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November Poetry Challenge: Ekphrastic Poetry

............................The Olive Trees by Van Gogh

...........
TheOliveTrees.jpg

............If I squint, the bars on the window
........................disappear as if I were free
.........................like the cloud scoops blue
.........out of the distant waves of mountain
.........................to lift a drink to God’s lips
...........and stir the green of the olive trees
..............until the colour rises to my mouth
....and I can taste the mercy that is beauty​
 
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Ooo, pretty. I like that one Carrie. It feels calming, but tinged with sadness.
 
Jamison said:
Ooo, pretty. I like that one Carrie. It feels calming, but tinged with sadness.
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I wanted to capture what must have been racing through VvG's mind as he painted this ... He wrote his brother about the two pieces he'd made at the asylum and how they were foils to each other. Do you know which is the other he was talking about?

He checked himself into the asylum and wasn't released until he was very ill and near death. Very sad, indeed.
 
Good picture, good poem, Champster. "If I squint my eyes" seems redundant, though. Shouldn't "If I squint" be enough?

I really like the right justification, which is something I thought I would never say. It works really well here, though.

Good poem.
 
Tzara said:
Good picture, good poem, Champster. "If I squint my eyes" seems redundant, though. Shouldn't "If I squint" be enough?

I really like the right justification, which is something I thought I would never say. It works really well here, though.

Good poem.
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Thanks for the compliment, T. A reader at editRed pointed out the similarity to Psalms 52:8 and I'm a bit freaked out.

Ps 52:8 But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever. (KJV)

BTW Jami-san, the other painting is Starry Night. Both are gorgeous works of art.
 
champagne1982 said:
BTW Jami-san, the other painting is Starry Night. Both are gorgeous works of art.
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Yes, thank you. I read more on Van Gogh after reading your fitting, wonderful poem to "The Olive Trees" and found more art done in that time of his life in Saint-Rémy. They're as I mentioned, beautiful, calming but tinged in sadness. I can relate in some very distant sort of way.
 
As a bipolar artist, I feel a connection to van Gogh. I wrote a paper about him for one of my psychology classes. If I get my schoolwork done, I may have to try this challenge. Looks interesting.

-Sheila
 
Double Nude Portrait - Painter Stanley Spencer and his second wife (1937).




This painting of Stanley Spencer's hangs in the Tate Gallery in London. Spencer is squatting, beside his recumbent wife. He is looking ruminatively down at her from close range through his wire-rimmed glasses. We, in turn, are looking at them from close range: right in our faces, the better for us to see how they are no longer young and attractive. Neither seems happy. There is a heavy past clinging in the present.
At the edge of the table, in the immediate foreground of the picture is a large leg of lamb. The raw meat is rendered with physiological meticulousness, in the same uncharitable way as the sagging breasts and the pendent, unaroused cock. You could be looking through a butcher's window, not just at the meat but the sexual anatomy of the married couple.

Excerpt after Philip Roth from The Dying Animal.



There is lassitude In her flaccid breasts,
his wrinkled gut and spiritless cock,
the tedium evident in his myopic eyes.

Even the meat looks dry, unappetizing,
past the state of roasting.

Yet she has a look
of contentment, redolent and dreamy.

Did he just take her
there on the threadbare floor
in front of the hissing gas fire?

And did he keep his spectacles on
to watch her expression
of exquisite pain to reproduce it
later in a masterpiece?


Sorry - I don't seem able to down load images. It can be Googled if you are interested.
 
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sophieloves said:
http://images.uk.ask.com/fr?q=moder...Fq%3Dmodern%2Bart%26page%3D2%26pstart%3D&qt=0



blinking perspective


at first i saw a dark dark fin
a dark shark fin in
silhouette
against an oceanic blue
not moving towards me
but moving away in the view
the blue became sky and the red the red of
carnage-water, reflecting the fin as it
slid away

then blink
and it becomes instead
a pinnacle cutting the still of eve
the red a red of sandstone - sand
wet sand to bear the echoe of the spire
no
a lightless lighthouse
casting shortened shadow on a beach

but then another blink and all i see
all i can think to see are
two bums
a blue bum sitting on a red bum

this is a two-bum poem
for a two-bum picture.
Click to expand...

fixed your link by posting the pic to photobucket...
composition-2.jpg
 
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L'Origine du monde

elemental to whom you are
if your belly was a prairie
I have not the time to cross it

considering the ethereal nature of what we are
born today, dead tomorrow, I conclude
that every little fuck of happiness should count

determined upon your naked body
my battered cock still miraculously salutes
your scrub of hair, your arse, your marvellous cunt
 

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bogusagain said:
L'Origine du monde
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That painting was not on display in the Musée d'Orsay when I visited. At least I hope not, as I certainly should have remembered it. :rolleyes:

The American contemporary painter John Currin's After Courbet is either a rip-off or an homage, depending on your point of view.

I quite liked this poem, bogus. It reminds me a bit (as many of your poems do) of the late Canadian poet Irving Layton, whom Tessie introduced me to. Layton's work is often quite straightforward, even blunt, and he handles sexuality in a similar way.

I particularly loved this phrase:
bogusagain said:
your scrub of hair
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Perfect description.
 
Tzara said:
The American contemporary painter John Currin's After Courbet is either a rip-off or an homage, depending on your point of view.
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I rather like that painting. I didn't know it before now. It has an element of anything you can do I can do better or rather, anything you can do I can be more explicite but it has a cheeky bravado and sense of irony that gives it a contemporary feel.
 
bogusagain said:
I rather like that painting. I didn't know it before now. It has an element of anything you can do I can do better or rather, anything you can do I can be more explicite but it has a cheeky bravado and sense of irony that gives it a contemporary feel.
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Currin is one of the bigger stars of the New York art scene among "younger" (he's 50) artists. He's especially known for adapting a lot of old master techniques to contemporary art.
 
Walter Anderson museum

I am here, in this little room
where a trembling hand fails to capture
crisp colors covering four small walls,
the ceiling a firmament, and on the floor
footsteps of the artist left in daubs of paint
that escaped from his pallet,
running out the door with his life.

<Ocean Springs Community Center: the murals

Near done, near blind, prepare to leave with the last;
my heart full and joyous, artist's mind churning;
so much given to media.
I open another door,
and here in this room of fourteen windows
a blue bear climbs a pastel tree
bees buzzing 'round his nose
fox hunts under a maple, three
doves refuge in stary leaves
while a calaphany(sic) of writhing images
cavorts around four walls
an old man sits on the floor
trying to describe it all.
 
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1441437863998


Poet and OLD MOBIL
After a photograph of Rebecca Gayle Howell

She sits, head turned aside
as if embarrassed
to be seen

perched like a pert pin-up
(though one quite chastely clothed) on
this wide and oxidized hood. The car,

twelve years and a world of hurt older,
could have been replaced
by a billiard table, a work bench,

the countertop of a Lexington Starbucks—
it's just a prop
the photographer found interesting,

a place to place an artist,
next to the cargo jet
that is the hood ornament, a plane poised

to fly machine parts
into Singapore or Kuala Lumpur.
The poet is attractive and slim and young,

and though the car is boxy, decrepit, and old,
its top has been down
for ten or twenty years,

and it has welcomed more rain, more snow,
more sunshine, more mold,
than this poet will likely ever know.
 
22frankenthaler2_inline-jumbo.jpg


Frankenthaler

I puddle thinned paint
on raw canvas
to shape life

as I know it. Critics
miss brushstrokes. But life
cascades

like a mountain brook.
So color does,
in a wash, in a drip,

leave its stain
spreading wide as how a river
silts its mouth

and I simply am the Mississippi,
rendered in colors,
framed, and hung on a wall.
 
I like this one a LOT, Tzara--it really speaks to me. But I wonder about the shifting point of view: what I hear is the painter in the first three stanzas, and the painting in the last, with some amorphous transition in between--a bit like the painting's own effects. Was that on purpose?

Gorgeous work, anyway.
 
legerdemer said:
I like this one a LOT, Tzara--it really speaks to me. But I wonder about the shifting point of view: what I hear is the painter in the first three stanzas, and the painting in the last, with some amorphous transition in between--a bit like the painting's own effects. Was that on purpose?

Gorgeous work, anyway.
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Thank you, mer.

I think (a lot of what I post here are essentially very raw/first draft/notebook poems) that I intended this as representing Frankenthaler all the way through--kind of the painter is the painting, or something like that.

The idea is perhaps most obvious with Jackson Pollock, where the painting embodies, or captures, the painter himself. In the case of Frankenthaler, it's that the image, the painting, is like a physical manifestation of her being--not just her conception of a painting, but something capturing and fixing her very essence on the canvas.

Which is, of course, just so much Artspeak, ultimately. :rolleyes:
 
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