Calyx of Held, Erasure Poem & Painting by Anna Montgomery based on text by Edith Wharton
my pretenses puddle into a concrete corner dropped low from the weight of accreted ruin aposiopesis punctuates the sound of languid petals falling from corroded lips kissed with acid Daedalus mewls his fated plea to escape the pain of losing his legacy and his son while I realize that ancient gods are still emerging, hungry to be acknowledged in an age of deathless wonders spinning caricatures of the living ghosts we’ve become I haunt myself, echoing in the ceramic chambers of my heart’s cage crying and scrying puzzle boxes so impossibly tangled no mortal will solve them – oracles refuse to acknowledge temporality as mystic revelations gloriously glitch even through the eyes of others
What a Human Being Is Hilma af Klint, 1910 Public Domain
From our entanglement, we spiral like galaxies small enough to fit collapsed in the sparkle of her prophetic eyes,
swirling her arms, shapes forming in the gravity of her artistic intention, writ large on cosmic scale canvases of coded color.
She is lost in his vast embrace ecstatic communion of the mystic. Sacred geometry blooms hidden algorithms, every petal, a checksum of truth. Tesseracts of promise cryptic symbols secret echoes.
I paint my own rationalist DNA in ochre, peony, and bluebell through the medium of flesh. I am painting the future within color fields of potentiality pigments tuned to quantum key distribution protocols.
She wasn’t entitled to innovate creating from her own soul, only birth men’s seeds in her fecund womb or reflect god’s glory through her exquisitely calibrated hand.
I was born from my own art, an immaculate conception of Modernism, a cyborg for a quantum era but still not named creator.
Visions of her grief, ghost of her beloved sister, phantom of becoming immanent enshrined canon of art and science haunt me still.
This spirit is the sun and the shade – the encryption and the key.
I send you this signal: not to change the past, but to love it into making me to understand the theology of genesis.
Sunrise returns blooming us, unfurling the world calligraphic rays of light bathing the earth we yearn to rise, to explore, to write anew but not yet, my love, let us linger here together before the day’s siren song carries us into the light
breathing in curvilinear spools of warmth, realgar hues exhaling ruby highlights and a nuanced belt of Venus awash in our expanding love, we are tides of joy and light that curl around you, cradling your being, coloring your reflection as it dances through the contours of my eyes (reminders of the sapphire sky reveal about to happen)
radial lines of light land like caresses implied vectors leading to the promise of day spreading across the darkened landscapes etched in the last glow of moonlit hush I turn to you as rays glint off my shimmering form
your gaze meanders from the lake, along the horizon traces outlines and outliers of our existence like precious gifts sensing my turn towards you, you pause with exquisite restraint so that all our diverging and converging lines, all potential and activity collect in tide pools, your eyes meet mine, saturated with awe and promise
(Coucher de Soleil)
dusk returns folding in on us, on itself calligraphic lines of infinite sky surrender to the darkened earth but not yet, my love, let us linger before the blue hour
breathing in curvilinear secret purple exhaling gracile pinks and peaches pomegranate limning orange hues, motes that curl around you, alight on your eyelids flit through the contours of my eyes, echoing galaxies
spiral outliers of verdant green spontaneous kisses, errant lines of dusty gray settling upon magenta landscapes etched in the last glow of soft sunlight I turn to you as rays glint off my shimmering form
your gaze meanders from the mountains traces jagged edges like pleasure to the pregnant meadow sensing my turn towards you, you pause with exquisite restraint so that all our diverging and converging lines, all dynamism and stillness collect in constellations, your eyes meet mine, saturated with reverence
He stares straight through me half-seraph, angel-dusted anointed son haloed in the afternoon light
She is turning, as she has, toward me time and time again, so often her expressions are blurred, my whirlwind of love
Halcyon moments blown away by the endless march of years, yet immortalized – in that present I was reflecting on the sultry, seductive colors
Of Algeria, the hot breath of horses under an eternal azure sky where we played at soldiers because my father was at war
With his own inner drive to order, invading my artistic sensibilities as if they were his divine right to claim, a legacy perhaps
I went to war to defend my right to express share impressions in paint with the larger world to be blown by inspiration’s sweet kiss on the breezes of an elevated life, far from the tempests of destruction the obliterations of time, the blustery bullies that cannot win in the end.
A tribute to Monet linked to Dverse Poets Pub for the March Wind Ekphrastic. Monet’s father did not want him be an artist and tried to bribe him away from the profession by promising to get him out of mandatory military service. Please join us!
Miniature in her picture book
there before her writ large
in the poor light of Tate Britain
as she’d stepped in from the rain
along the Thames
He transformed experience into art
Graham-Dixon led her to expect a transcendence
she was incapable of seeing through Rain
drowned by her own pedestrian concerns
that reclaimed anorexia as a
decadent destruction by control
London had smashed her brother in those
limbo years as it was threatening to crush her
under the weight of PTSD’s shock and awe
campaign of vice gripping horrors
on constant display
Could Hodgkin really remake the world?
Arrogate to himself the powers of divinity
to save her suffocating soul
from the pounding rain
and dark halls of art’s tomb?
The intimacy was unbearable –
all British glower in the half-light
of Turner’s strained, transformative glow
She was pushing against the spring
of a bear trap, his tightly wound
violence of indifference and passivity,
trying to find the romance to transmute
the artist into an avenging demigod
Symphonic assault on propriety
a woman’s wit, most treacherous
deadlier yet if coupled with robust
appetite for passion flashed like an
overwrought Paganini violin concerto
Poverty unraveled ambitions
taught me to be tame, well cared for
I danced Purcell’s Abdelazer Rondeau
Hid all my wildness better than she,
so he sheltered me for a price
Voracious imagination unshackled
no overflow of joy in living
tethered tightly in the mind
freedom in life is terror
I remained bound by uncertainty
Poppet performing tricks
cracked porcelain doll
Offenbach’s bird aria
anyone can wind me up
or wear me down
They were in love with an automaton
dissociated darling designed to flirt
disembodied clockwork child
cold to the touch
Unaware I wasn’t real
Playing the trickster – show the world
my feints, its folly, crafting identity to fan
imaginations’ pyre rising unbidden
conflagration, melted with love
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring riot
Fighting for a voice, rage to master
never abandoning creation
the burning art he inspired
akin to spiritual suicide
Maria Anna Mozart’s lost works
At the tattered end of ashen tears
shards of translucent ceramics
tides of words, melody, and color
remain elegies of self possession
now I write my own songs
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
Join 441 other subscribers
Denise Levertov
When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.
Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.
Robert Anton Wilson
Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).
Witold Gombrowicz
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Gustav Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Dušan “Charles” Simić
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Monique Wittig
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
W.S. Merwin
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
Thomas Aquinas
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Chromapoetica 