I'm loving this thread but, in answer to a question further up the thread, I would like to be the devil's advocate about most verbal responses to visual art.
I am married to someone who has, in the past, exhibited seriously as an abstract painter, and also was an art critic.
We both developed an aversion to verbal attempts to "describe" or "explain" paintings. Eavesdropping on literary conversations in galleries was actually a source of entertainment. They so often missed the power of the simple visual statement as they delved for hidden motives, metaphors, and religious meanings.
The sad thing is that journalists and academics often asked painters to speak about their work. Painters (with some notable exceptions) are people who paint, not speak. They usually responded to the expectations of the questioner with a hideous pastiche of the questioner's own platitudes and so the web became more tangled. Painters then started spouting the stuff spontaneously and the promotion industry fastened on their naive words with a terrible rapacity.
But back to the poems. Anything on the earth that moves a poet is fair game in my opinion. And the poems here show that the innocence of a poem transcends all the babble of theorists. Wonderful stuff. Thank you for posting these poems.
Janet
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