fittingly, the last one in my most recent book) and a Rothko I would have picked to go with it.

Rothko

black black black black black black
in tones of black and black on black
the canvases are tagged abstract
expressionist on every plaque
although the artist will attack
abstract and shun the word the lack
of it will not distract the claque
in black black black black black

brown brown brown brown brown
a message floats above the ground
serene reflective, and profound
a man who wound his own life down
red red red red red red red red
dead dead dead dead dead dead


https://media.architecturaldigest.co...-525096024.jpg

This is cheating, in a sense, because I am pairing arguably the most famous painting of the last 100 years with a poem which I still have not workshopped because it's a bitch and I'm not happy with it. But the two work together, and the painting lifts the poem.. Now all I have to do is get that Pablo guy to use his talent to work on S5. And, oh yeah, to let me publish the painting. (The one I'm showing is an Etsy copy - yours for $199.99.)

Marching Orders

Thrust and thrust and thrust and thrust and thrust
until you cannot think to close your eyes,
until your throat is choked with blood and lust,

and everything you’ve touched has turned to dust.
Regather then, and let your passion rise,
and thrust and thrust again, and thrust and thrust,

because the one emotion you can trust
is fear, and you must never compromise
until your ears are choked with blood and lust.

So bomb and burn and leave the ruins to rust;
ignore the truth and radiate your lies,
and thrust each day and night, and thrust and thrust.

Each people has its heritage: you must
be true to ours, respect the ancient ties
until our throats are choked with blood and lust.

Bomb and bomb and bomb and bomb and just
ignore them all, their weeping and their cries;
but thrust and thrust and thrust and thrust and thrust
until the world explodes in blood and lust.


https://i.etsystatic.com/25047203/r/...41443_qhci.jpg

Hi Michael,

I'm enjoying your poems here - they are as always well-executed. The Rothko is rather a leap, to me, from your usual fare, but I think Rothko may do that. Here's my Rothko, with the painting that inspired it, though I'm afraid mine is a straight ekphrastic:

Rothko


This is a scarlet canvas. There’s a flat

rectangle or two on it – in the center
and at each side. It is the color, not
of blood, but of a cardinal’s hat. Do

not be alarmed, it’s quite serene. I think
the two long framing rectangles the man
has dubbed maroon might well extend beyond

the painting’s frame and into space. It looks
a bit like a fence someone painted – you
can see each brush stroke, and the rectangles

are rather sloppy. Red bleeds in across
that framing lattice. You might think it worth
my while to step outside the color and

the line that shape this canvas. But I won’t.


And here's the Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks...-t01165 


The Cormon is my favorite Cain painting, but you could be right - it's not uncontrolled, I think, but it is rather loud. Not an ekphrastic.

CHeers,
John

This is a little fun! Here's my Guernica, a world away, I think, from yours, Michael, though I'm not sure what my takeaway from that is. I like your poem and title.

Cheers,
John

Real Hope of Respite


The upstairs light blew out about the time
I went to view Guernica. I’ve arranged
books on my shelves by centuries; Picasso
lives upstairs, although Kafka and Thomas Mann
are near the sofa where I sit as Liszt
plays on the stereo. It’s 2 a.m.

Guernica. Now I see that tortured bull,
those hands uplifted – suppliant hands with no
real hope of respite. Is it bleached of color?
It is in memory – a wall of lines,
of blocks, angles, and shading. Nor did Goya
put red in his Desastres de la Guerra,

for what it’s worth. The horror does just fine.
Bombs drop from Heaven and cause collateral damage,
it would appear – though here the target was
hit on the bull’s eye. As the bull confirms.
 

connection failure

Hi all (and thank you so much for such an interesting discussion - I’m learning a good deal from this exchange - and it’s also a lovely excuse to riffle through the books I have on Modigliani.

John, why I like about your poem ‘Cain’s Song’ is that it tells a good story - I particularly like/enjoy the first five lines - there’s a weariness that’s palpable and a sing-song quality. The picture is powerful - a powerful and dramatic rendition of a narrative, so if you wanted to bring that to your poem, then it’s a good choice…but I’m not entirely convinced.

When I read your recent work I do think about Blake, and I wonder if that is the sort of illustration - maybe a bit more contemporary that I visualise accompanying it. Something cohesive, that brings the work together rather than something which presents a linear history - I guess I see the image as being quite a linear storytelling, whilst your stories/strands in the book you’re writing are more complex (whilst being a narrative, still) ?

Michael - Ahhh, but these aren’t my favourite Rothko’s either - like you, I love the massive blocks of colour and have spent a longer time than I’d like to admit in the Tate’s Rothko room (although partly, tbh, it was pretension - I liked to think of myself in the Rothko room, too - in my defence, I was in my late teens/early twenties at the time). I was thinking about your poem when I chose those specific images - your poem, in my reading, is an artefact which begins beautiful and ends up ugly. I was thinking about the image might bring out the elements that I’d missed, too - the Rothko’s I thought about were the powerful/ugly/cluttered ones, rather than the pure solar plexus hit of the colour-blocks? So it was less about an image I liked, more about how to bring that reading across through an image.

I like your Rothko poem, despite my sense of Rothko being untouchable. I like that the poem is brutal in its architecture, and the repetition works beautifully - I think claque/black particularly works well. The sounds of that, with the meaning and the repetition - the sense of isolation - chosen isolation, and a kind of beauty.

Marching Orders - well, that’s an image to take on. Have you tried the age-old thing of culling the poem back to the very bare bones and reworking it, much as the image (for me) worked with the tradition which inspired it and which I can still read in the painting, the reworking of that tradition being, in a sense, part of the image? If you did that to the poem too, what would happen, I wonder?

John, I like the storytelling in your Rothko poem, and the very specific way you’ve described it - and the end. For me, it’s more an intellect-driven commentary on Rothko than a dialogue with Rothko and it’s so interesting the different ways two poets have responded to it. It makes me wonder what I’d come up with if I thought of writing an ekphrastic inspired by Rothko’s work.

Again, your Guernica is so different to Michael's poem - yours, in my reading is again a commentary, in a sense, on the painting, with a clear narrator. I think I’d have to take that approach with Rothko, in a way, too - have myself in there, shadowly, as a frame, with all the cultural gaucheness I had at 20! (Your poem does not show cultural gaucheness, by the way - it’s far more suavely aware of the placing of narratives, and, in a sense, that’s one of the ways the poem works, I think - a kind of meta-reflection on context - the narrator and Guernica placed within a collection of other images and artists).

Ralph! Lovely to see you!

Sarah-Jane

Hi Sarah, and everyone,

Here's a poem I worked on for a while. The thought of what it's like being turned to stone came to me one day but I turned it into a stove instead. So i found an image close to the type of stove I pictured. Hopefully one of the links works.


Turned to stove

Turned to stove instead of stone,
older model made of bone,
shelf and pipe over throne,
peach and tan into golden tone.

Burning lit the molten shop,
the piney spices measure pot.
Wreath of fire crowning top,
scorching iron town it's got.

Conscious kettle gleaming round,
stirring strikes its bony sound.
Softest handles mittens found,
steam uplifted, aroma drowned.

Steep uncovered the fitting dome,
boiling contents whistling own,
eyes and ears of the grown
bringing together people home.


https://www.reddit.com/r/HVAC/commen...eb2x&context=3


https://i.redd.it/1dcf78vqf9s21.jpg

Hi Sarah,

Here's my quick take on the Rothko pictures. i found the first one pretty scary, a crime-scene of nightmares, mutilations; the second one, a serial killer looking through blood with half his skull exposed, so not that pleasant haha. I know nothing of Rothko or these paintings, so I'll probably have to read up on him.


the pink elf

silly putty leads to bean art
fish swims up to body parts,
draped over blood vessels noodle
their guts by the gory doodles

sick in portrait, eyes that jumble
brickhead saves his flame in bundles
laughing back through the gaps themselves
is the world of the pink elf




https://d2jv9003bew7ag.cloudfront.ne...othko-No-2.jpg

Michael, your post 22 would go very well in your The Horrors of War thread.

Hi Jason,

Thank you so much for joining in and sharing your work and ideas! I think the move from stone to stove is beautifully surreal and also really interesting - the stove as the place of production, of warmth - a kind of statue, but one which people cluster around for very different reasons. I love ‘steam uplifted’ and the ‘piney spices’ and I hope you workshop it if you feel the urge.

The image is gorgeous. It’d make a fantastic surrealist collage to combine the two ideas, I think. I’m not sure how confident/eager you are to play with arts practice but I could imagine a similar type stove image being used to amazing effect cut up (physically) and the pieces placed in a silhouette of a face. Or use eyes from magazines and position them over the stove image. It’d be brilliant, I think.

I love how your Rothko poem is so different to both John’s and Michael’s. I enjoy the playfulness in it, the way you’ve taken a surreal leap, and the kind of horrible but also really effective noodle/gory doodles. A combination of child-like and visceral, which has a real effect on the reader (not that pleasant an effect, but I don’t think that this was the point of your poem).

Allen - nice to see you here.

Sarah-Jane

Micheal, I enjoyed your poems especially the Rothko one with its chunk of text and stamping of color with repetition which made for an exciting read. The man who painted women is great writing, I love the command you demonstrate in it, and I agree with Jim the images don’t do it justice; if you could combine those images into one maybe it would.

John, I liked your Cain song poem, it created an image of its own for which the painting is clearly the inspiration and your words resembled the figures.

Jane
I realized while searching for an image, which was quite consuming on me, the possibilities of a more complete visual but all the tricks of digital art I don’t understand. The stone and eyes would be awesome forming into it, showing the stove working with a person or two fading in or out. I’d be up for any collaboration with it, nothing urgent of course. Thank you for the kind words.

I think maybe we might (if you're up for it) use this opportunity to start a poem/text thread (we did this in challenges a while back but for obvious reasons I'm keen to try to get the art forum moving if I can a bit).

The way these work is that I'll make a collage response to your poem, and then someone else might make a poem response to the collage response to your poem... if that makes sense and would work for you? Let me know, and if it does, I'll make an image response and post it in a separate thread!

Sarah-Jane

You have my Ok, and we can see where it goes

Descartes came up with I think therefore I am while sitting inside a stove, FWIW.

CHeers,
John

Crikey! Descartes sounds eccentric. He must have been limber, too.

Righty, just to update that I've made a very quick and quirky playful image in response to Jason's stove/stone poem and I'm going to post it in a different thread with a link back to this one. Cross your fingers for me that this plan works!

Sarah-Jane

Oh thank you John. I hope to slip that into a conversation sometime and see what the person says.

Sarah-Jane,
What a fantastic idea, to do a reverse-ekphrastic matching art to poem. Here’s a poem I never posted here or sent in or even considered worth revising, yet when seeking a poem that was expressed by a particular piece of art I love (and credit Mary Meriam for showing me), this was the only one that clicked for me, and suddenly I thought, tentatively, “maybe it’s not all that bad” so here goes:

Heartwrecked, Seeking Relief

Thoughts of you tucked softly just to cool the eye
when words like sticks and stones would scold the eye.

The radiance of your words, though disembodied, shines a way
where barbed-wire traps had ridiculed the eye.

The body finds a flightpath even without wings.
Even without you I feel your light, a jewel, the eye

I seek when my world whirls in madness and I’m lost.
Is this the center I can’t hold that fools the eye?

It’s neither place nor time, but emptiness—
a whole that never burns but rules the eye.

And yet I circle back, my mind in tow
to drink from your sweet nothing to console the eye.

I’m working hard to lose the word desire,
replace it with an aching that controls the eye

which always wanders through uncharted waters
with neither home nor anchor, something to hold the eye.

So I try smaller tasks and minor chords,
like mending seams to buttonhole the eye.

But naturally the heart will never yield its turf
to arrows that don’t pierce the soul, the eye.

The art is here

The poem was not written with this picture in mind at all, yet somehow I felt they spoke to each other.

Wow, Siham. What a beautiful ghazal. It's achingly good.

And the image is perfect (I'd recognised the sense and style of it as Odilon Redon, but it's not one I knew before you posted it).

They have such power together. There's a synthesis, a dialogue which isn't obvious but is very, very, much there.

One day, when I eventually retire (it'll be a good 20 years, sadly), my dream is to print limited edition broadsides. Poetry and art together. Some with QR codes that lead to readings or animations. With a remit of putting them in public spaces as well as sell for walls.

I hope you send the ghazal out there into the world, and if we're still posting on this board in 20 years time, expect a PM from me asking if I can make a broadside from it! Thank you so much for posting. I think it's a wonderful poem.

Sarah-Jane

Thanks so much, Sarah-Jane!
This thread is what inspired me to make this connection so I’m grateful for that. And I’m so relieved you like it. In fact I’ve been working on a set of photographs (mostly black and white) and poems to go together this way, working towards a (relatively) small chapbook. But it’s been easier said than done. Matching visuals to poetry is itself an art, and I’ve been inspired by what I’ve seen here thus far. Some fantastic poetry here really, and sometimes the art brings the poem out from the shadows. Your work has also inspired me.

Siham, that sounds like a gorgeous chapbook. It is very tricky, I think, to make images dialogue with poems in a way that adds to the meanings or reinforces key ones rather than reducing them.

If feedback is useful, please consider starting a thread here - you can always remove the links once the book gets sent out. If you need help with posting the images in a way that doesn't get them 'out there' for general consumption DM me and I'll see if/how I might help (once I'm back from an illustration shindig this pm).

Thank you so much for posting.

Sarah-Jane