Mourning my Little Tragedies (c) 2002 Anna Montgomery 30X24 Oil on Canvas
Anfractuous Historiography (click here)
This is a spoken word piece so please listen to the MP3 (link above) but if you need the PDF it’s here: Anfractuous Historiography (An Experimental Ghazal)
The video is the poem (images and music are integral).
Here are the words to aid when the text is difficult to read:
mikado petals nuzzle blush lilies
dove Anna roses, kissed moonlight at the edges
poppy anemonies accentuated by amethyst borders
enamoring the alpenglow orchids
other worlds illuminated by celadon hues
nature’s decadence intensified
vast charms of coloris displayed
complexity above the most eloquent descriptors
passionate pleasure lying beyond language
dynamic interrelationships unfold
golden patinas caress cascading emotions
amidst diaphanous glazes of iridescence
mingling with shell tinted apricot spheres
in a nuanced interplay of ideas
amorous glances, mandarin curves
flirtations shimmering with ultramarine blue
immersing self in a shattered unity
a stardust rendezvous, billet-doux
spiraling epiphanies of auramine delight
these vivifying encounters, this saturated bliss
Hinba (c) 1978 Gillian Ayres
Painting’s exultation upon the substrate
expanding the subject of the mandorla
color fields intimate imaginary space
where the mind and the eye play
pleasure from the richly surfaced texture
accretion and accumulation of time
within the picture, a dynamic event
continuing in the rumination of the viewer
Eternal evocations of torments and longings
worshipping the beauty of the supreme range
secret laws blossoming as the artist surrenders
entirely, reverie and revelation pouring
philters upon soul kisses, an intimacy
rivaling that of the amorist, ecstatic interface
communion with inamorata, a tryst of sublimation
Devotee of proportion, line, and chroma
organic curves highlighting impasto unity
pigment glazes adorn the brilliant plane
intensity, contrast, and avant-garde forms
rhythmically assert architectonic genius
sybaritic rapturous artists trace nascent worlds
illuminating the unfixed nature of existence
daydreaming beneath the veil, imbued with subtle metaphor
Sensorial gardens of desire and metamorphosis
truth corroded by passionate individual encounters
creating a diversity of incident, dynamic events
richly sensuous, distinctly colorful and allusive
complexities entwining choruses of mystical luminosity
visceral responses of awe, beloved cries to the inner paramour
vows within the temple of art, consummation of the divine spark
Linked to dVerse Poets Pub’s Open Link Night http://dversepoets.com/2012/04/17/open-link-night-week-40/
2. Ophelia
Ophelia, sweet child, dominated by powerful men
Abandoned to grief and madness
Her last moments, a watery slip
May have been unintended consequence
Or dire injury
Consecrated – and yet we wonder
Who is culpable?
A modern woman now faces
The same pernicious forces
That may divide her from her own precious reason
Professor of mathematics, her intellect, ratiocinative,
Attempts to quantify the carrying capacity of the earth
What can it hold, nurture, sustain
Without ruin, lack of renewal,
Or toxic inundation?
Her losses, both great and universal
Small and specific
Her shame-filled love
Will serve as the crucible
Over which her sanity may be fractured
4. Death Enters the Room
There is only a vague sense impression
Of all that came before
Her husband’s violent death.
His cataleptic rigidity a necrotic grimace,
Creating shock
From which she does not recover
Contrasting the trauma with an inevitable process of biology
Entropy claims its dominance
Through programmed cell death
As 50-70 billion cells die within the body each day,
Expressions in the art of disintegration
Ophelia had not considered this internal suicide
Impermanence unsettled her.
Universal forces destroy with uncostly effort –
Endosymbionts inducing a biochemical cascade,
Release of caspase activators of annihilation
What then of the symbolic ends?
Thoughts, feelings, relationship
She could not push away the concepts
Handle the nuance of shade
Mourning each permutation
Uncomfortable with the intensity of emotion
The finality of the funeral.
6. Deep Grief
Death entered the rooms of her soul,
Unwelcome and alien
Permeated the air
Sleep was her only comfort,
The denial of dreams
Truth returned each morning, aching
Nothing in her waking hours could drive it away
Time had betrayed her –
No solace gained through its passing
The memory of life before became distant
The memory of her love transfigured into a specter;
A cruel trick
She could feel the world
Slipping from her mind
Meaning drained from her face,
Replaced with an effigy:
Becoming the object of her own scorn
Confusion lined her eyes,
Now emptied of other expression
In the recesses of her secret self she began to be afraid
Not of death, stalking her thoughts, but insanity
A far greater apprehension –
Death is certain,
Sanity not so fixed!
The onset of madness,
Robbing her lucidity, was subtle,
A slow and silent poison
It weighed upon her as if tangible, haunting her
The connection between her innermost being
And the outer world dissolving –
She began mimicking his death.
Notes: These excerpts are from my epic, Mere Beasts, which can be found here: http://chromapoesy.com/2011/07/18/mere-beasts-an-epic/ Sections 2 and 6 were already posted but Section 4 was written today for NaPoWriMo day 14.
Kawaii Mori (Cute Forest) (c) 2010 Yumiko Kayukawa
Shaanxi panda bear
sesamoid bone ‘pseudo-thumb’
rare symbol of Man
(c) Anna Montgomery
Saffron threads ribboning in a rain shower of dahlias
star of Persia oasis as the drought ends
moon indigo dragons dance on kimono pink petals
magnolias bloom releasing countermelodies
to belladonna infused mirasol motets
Gloria aster overpowers the haiku Lenten rose
seeding the grains of paradise chanting
a pomegranate kyrie underscores vanilla’s benedictus
savory hosannas nestle sweet pea alleluias
trailing bluebell’s credo and a barberry sanctus
Cardamom entwined gladiolus celebrate
oleander ringed with jessamine flowers
blue crown dotted with gold drop anoint the alter
foxglove and lisianthus raise cassia cries
coral honeysuckle entices anemonie’s enigmatic beauty
eucalyptus and sage purify angel’s trumpet
Rococo tulips blush, hibiscus twirl
phlox, monkshood, and mountain laurel rejoice
nasturtium, juniper, and love-in-a-mist revel
velvet cloak enraptures crown of thorns
frangipani coos to the morning glory
a snowdrop cantor of the peppermint agnus dei
Happy Easter to those who celebrate and Happy Spring to all!
This is a digital alteration of a polaroid picture I took when I was 6. The original was purposely out of focus.
Lenses initiate selective focus
a fantastication only possible when young
encased in the vault of unextinguishable incunabulum
developing the picture as it comes into being
peering deep into the essence of life
Showing one moment, one side of perception
in its inability to capture without speciousness
belying motion, upheaval and change
in the niveous nature of memory
its meandering dreams recast
Glimpses of truth like a halation appear
ocular glitches reinforce tathata
of what can be distinguished and claimed
encoding through elaborative rehearsal
all known and unkenned phenomena
Converging lenses limited by one focal length
growing as depth of field expands
while patulous schemas incubate
evolving mind forms eidetic imagery uniting
as episodic memory stitches identity
Holographic retrieval reveals
clarity amidst the circle of confusion
this positive bias memory distortion prevails
polaroid process makes positive images
without negatives, not lost but never created
Artmaking acts as a nepenthe
coalescing strands of experience
collaging each image of striving
into a concatenation, aspects of self
lighting recesses in the kistvaen of the past
Notes: Method of Loci: A mnemonic device that relies on memorized spatial relationships to establish order and recollect memorial content. Selective Focus: Is a technique in photography that allows one part of the image to be sharp while the rest of the image is out of focus. It works to great effect in macro shots where the foreground should stand out intensely from the background. Fantastication: Action of framing in fancy. Incunabulum: Early stages of development. Speciousness: An appearance of truth that is false or deceptive; seeming plausibility. Halation: Spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries to form a fog round the edges of a bright image in a photograph. Tathata: Ultimate nature of all things, as expressed in phenomena but inexpressible in words. Encoding: The process of transforming information into a form that can be stored in memory. Elaborative Rehearsal: A memory strategy that involves relating new information to something that is already known Unkenned: Unknown, strange, unperceived, unexplored. Converging Lens: Lens such that a beam of light passing through it is brought to a point or focus. The lens of your eye and that of a camera are converging lenses. Focal Length: The focal length of an optical system is a measure of how strongly the system converges or diverges light. In most photography where the subject is essentially infinitely far away, longer focal length (lower optical power) leads to higher magnification and a narrower angle of view; conversely, shorter focal length or higher optical power is associated with a wider angle of view. Depth of Field: In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance. Patulous: Open, expanding, gaping Schemas: The integrated frameworks of knowledge and assumptions a person has about people, objects, and events which affects how the person encodes and recalls information. Eidetic Imagery: The ability to retain the image of a visual stimulus for several minutes after it has been removed from view. Episodic Memory: The type of declarative memory that records events as they have been subjectively experienced. Circle of Confusion: In optics, a circle of confusion is an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens not coming to a perfect focus when imaging a point source. In photography, the circle of confusion is used to determine the depth of field, the part of an image that is acceptably sharp. Positive Bias (Memory Distortion): States that pleasant events are better remembered than unpleasant ones and memories of unpleasant events become more pleasant over time. Nepenthe: Something capable of causing obliteration or reduction of grief or suffering. Concatenation: A series of interconnected or interdependent things or events. Kistvaen: A stone burial chamber. Linked to the Poetics prompt by James Rainsford on photography and poetry here http://dversepoets.com/2012/03/24/patterns-pictures-and-poems/.
Alice Neel (c) 1980 Self Portrait National Portrait Gallery
For Alice Neel 1900-1984
(all quotes are hers except where otherwise indicated)
You passed the civil service exam
to support your parents at a time
when women didn’t work
going to night school in painting
determined to be an artist
to reach escape velocity
Lure of the wealthy Cuban artist
his well-mannered promises:
joys of marriage,
intellectual circles, artists, literati,
philosophical vistas all called to you
before the Great Depression converged
the country’s agony paralleled your own
Santillana died, Isabetta removed from your care
prescribed a year in the sanatorium on suicide watch
your daughters lingered in every subsequent interaction
whispered themes of loss at each sitting
made you cry in front of aquariums
even as an old woman standing in the dark
you claimed it intimated your life
Really seeing into the other, each model’s
psyche revealed in a less static form
portraiture never capturing only a moment
but the continuous life of something greater
when they inducted you he said:
‘she probes courageously, almost violently’*
and called yours a difficult art to bear
you believed in the veracity of humanism
sometimes when they left
you ceased to exist, lost somewhere in them
Your sons sought succor in opposing ideologies
unable to face the consequences of bohemian chaos
Richard beaten, unprotected, loved you
Hartley proclaimed his loyalty to you
each caught in ‘blocks of ice’
consumed by corporations in the rise of capitalist fervor
Beautiful, wounded Isabetta
walks out to the seawall
takes the sleeping pills
was it that you were never there?
Feminist icon, they never felt you acculturated to the movement
outrageous behavior claimed psychic space for women
‘I never just paint my pussy; I think that’s absurd,
I mean, to do your pussy over and over, how monotonous.’
a collective gasp as you asserted there’s no difference
between paintings made by either sex
Until the retrospective at the Whitney, validated by the establishment,
‘I always felt…I didn’t have the right to paint.’
there were children to care for, men to uplift
you painted ‘without ingratiation,
without pretty nuances of color and drawing,
but with great validity.’* now the Academy approves
a lifetime membership but you’re already dying of cancer
Precociously out of your time
longing to be a great artist
for recognition from a society
that believed you should be bounded by conformity
all those contradictions, complexity, and sacrifice
your perseverance carried a high price
‘When you’re an artist you’re searching for freedom,
you’re never going to find it
because there isn’t any freedom.
Art could be called the search.’
*From the American Academy of Arts and Letters induction speech
Connected to the Open Link Night prompt at dVerse Poets Pub here: http://dversepoets.com/2012/03/20/openlinknight-week-36/ please link up and read some world class poetry.
For Iris Murdoch
‘All art is a struggle to be,
in a particular sort of way, virtuous.’
she’s talking with that awful haircut
only ameliorated by a shy smile
thoughts arrive in her head
like a bull she charges at them
a philosophy tutor at Oxford
always ready to make an argument
It’s wonderful to see her so I know
we are very different in that way
thoughts arrive in my mind
blossoming into interconnecting maps
wild tendrils of expanding ideas,
my motivation is creative imagination
She’s dissecting myriad ways
that art and philosophy diverge:
mystification versus clarification
claiming art’s deep purpose is to impose form;
turn life’s rubble into something admirable
bolstering our shaky foundations
Philosophy is repetitive
a critical analysis of presuppositions,
an unnatural game
conceptual structure and significance
argument not self-expression
forceful, persuasive, analytic, and clear
Art, being mimetic, is natural,
everyone loves to be told a story
the use of creativity helps it be,
in a special way, true
mystic underpinning of mundane experience
intimate, sculpting, suggestive, and provoking
Fantasy’s a destructive menace,
suffocating intimacy with the reader
philosophy may damage art too,
obscuring sublimity and beauty
and so we come to understand:
to create great art
we leave room for imaginative space
A wilderness where psychology intersects story,
myth infringes on structure,
where the entirety of existence
skims the border of the embodied and
our being encounters transformation
Linked to dVerse Open Link Night http://dversepoets.com/2012/03/13/openlinknight-week-35/
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Chromapoetica 