Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Ekphrastic Fantastic!

I live in a one-bedroom condo with white carpets. We figured out, using math of all things(!), that excluding the downpayment and the year end lump sum someone throws onto the principle, I contribute to roughly 20% of the mortgage. (Is that how grammar should work in that last sentence? Oy, I can't even talk well english about this kind of stuff!) I haven't decided yet which part of this place I call dibs on. Probably not the carpets. Or any of the interior design for that matter. And especially not the stencilled flowers on the fireplace.


When I have a day off during the week, I tell the bf to make me get up with him, since he's got one of the 9-5 deals. If I sleep in I feel as if too much of the day was wasted. But I don't always get up, I tell him that I am getting up, just slowly, that I'll leap out of bed once he's out the door, honest! But that doesn't always happen. Even with the lights left on... I can still sneak in a couple extra hours. I got up this morning. Yesterday I didn't.


Sometimes I forget to turn the stove on. Sometimes a cup of tea takes longer to make than it should.


Ekphrastic poetry. I stumbled onto this one at some point this morning, but it was early so I haven't a clue how I came upon it. It is poetry inspired by art, whether it be a painting, music, architecture, etc. It gives the poet an opportunity to explore the visual language of the art, or simply play with the inherent narrative. I'm actually pretty sure it was brought up at some point in one of my classes, so maybe this was just a bit of a refresher for me, but it struck me as something I should give a go. I minored in visual art, and while I can't paint much in my present situation and haven't got access to a printmaking studio and never cared much for drawing anyways, this could be a good way to keep my fingers in the fingerpaint.

I'm always looking for things to write about. I'm young still, so maybe that's why I don't have much to write about, like in a personal experience kind of way. A lot of the poets I admire have kids,travel, family drama, or just a really long life to draw from. I have the animal poems for whenever I get stuck, and now I'll make use of ekphrastic poetry, and put this monstrous art history text to some use. And get out more to see some galleries. I never do. I'm shy like that.

So I wrote this morning a poem, The Twittering Machine, inspired by, of all things, Paul Klee's Die Zwitscher-Maschine. It turned out very well, and very quickly, and actually revealed more of Klee's work in the process. In putting to words his imagery, a painting (or is it considered a drawing?) that at first glance has a lot of whimsy to it, a dark side appeared. In the poem is born a sense of cruelty that lays roughly concealed in the visual piece. It's neat how one of my favourite art works can continue to change and grow, just by looking at from a different perspective. It happened before too when I used his piece to inspire a painting of my own for an Arts and Culture class, but that was more of an exploration of his use of naive, primitive, and children's art.

Connect the dots now. Children can be so cruel...

1 comment:

  1. ekphrastic

    good thing you told us WHAT it is...
    almost sounds like swearing (in another language?)

    we're all children inside...

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