Poet Jessica Goodfellow Captures Picasso's Ostrich

Jessica Goodfellow grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and has spent the last 20 years in California, Florida, and Japan. Her first book of poetry, The Insomniac's Weather Report (Three Candles Press), won the publisher’s First Book Prize and was reissued by Isobar Press in 2014. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland (Concrete Wolf, 2006), which won the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. Mayapple Press will publish her collection Mendeleev’s Mandala in 2015. A recipient of the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal, she lives in Japan with her husband and sons. For more about the poet and her books, see http://www.jessicagoodfellow.com.

Ostrich, from Picasso: Original Etchings 

for the Texts of Buffon, Pablo Picasso, 1936

Picasso’s Ostrich

The posture of the ostrich will oscillate,

shifting its heft from left to right to left.

What various precarious poses it supposes,

as it wades through space and time,

limbs akimbo, ungainly and inane,

wielding wings not to scale the skies,

not to rise above horizon, but to decelerate

in dirt, anti-thrust; it must disguise its desire

in design absurd for a bird, but divine,

so divine, for an inky line.

Artist Francis Nguyen and Poet Robert Gibbons on Feathered Brains

Francis Nguyen studies and creates art in New York City. “My interests primarily lie in drawing, which I believe is the foundation to many other forms of visual art. I like to imagine drawing as if I were threading a spider web; a natural pattern that is reminiscent of the essence. Ever since I was a kid, the beauty of man-made images compelled me to draw, paint and sculpt the characters in my mind. As in the tradition of the old masters, my style appropriates its meaning through the depiction of the human body and reveals its archetypes. For more of Nguyen’s work see long1337.blogspot.com

New York poet Robert Gibbons has been featured on paintersand poets.com several times. His poetry appears in Uphook Press, Three Rooms Press, Brownstone Poets Anthology, Dinner with the Muse, Cartier Street Review, Nomad’s Choir and the Palm Beach Post. He has studied with master poets Cornelius Eady, Marilyn Nelson, Kimiko Hahn, Nathalie Handal, Linda Susan Jackson, Kevin Young, and Kwame Dawes. Three Rooms Press published Close to theTree in 2012.

elegy to an airhead

I thought this was the city, but it could be the country

being so conceited and self-involved, minding my

business, looking the other way, I am afraid

being a man, keeping to myself, caught up

in my own brine of thought, my hair as explosive

as it is hypnagogic with all the material available

for my use, some may think I am enlightened

but in my distance I am benighted because

it is difficult to read outside my canon, to involve

another genre so I become as thematic as a cliche

always out to compete, to climb the mountain's

tightrope, the high wire or plower into earth

and frack never an estimation, always exacerbation

I will end in my head before I am dead.

Poet David Wright Dines with Caravaggio

David Wright’s first poetry collection A Liturgy of Stones was pub-lished by Cascadia in 2003. His latest collection is The Small Books of Bach by Wipf & Stock. Poems have appeared in Ecotone, Image, Bluestem, and Poetry East, among others. He lives in Champaign, Illinois, and has taught in the English Department at the University of Illinois since 2006. Link to Wright’s essay “A Few Worries about Being a Poet” here. 

The Supper at Emmaus, 1601 
(above) and 1606 (below) 
by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Two Suppers at Emmaus by Caravaggio

The worm in the apple gnaws the fruit away,


and the dressed fowl the men have devoured

by the time Caravaggio remembers the inn-keeper

and his creased wife, the finer linens

and the pitcher as detailed as the Gospel of Luke,


and the ridiculously large ears of Cleopas.

What fierce blaze gets fired and glazed


within the tender-hearted as a stranger paints

the air with his midrash of pigment and time? 


What light layers enough shadow over years?

I am inventing this last part; the rest you could have 


read or been shown on your own:

Caravaggio once punched a drunk in the head

and saw Jesus as the man's flesh dented

beneath his fist like a warm loaf. For five years,


the stranger rose again and again in Caravaggio's eye.

  

       

In the Vernacular Gallery

Art Institute of Chicago

Country Preacher, 1860/90, 
white pine. Artist Unknown.

Hanging quilt and the gazes of the carved half-dozen


prows of ships and this preacher, upright and upholding


the opened and planed smooth Word of God in his lap,


he fixes his hollowed eyes past the book, on a particular


point of sight, devotional turn for the wooden minds


in his care. Or recollects a work song from before the war


and feels its hum in his brow and high cheeks that betray


the grain of southern white pine, deep gouges of chisel


and time. I am praying to him now, that the split in his spine


will hold. That like his arms blessed tight to his trunk, he will


keep his own counsel until the Spirit fires him alive as the free


hand and eye of the vernacular maker whose sermon he is.

Plague of ladybugs, plague of the suburbs 

Gathered in my beard, on your skin,

       in the mouths of bottles.

                               Drink down

their speckled bodies--Mexican beetle,

Asian beetle, domestic bodies--no one

       will say.

                               On my sweater,

       this one, a jewel in a vestment,

       rises away.

The several on my hands

                               I'm flinging

like orange paint from a brush--

                               these winged

               red oils, striated, enameled.

The ends of my fingers a brush--

                       Pollock with ladybugs,

                       Pollock with a canvas of sky.

Poet Grant Tarbard Imagines Kiefer, Malevich, and Galileo

Grant Tarbard lives in Essex, England. He has worn many hats as a journalist and currently serves as chief editor at The Screech Owl, a UK literary journal (http://thescreechowl.com). His poems have been widely published; WK Press will release his first collection, Yellow Wolf, later this year.

The Body Climbs a Ladder

inspired by Seraphim by Anselm Kiefer


When all that is war has taken all landscape
but insomniac miles of stone and bone


under cracked pigments of fawn
simmering with violence.


The body climbs a ladder that ends
with an eternity of Brownshirts


and a hint of an angel's wing,
hope from hopelessness.


And the sky is a seed of a uniform,
this is what the toppling body found;

the walls are painted with soil
trapped by stares and dark straw

that seem to have a physicality,
an emotional charge

that amplifies the experience
of the body's unhorsing.

The quiet leaves riot,
and the earth that runs through this land

is a body, at the bottom, head rolled away
accusingly as if the body is to say "too little, too late".

What Lies Behind A Closed Door
inspired by Black Square by Kazimir Malevich

Embrace logics absence,
beyond feeling there is void,

and what lies behind a closed door?
All objects are an abstraction

exploding in a texture
of ebony parchment,

what lies deep in this burnt paper world
within a throaty loss of gravity.

A blacked out city's light
orbits in white omission.

Kino of the geometric blur
decreased boxlike intertwining

with infinity floating in equilibrium,
a galaxy funnelled.

What lies beyond the frame?
All objects are an abstraction.

Monday
inspired by Galileo's 1616 drawings of the Moon


Dimples beholden to light,
a reflection of orange peel.

I can almost make out the face
the peak of the nose,


the shadow of the right eye
a crest of lip, a sunburnt forehead.

A gravitational monograph
within the vividness of the midnight oil,

six spherical bites, an apple that's about to fall
on the sunless grassland of a patchwork Eden.

Icebergs, Movies, and Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling

Drawing by Takashi Murakami/
Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

AT THE MOVIES WITH WAKOSKI

by Matthew Dickman

Diane and I sitting in the dark

like sitting in a death you actually want,

a death you have

always wished for, looking toward

the lights of Hollywood, the long legs

of swimmers, cocktails and rum made out of water

and iodine. Earlier that day

something like twelve city blocks crumbled inside me

every time I thought of you

and how walking toward her always felt perfect

like a silver key with a red ribbon announcing

its specialness and how I would suddenly burn away
like a shot of whiskey some bride-to-be dropped

a match into. Somewhere Johnny Depp is sleeping

or turning to his right because a woman is there

and has touched his elbow with the soft cloud of her fingers,

or he’s facing the mirror and listening to all the gods

inside him begin to rage; the god of childhood and the god

of his mother, his father. Diane and I are standing

on a street corner together

in the world, after the credits, in the crushed-ice rain,

looking westward toward the dark-sunglass-

Coppertone-white-beach-heaven that waits for us and us alone.

Woman with Flowered Hat,

Roy Lichtenstein, 1963

G.L.O.W.
by Cathy Park Hong

Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling
in their spandex regalia parade the Vegas suburbs,

among spider cottoned smoke trees and foreclosed one-tracts,
half-full whirlpools spiraling
a confetti
 of limbless G.I. Joes;
the sun is at high lament, and Mountain

Fiji is barefoot, and cuts her toe on a Sudafed foil.

Mountain Fiji, you ate too many hamburguesas!

Now you have the diabetes and tonight you must

body-slam Vallerie Vendetta. Look at how

Ebony and Habana with their bedazzled eyelashes

laugh at you. You hate them.

They smoke reefers in the Tiki ballroom where sheets

of moonlit rain pour whenever Lala sings Blue Moon,

but the moon never comes, though sadness always does,

like Palestina in her hijab and her ammo camo bikini.

She’s always supposed to lose to Hadar the Brain,

who is the Good one. When you made love to Palestina,
a sob was stuck in your throat and that sob remained

in your throat, an itching nest that threatened your sinus.

You need a good cry like a good sneeze, and you keep shuddering
your face to make it come. Bahama Mama lends you sunscreen
and you smear it on your broad nose and you wave at hooting boys
whose features seem not quite formed, like God started

pinching out their noses and eyes and then left,

because he got distracted. You shrink to the size

of Thumbelina on a TV in La Jolla. She never wins.

It never comes. I am always waiting.

“Untitled” by Julie Mehretu, 2013.

Watercolor, ink, spit bite and etching on paper.

ICEBERGS, ILULISSAT
by Jean Valentine

In blue-green air & water God
you have come back for us,

to our fiberglass boat.

You have come back for us, & I’m afraid.
(But you never left.)

Great sadness at harms.

But nothing that comes now, after,
can be like before.

Even when the icebergs are gone, and the millions of suns

have burnt themselves out of your arms,

your arms of burnt air,
you are with us
whoever we are then.

Poems and Art from "Heart to Heart": Dove, Russell and Marisol

These poems are from Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth-Century American Art, (2001) edited by Jan Greenberg.

A Word

That Red One, Arthur Dove, 1944

by Gary Gildner

Give me I said to those round

young faces a round word

and they looked at me

fully puzzled until finally

several cried What do you mean?

I mean I said round round

you know about round

and Oh yes they said but

give us examples!

Okay I said let’s have a

square word

square maybe

will lead us to round.

And they groaned

they groaned and they frowned

every one except one

little voice way in the back said

Toast.

Standing Buffalo, Charles M. Russell, circa 1920

The Bison Returns

by Tony Johnston

Midnight and the world so cold.

The sky is holding snow.

On the stone flank of a buried cave

an old fire-smear awakes

and walks out, down the drifted miles,

down the smothered hills.

It steps into the yard to graze

just as snow begins

falling soundless in a dream

upon the shaggy ghost.

What will I say to keep it here?

What song will I sing?

The Family, Marisol, 1962

Breaking Away from the Family

by Susan Terris

I’m there. See me in yellow? Not the short one


with no visible arms. That’s my sister.


I’m the frowning-smiling girl, eyeing the family.


See us? Sister, Sister, Mother, Baby. Then Brother, 


at his board-like best, standing in too-big overalls


trying to be Papa. We’re caught there, 


nailed and glued to a door with no house,


a door that won’t open. Only my half-laced


boots are real. The rest: flat-tinted,

an odd two dimensional, one-handed girl.

The part of met that’s broken away


has grown tall, drives a car, goes to work, lives


in a house with a real door. She’s warm


and full-fleshed and dances with boys under


a flower moon. But the splintered girl I was


keeps coming back, returns me here


to stare at Mother’s pork sausage fingers,


At her dress with its bear-claw flowers.


Overhead, black scrolls hold her and them


like curved iron bars of a jail insisting.

You may never leave


or charge or be part of any family

except this one staring helplessly outward.


Papa will not return.


Brother will not become Papa.

Baby will always be propped in Mother’s lap.

Sister will never find her arms.


The five of us will always be


the last picture Papa saw before he went,


a stiff wooden portrait left behind.