Posted on: November 24, 2008
Kandinsky’s Composition VII. 1913
My poem from yesterday was about many things, but chiefly about fighting the inability to write. Poems, prose, in journals. The painting above is about something else, though it ties some things together for me. Kandinsky, in this work from his Der Blaue Reiter period, was painting in part theoretically, putting theories into his paintings, arming his colors with monads of thought. Color as spirit. Spiritual color(s). Color to invoke the spiritual. And music as the bridge of bridges.
“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” — Wassily Kandinsky
He, too, would paint improvisationally, in a way similar to my poem In Medias Res. But it is often easier to paint musically, spontaneously, and make it effective as a composition, than to write in that manner.…
[More...]
Posted on: November 23, 2008
The Night Café, by Van Gogh. 1888. Yale University Art Gallery
In Medias Res
There is a flurry of noise
Of images and batterings
As if I weather more than storms
More than wild winds
The flurry surrounds and confuses
Distorts and narrows
The field my focus
My open-ended vision
I’m too much a part of the world
– right now
Too much a swamped victim
Of my own acquiescence
Flattened like pictures
Floating down
pre-Raphaelite
streams
– by Douglas Pinson
…
[More...]
Posted on: November 19, 2008
Bruno Schulz
Sixty-six years ago today, Bruno Schulz was murdered by a Gestapo officer in a concentration camp in Poland. Now recognized as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Schulz was little known outside his native Drohobycz during his lifetime, though he had made fruitful contact with several important Polish literary figures of his generation. He was friends with Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz and Zofia Nalkowska, among others, exchanged letters with them and sometimes reviewed their works. His connection with the larger world was chiefly through literature and art.
Schulz was a rarity in a multitude of ways. He was a small-town, provincial intellectual and artist, a public school drawing teacher who rarely ventured beyond the confines of that small town. He did not seem to feel the need to live in the center of literary and artistic ferment — the closest city like that would have been Prague. He traveled little.…
[More...]
Posted on: November 17, 2008
Desi Di Nardo, who has graced our site with her wonderful poetry, has a new book coming out soon.
From the book blurb:
Title: THE PLURAL OF SOME THINGS
Author: Desi Di Nardo
Format: Trade Paperback
Published: December 1, 2008
Dimensions: 75 Pages, 5 x 8 x 0 in
Publisher: Guernica Editions
ISBN: 9781550712964
To purchase The Plural of Some Things: click here
The Plural of Some Things illuminates the subtle and poignant flashes of experience which shape the way we evolve and flourish and from time to time digress as human beings. Written with a probingly sensitive eye and a profound fervour for the natural world, The Plural of Some Things invites the reader to journey towards those encumbered truths embedded deep in the heart’s home.
Reviews:
Desi Di Nardo’s energetic and exquisite poetry is already a major force, and a distinctive universal voice.…
[More...]
