Glorious meeting at Najwa's studio

What a great time at Najwa's studio. The ambiance and discussion couldn't be better, surrounded by Najwa's and Shakir's beautiful paintings and our group of creative spirited artists. It is fascinating to hear from each other about how we nurture and exercise our art forms. It is all of fascinating, hilarious, striking, and magic hearing how the common creative spirit motivates and inspires us in our diversity of painters, poets, novelists, mathematician, scientist.

Najwa  thank you for a great evening, the food, drink, and discussion could not be better. And thank you for introducing us to your very talented and dear friends Ed and Shakir.  Please see Shakir's stunning work at http://alousiart.com/.

Your delicious Iraqi food and warm Iraqi hospitality were gracious beyond bounds --- wa alaikum salaam.

A poem inspired by Picasso

Mary's recent postings remind me of the important ways that poets are influenced by art.  I offer here the opening poem of my new collection (Red Has No Reason, Plain View Press, 2010) -- it came from my viewing of a sequence of several drawings by Picasso, works that progress from a carefully detailed ink drawing to a sketch of a few lines that, with extreme brevity, also gives us the bull.

     How Did It Come to This?     by JoAnne Growney


     Prints on exhibit walls—
     notions of a bull by Picasso,
     whose clear eye directed a deft hand.
     Careful likeness becomes surreal
     design then sketch
     and in the end
     a few fine lines.
     Poems also we make
     by erasing.

Another Ekphrastic Poem

Picasso's Insomnia After Final Self Portrait

idnight in the emerald garden,
and I long for the moon to drown
me in its shadow, the sky to soothe
with its blackness, for stars to stave off
the unshaven stubble of insomnia,
heavy and brown like mud.

If I could dream, my body would race
backward with the swiftness of the Seine.
I’d dance with a barefoot maiden
in a cornfield, my green forehead
obscured by a wide straw hat.
I’d inhale the apple of her hair,
see the lake’s mirror in her blue eyes.
I’d strut in the willows, limbs nimble
with the greed of youth.

Still awake, I find sleep slow-footed,
dragging its shackles.



Mary L Westoctt

Ghazals

Poetic Form: Ghazal



The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets--and typically no more than fifteen--that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet's signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet's own name or a derivation of its meaning.

Traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions, ghazals are often sung by Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani musicians. The form has roots in seventh-century Arabia, and gained prominence in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thanks to such Persian poets as Rumi and Hafiz. In the eighteenth-century, the ghazal was used by poets writing in Urdu, a mix of the medieval languages of Northern India, including Persian. Among these poets, Ghalib is the recognized master.

Other languages that adopted the ghazal include Hindi, Pashto, Turkish, and Hebrew. The German poet and philosopher Goethe experimented with the form, as did the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

PIcasso's Last Self Portrait

A green fawn flees undaunted
by figs or orphan eyes,
hungry for a face fig-green,
stubble awed by angles and lines,
nostrils greedy for tears,
circling. Abiding desire to flee
absinthe, his face spikes blue,
steeple black against the dangling
retina of a moon. Greedy for steeples
and stars, rising in awed angles
and lines, a greedy orphan circles
the One.
 
Mary L. Westcott

This is an ekphrastic poem. I can't copy and paste the portrait...