[Julie Steiner]

No, Roger, incomprehensible blather is MY turf! And I liked your translation arguments very much.

I started repenting of my last post the moment I sent it--especially regarding my statements about the reader or viewer "interacting with" works of poetry or visual art. (Doh! Interaction is a two-way street, and the poem doesn't change in response to the reader except in a workshop setting.) Oh well, I told myself, I guess I've generously provided fodder for further discussion.

Ever the altruist,

Julie Stoner

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Roger, what you say about translation and how it both resembles and differs from ekphrasis strikes me as perfect.

[Gail White]

I think A.E. Stallings was too modest to tell Mr. Clawson, about a month ago, that the poem he saw in the Atlantic must have been her own. It was a sonnet about an Orthodox icon of the resurrection - illustrated in color, too. Splendid work!

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks Gail (and Bob, of course) for the plug. It was certainly an interesting experience having a poem published with an illustration. Icons are genre works, and certain scenes and attributes are reproduced again and again, but with slight variations. My poem was based more on a "composite" of this particular genre than on an individual icon. The art staff was therefore perplexed at not being able to find an icon that perfectly fit with all the details of my description. To me, that was not the point, as I had intended the poem to stand alone, and the icon to be imagined. So it was interesting having to deal with the problems of an actual image.

I do look forward to reading Alicia's poem. By way of apology for my foolish fantasy about the origin of the Fleur Adcock poem (see edited comment above) I offer Edwin Muir's The Annunciation, together with his account of its origin:

'I remember stopping for a long time one day to look at a little plaque on the wall of a house in the Via degli Artisti [Rome], representing the Annunciation. An angel and a young girl, their bodies inclined towards each other, their knees bent as if they were overcome by love, 'tutto tremante', gazed upon each other like Dante's pair; and that representation of a human love so intense that it could not reach farther seemed the perfect earthly symbol of the love that passes understanding.'

The angel and the girl are met,
Earth was the only meeting place,
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way
That was ordained in eternity.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze woul never break.

Whatever truth-value one attaches to the story from Christian scriptures, this is (I think) a powerful and affecting piece - which owes much to its strong first line.

Margaret

[Thomas Newton]

Alicia,

Here is one of my favorites:

Sonnet of Model Romanticist 2055

You stand, robe billowing, by a leafless tree
As barren as the soul of which I'm told
Does not exist; is void and stony cold.
Such nothingness! And thus was their decree.
Still! What feeds this mind they fashioned me!
Orange skies and a day I'll ever hold
Inside my programmed brain that they did mold.
They played God, but they did not foresee . . .

One moment could transcend the laws of man.
That day I came upon you facing west,
There swelled in me such feeling they would ban-
Unplanned and rising up inside my chest.
My quest-to find the vision-lovely Anne.
And the searching for my soul-the final test!

by Andrea Dietrich

About the Painting “Dreaming Machine” by Magda Vasters
(You can click on the bottom right corner of the painting to make it much larger) http://www.raptor8.hpg.ig.com.br/jjbinks/mvasters/pages/magdavasters12_dreaming_mac hine.jpg




[This message has been edited by Thomas Newton2 (edited September 04, 2003).]

[David Anthony]

I'm intrigued you favour this one, Thomas.
I think there are serious flaws which would be quickly identified if it were posted on any competent workshop; no way does it justify a Mastery posting.
Who's Andrea Dietrich? Is she famous?
Best regards,
David

[Thomas Newton]

David,

You are correct. Andrea Dietrich is not a Master Poet. She is not as famous as the New Jersey Poet Laureate, Amiri Baraka, but much more famous than the sculptor that produced Venus de Milo.

Perhaps, I was overly influenced by Literature and Science by Aldous Huxley; “Rockets and Carts” by Yevgeny Yevtsushenko, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University) by C. P. Snow; Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (1962 Richmond Lecture at Downing College, Cambridge) by F. R. Leavis; I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov; 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke; and the magnificent digital art titled “Dreaming Machine” by the Polish/German artist Magda Vasters.
Respectfully,
Thomas Newton

[kday1]

What an interesting thread. Poems like this should be put into a collection. I did several pieces about sculpture and art for my new book, one of them, on Titian's "Penitent Mary Magdalene."

[Janet Kenny]

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