Oh Sonia If only I could reach into the glass museum case, smooth the quilt you sewed for your baby boy, feel the weight of your walking poem outfits, see you appraise, measure, trace, chalk, shear, iron, and stitch, like my mother did when she made skirts that actually fit me, hemmed the bedspread that matched the curtains where my hesitant girl-body lay and read and wondered next door to her sewing space in the laundry room where she talked to me while she cut fabrics on the deep freezer near the warm lamp light after a long day at her job. If only I could do all that. I see you in the televised interview, speaking French with familiar traces of my grandparents’ Ashkenazic accents. No longer Sara Elievna Stern of Gradizhsk, no longer Sonia Terk of St. Petersburg, this Sonia Delaunay of Paris. Oh Sonia, my art history lessons decades ago were about Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia, and hardly enough about Sonia. Sonia of the paintings, murals, mesmeric bolts of fabric, clean-angled furniture, and striking stage sets. Sonia of the Simultaneous Dresses. Oh Sonia, I did not know about Sara. I had not anticipated this retrospective of your work bringing me back to my mother’s dresses with their splotches of joy, to how she stood, and how she stitched, a life. Sharon Roseman Sharon Roseman (she/her) writes poetry, non-fiction, and fiction from St. John's, Canada where is Professor of Anthropology at Memorial University. Recent examples of her poetry can be found in Poetica Magazine, SurVision, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Memory Palace anthology.
0 Comments
Whistler looked into his nocturne, then up and down and side to side. Which was the way? The water flowed like a pale tongue from the horizon; it grew wide and thick three-quarters up the canvas, then dropped down the sides three-quarters to a long thin tongue. He could not resist the patch of land in the close forewater two-thirds down, or whatever floated there, nor the bottoming twig that seemed to say he was a camera still, though one instinctively out of focus. But how not be a camera? Was it unthinkable, the next natural step: to compose with no more than patches, splotches of color? Hugo had done it, but Hugo was a poet; who would see his paintings? Who would care? A pure abstraction? Whistler’s instinct may have urged him on but his life warned not, and even so John Ruskin called him coxcomb, said he flung paint in the public’s face—brush and pen at war. Ruskin’s world would not admit a purely graphic language of shape and color related, the language the eye read on a wall, the babble of broken things together: could only translate poems of paint to prose, could only illustrate the slow, linear language of speech. Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket: how close to spatter painting Pollock! How very close to knowing how the essence is what counts! True, Art won its farthing against Ruskin, but the new vision remained unseen. But had they asked how they could see, those blind, Whistler might have said, as he did to Oscar Wilde that night in the salon, “You will, you will!” E.M. Schorb E.M. Schorb's poems have appeared in Agenda (UK), Antigonish Review (CA), The American Scholar, Dalhousie Review (CA), The Fiddlehead (CA), The Queen’s Quarterly(CA), Poetry Salzburg Review (AU), Wascana Review (CA), Prism (CA), The Yale Review, and Oxford Poetry (UK), among others. His collection, Murderer’s Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press years ago, and a subsequent collection, Time and Fevers, was the recipient of the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Award for Poetry and also an Eric Hoffer Award. Cover Story Raymond Isidore (1900-1964) La Maison Picassiette, in Chartres He sought on impulse fragments of crockery and glass, to make mosaics pressed upon household objects, his wife's sewing machine, the headboard of their bed, chair legs, even coffee grinder and lamp, poignant in their native isolation. When he brushed surfaces with adhesives, worked with simple tools, spoon, pen knife, fork, embedded coloured shards of porcelain, earthenware, faience, into wood, metal, stone, he felt the world safely settle into itself again, under his fingertips, a big wide nest, sky and earth, moon and stars, return entirely to earth, intact, sturdy ground to steady him, Raymond Isadore, the cemetery sweeper in Chartres who, bored by the doldrum broom had some other reason for being, bigger purpose. God told him so, a mission. Orphaned stashes of broken plates, piled porcelain cups, abandoned in the dump, implored him to make use of them, he obeyed, spread his butter, every surface a bread, and studded it with shards, a highway of tesserae. As he set each fragment into the sticky mastic, figure into ground of every appropriate object, he fostered home, sweet continuous home, a skin, a poultice, an exorcism, a vision, a convulsion, heal the wounds of the world. Any wonder his wife and kids complained, the neighbors called him picassiette, plate stealer, but he knew his future glory, dreamed when he'd be pressed into the grout of God, a petal in the mosaic rose, Jesus hugging him close to his chest, where, among the other good souls, he could finally take his eternal rest, lie down on his back, upon the only object that alive he couldn't cover over -- where he and his wife had slept, that stark but soft bed, now made purely of a porcelain heaven. Deborah Gorlin Deborah Gorlin is the author of two previous books of poems, Bodily Course, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997, and Life of the Garment, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her new book of poems, Open Fire, Bauhan, was published in Spring, 2023. Recent poems have been published in Plume; On the Seawall; The Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; Rumors, Secrets & Lies; Swwim; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades” was a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing. Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review. Urdu and English: Closing Time, by Lorette C. Luzajic, Translated by Saad Ali & Nashwa Yaqoob Butt6/1/2024 Closing Time I’m just a baby, but won’t know it for another twenty years. I’m loud and brash to cover up the lost and shy. I’m on a patio on Davie Street with a new friend in my new city. The photographer. He is long and thin and orange. He takes photos of weird mannequins and gum wads on sidewalks. I yell at him for ordering lamb shish kebab, tell him he is a murderer and he will drop dead of jammed arteries before we get to know each other. He is more shy, and even more damaged than I am. But he is ten years older and has lived enough to laugh it off. He likes me anyways. We both have a penchant for oddities and for characters. We both love the poetry we find in the cracks. We both love Leonard Cohen. And I am not the first vegan he has met in Vancouver. ** Urdu Translation **
Transliteration Christian Krohg (Norway) ki tasweer Bo Pema ke Pashinde (1885) ki tarz per Waqt-e-Ikhtitam Main mehz aik bachi hoon, magar mujhe ye m’aloom nahein ho paye ga aglay bees saal tak. Main purshoor aur bedharak hon gumshuda aur shermilay pun ko dhaampne ke liye. Main Devi Street ke aik aangan mein aik naye dost ke saath apne naye shehr mein hoon. Jo ke tasweer banana ka mahir hai. Woh lamba, dobla aur naaranji rangat ka hai. Woh aajeeb potloon aur pagdandiyoon per chipke huwe gum ke tokroon ki tasaweer utaarta hai. Main uss per ghilaati hoon dombe ke ghost ke shish kebab ka aarder dene per, ussy batata hoon ke woh aik qatil hai aur who munjamid sheryanoon ke saath murda haalat mein hoo ga iss se pehle ke hamari jaan pehchaan ho. Woh aur ziada shirmila hai, aur mujh se bhi ziada kharaab haal mein. Magar woh das saal bara hai aur kaafi gi chuka hai iss baat ko hans ker taalne ke liye. Woh mujhe pasand zaroor kerta hai. Hum doonoon aajeeb-o-ghareeb chizoon aur kirdaroon ki terf rojhaan rekhte hain. Hum doonoon sie shaa’ari behad pasand kerte hain joo shigaafoon mein milti hai. Hum doonoon Leonard Cohen ko behad pasand kerte hain. Aur mein pehli sabzi khor nahein jis se woh Vancouver mein mila hai. Lorette C. Luzajic translated by Saad Ali & Nashwa Yaqoob Butt This poem first appeared (in English) in The Neon Rosary: tiny prose poems (Cyberwit Books). Saad Ali (b. 1980 CE in Okara, Pakistan) has been brought up and educated in the United Kingdom and Pakistan. He is a bilingual poet-philosopher and literary translator. His new collection of poems is titled Owl Of Pines: Sunyata (AuthorHouse, 2021). He has translated Lorette C. Luzajic’s ekphrastic poetry and micro/flash fictions into Urdu: Lorette C. Luzajic: Selected Ekphrases: Translated into Urdu(2023). He is a regular contributor to The Ekphrastic Review. He has had poems published in The Mackinaw and Synchronized Chaos. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. He has had ekphrases showcased at an Art Exhibition, Bleeding Borders, curated at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie in Alberta, Canada. Some of his influences include: Vyasa, Homer, Attar, Rumi, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Kafka, Tagore, Lispector, et alia. He enjoys learning different languages, travelling by train, and exploring cities/towns on foot. To learn further about his work, please visit: www.saadalipoetry.com; www.facebook.com/owlofpines. Nashua Yaqoob Butt (b. 1984 C.E.) is from the Gujrat District, Pakistan. She is a teacher, social worker, and poetess. She holds an MA in Mass Communication from The Allama Iqbal Open University, Pakistan. She has authored two collections of poetry: Luminous Butterfly (2021), and Solitude: Silence and Self Identity (2023). Currently, she teaches Urdu and Social Studies (Secondary Level/Grade 9 & 10) at the Jinnah Public School & College, Gujrat, Pakistan. She has also been a part of a local Social Welfare Organisation (working for the empowerment of women in the region) as a Crochet Instructor. Her influences include: Rumi, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Amrita Pritam, and Rabindranath Tagore – to name a few. In her spare time, she pursues gardening, sketching/painting, writing, and crocheting. You can learn more about her work via her Facebook Author Page: www.nashwayaqoobbutt. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you. Join us on Facebook:
July 2024
|