Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Anca Mihaela Bruma reads and writes



Rhetoric Introspection 




I do not know what to regret anymore...

that I cannot reach you through our memories,

that an insane song cannot touch your soul,

or that you reversed yourself on the other side of Life?!...



I watched how spring drained from us

and not even a curved second could see anymore

the Miracle from us!...



Not even my own flying is vertical anymore

and I remain with my wings sealed

running barefoot on the shells of Time

on the look for that plenary Love

which you had promised along a sunset...



You stole the jewels of Time from beneath my eyelids...

just one white night struggled to reach the cloud's temple

and I do not have shores to reach.... anymore...

I just got lost in the morning known by nobody!...




Music by Johnny Alici - "I Am Tired"



Robert Lee Haycock shoots

Sky

 

A. V. Koshy writes



An Epic on Childhood - 12 - Rimbaud's Boat

w t f
e o o
u w r
s a t
e i h
d t e
heavy rains to fall
then make them
frail voyagers
origami creatures
come to sail and sink
drinking brown tea, their death, on the choppy oceans of their brief

        lives
our puddles
over which i squatted, watched them soggify
tried to dry
but they would still tear
and die,
the ink from the notebook page
run like
blue snot or tears
down their bodies
well, i and my sister
never, did, cry
at their demise -
only an end -
but look up at the sky as
w t f
e o o
u w r
s a t
e i h
d t e
ftw
next heavy...


Image result for pink floyd paper planes images

Ra Sh writes

Rolland Garros

Match One 
Serena rules the base line 
Moving Kvitova like a chess piece 
Till a drop shot in the fore court 
Leaves her stranded 
On the red clay court. 
6-2, 6-4 the score reads. 
The players shake out the red clay 
From their Nike Air Max Mirabella 3 shoes.

Match Two 
Maria grunts into another 
Cross court shot 
That makes Azarenka slide, 
The ball just beyond her reach, 
On the red clay court. 
6-4, 7-6 the score reads. 
The players shake out the red clay 
From their Wilson Rush Pro Clay Lady shoes.

Match Three 
Bouchard’s ombre striped 
Nike slam dress lifts in the wind 
As she reaches high for the lob 
From Radwanska’s Babolat Lite racket 
On the red clay court. 
6-1, 6-3 the score reads. 
The players shake out the red clay 
From their Asics GEL-Solution Speed shoes.

End Game 
Omega reads the time 
At 20:00 GMT in Bastar. 
The armoured vehicles move into 
the village. Heckler & Koch MP 5 guns 
spew bullets. fleeing men shot with 
Auto 9 mm 1A pistols. huts burnt,
women bludgeoned with rifle butts, 
dragged into MPVs. the blood of the shot 
tribals running into the earth forming 
a red clay ground. 
20 men, 15 women the score reads. 
The Cobras pick out the clotting blood 
From their regulation boots.

 Image result for roland-garros images

Monday, May 30, 2016

Alex Krivtsov shoots

Dorin Popa writes



NO WAY BACK

sweet  and  spacious  are  all

before  they  jump
on  your  back,
full  is  the  breast  while
you  can  see  it  full
and  silvery  are  the  paths
until  you  take
the  first  move
sweet  and  spacious  are  all
as  long  as  you  think
you  can  still  come  back




The Rite of the Silver Path -- John Harris

A. V. Koshy writes



An Epic on Childhood - 11 - Pink Floyd

child of the universe
hundreds of paper-planes
in a green field of nuts and crosses
graves, headstones and angels
paper bullets and rubbers shot up with a rubberband, or the four forefingers
fly
c i r c l i n g a l l o v e r
then they
f
a
l
l
o
u
t
d
o
w
n
d
r
o
p
dead, ir-radi-o-active-ate
the blue sky.
paper boats, guess the colour
guess the number
guess, guess
chalk battleships
endless paper rockets
goodbye -





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhWKSFkC3eY

Peter Bollington writes



One Moment, Please (1972)

Remember the lovers
Pulling hairs on each other's thighs
laughing
Racing to the out-house
Caressing death into the golden moon
Eating and rolling their eyes
Screaming with the ambulance
Waiting in the cold
Examining
Leaves, flowers, animals

 Image result for golden moon painting
Golden Moon -- Lauren Marems

Kyp Harness and Allison Grayhurst respond



Kyp Harness: I am from Sarnia, Ontario, and I’ve made 13 independent albums of my original songs that have about 200 songs on them, and I also create Mortimer the Slug, a webcomic, which I have been doing for about 3 years. I have written two books, published by McFarland in the US, "The Art of Laurel and Hardy" and "The Art of Charlie Chaplin." My novel 'Wigford Rememberies' was just published by Nightwood Editions; www.kypharness.net

Allison Grayhurst: I am a vegan. I live in Toronto with my family. I am a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three of my poems have been nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, and I have over 850 poems published in more than 375 international journals and anthologies. I have published twelve books of poetry, six collections, and eight chapbooks, and another chapbook “Currents” is pending publication. I also sculpt, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com

DV: How did both of you get started in your creative lives, especially in the word game?

KH: I've been writing stories and drawing pictures almost since I can first remember. I've also always written songs in my head.  

AG: Writing and an appreciation of language has always been a part of my life, as both of my parents were writers/journalists. Writing just seemed like a natural way of expression to me from the beginning. When I was around five we moved to Spain for a year so my father could work on a novel. My mother and I would write stories together when I was in elementary school, though I didn’t start writing poetry until my first year of high school. I started sculpting and working in clay in my early 20s, and had a phenomenal teacher/mentor and friend in the late Elizabeth Fraser Williamson.

DV: So you both got started very early, to the point where it was almost a biological development. Was there ever a time when either of you became jaded about the communication process and seriously considered doing something else with your lives?

AG: No, for me, writing poetry is like eating, an essential part of my well-being and existence. I don’t like the publishing part of writing and stopped publishing for fifteen years - part of those reasons were practical – raising our two children - but during that time I always wrote and always planned to get that work out in book form. Yes, often I have felt the futility of being a poet and it has arrested my ability to create, but in the end I have learned that if I am going to continue on, I have to write.

KH: Yes, sometimes it gets discouraging and the only reason I keep doing it is because inspiration keeps coming to me, whether it's about writing or drawing or singing or playing .... otherwise I wouldn't do it, because I sure wouldn't try to make things happen creatively.  I've accepted that I don't really seem to have a choice, and if I try to stifle inspiration it only makes me unhappy and sick, so I just let it go.
DV: Allison, you've obviously been a publishing success. What was it about the "publishing part of writing" that turned you off?

AG: I am a very private person and I don’t like putting myself out there or being exposed. I’d rather not, but it is a duty I owe to my art, so I did what I felt compelled to do, as a part of me feels that the completion of art only comes when sharing it.

DV: You're both multi-talented
-- poetry, prose, sculpture, music, cartoons -- but if for some reason, Apollo's jealous retribution for overweening hubris or some such, you could only practice one art exclusively, which one would it be?

KH: I guess if I were forced to pick one it would be music since you can always get an instantaneous reaction from music, and through the years that I've been writing other stuff, which can often be a long slog, the music has kept me going just by playing it, and playing it with and for other people.

AG: I enjoying sculpting, get a lot out of it and inspiration from it, but I don’t have to do it, and I have had to let it go at different times for extended periods of my life. Writing poetry for me is an integral part of myself and an ongoing necessity, so I would choose that.

DV: Do you remember your first "successful" piece? (I don't mean commercially successful or popular among your circle -- I mean the first one that succeeded in inner terms of self-satisfaction that it had been done "right.") Would it still pass the self-approval test today?
KH: No, not really -- they're all successful to me, otherwise I wouldn't have written them.  I can think of a lot of failures I've abandoned or thrown away -- but if I've completed them, they're successes.
DV: Kyp, in your estimation, what's the ratio between "keepers" and "losers"? Has your throwaway rate changed much over the years?

KH: Most of my time I've continued to write and write and write, and I let the stuff that I remember stay on. If I forget it I figure it's not worth remembering and I let it be forgotten. I do think more of my stuff is keep-worthy now as I get older because I'm more focused and know what I want more, maybe.

AG: The first success I had as a writer was when I found my voice. It was during the process of writing a poetic-prose novel when I was nineteen. I still have it in a filing cabinet. Everything I wrote before that I’ve gotten rid of. I would never publish it, and I haven’t looked at it for many years, but there are probably small parts of it (with much editing) that I would be artistically proud of.

DV: Allison, what was it about? Do its themes still continue through your current work? Has your voice changed?

AG: It was called Letters To.. and they were a series of poetic love letters to a person, but in actuality they were letters to God. My voice has evolved, changed, undergone many transformations, but it is still the same voice, coming from the same place within me, and all my work remains to and for, and ultimately, about God.

DV: Having a shared artistic interest probably strengthens your marriage in many ways, but I imagine that there must be times when your individual artistic obsessions and tensions must be counter-productive as well? Do either of you have any examples of this that you wouldn't mind sharing?

AG:
I fell in love with Kyp when I first heard him perform his song “Wandering Heart,” and listening to his new creations when he hits the mark always catches my breath in wonderment. In my estimation, Kyp is in the top few greatest artists that have ever lived, and sharing this life with him is a consistent blessing and inspiration for me as a person and as an artist.

KH: Nothing has ever been counter-productive in my relationship with Allison.  She's one of the greatest artists and greatest humans ever, so it's a privilege to live and work beside her, plus she seems to be as insane as I am.

AG: I honestly can’t say that being artists has ever been counter-productive to our marriage. We have been together for 27 years and I have always honored and admired Kyp as an artist and all of his creative works. Throughout the years, even while raising young children, I have felt the same respect afforded to me. In fact, being artists in some way is the pulse of our relationship, and in many ways, it keeps us both alive as individuals, as well as our love.

DV: Kyp, you refer to yourselves as being "insane," but in this conversation you seem to be more sane than most couples -- and certainly most artists -- that I know. So, what kind of insanity are you referring to?

KH: I guess the insanity is being sane in an insane world or insane in a sane world. Either way, I don't much care.

DV: Are all of your children artistic too?

AG: We have two children, our oldest is 18. She is multi-talented in film, photography and writing, and is also strongly interested in politics. She attended a high school for the arts and is now in her first year at university majoring in film. Our son is 14 and is also attending a high school for the arts, with a focus on drama and visual arts. His most recent passions and pursuits have been archery and kung-fu.

DV: I'd like to give you both an opportunity to talk about your work processes, in some detail. Do you treat your art like a profession, with a regular daily schedule and routine? Do you just wait to be guided by inspiration? Is it mainly a matter of "spontaneous creation" or a long process of pre-planning and extensive revision? Or, for you, is the process something else entirely?
AG: My journey with writing poetry has spanned over decades and my process has undergone many changes. I started writing poetry in high school during classes, then mostly at donut shops or in my room. When my children were young or I had to go to work early, I would wake up at 5 am to get time in before the household got up. Mostly and recently I write when walking my dog. I used to write every day. It was a necessity but also a discipline. Now, I wait for the absolute need to write. Sometimes it happens at inconvenient times - making dinner, in the shower, when trying to fall asleep, etc. Sometimes I write daily, sometimes a week can pass. For a while, I tried to force myself to stop writing, to halt the inspiration and ignore the words in my head, but it ended up making me feel spiritually and physically ill. Now, I really don’t care when I write, it happens often but nothing routine. I usually write in the mornings, always long hand with pen and paper, stick it in a drawer, edit it in long hand until I type it up and edit it a bit again. The last batch of poems I wrote took about six months before I put them on my computer. In terms of editing, I do edit my work, but it is not an intellectual endeavour for me. Writing for me is a visceral process, and hopefully the poem has a rhythm and life of its own – if that is not there, the poem gets trashed. Poems come to me whole and quickly, if they need editing it is usually in small amounts for claritys sake or grammatical corrections. I keep only about one tenth of what I write.

KH: I just wait until it comes. I used to try and force things but that doesn't work for me and often just made me pissed off ... so I just wait until it gets going, and then sometimes later I might have to force it and work at it to get it finished, but in a way that's the easy part.

DV: Since you both do more than one type of art, is the process the same for all of them? Allison, is sculpting an extension of writing poetry, in terms of how you approach it, or something completely different? Kyp, I see more of a continuity between writing and music, but what about between cartooning and music?
KH: It's all just writing in one form or another, since it's all about ideas .... ideas you put into drawn lines, or notes of music, or into a dance. The form the art takes is not that important.

AG: Sculpting is something I do, but being a poet is an integral part of my being. I sculpt when I am inspired to. It takes months to finish a piece, and it requires a lot of patience on my part. It is like a sensual meditation. At times I have sculpted daily, at other times there are long stretches when I don’t sculpt at all.

DV: You've both identified your chief artistic mode of expression as being part of your essence, your very being. How did you branch out from the soul-synonymous art you've always done into some new, and different, medium?

KH: No, I said it’s all the same .... it's about ideas, whether they come through movement, singing, drawing, writing or whatever.  If you’re an artist it doesn't matter how they come out.

AG: For me, sculpting offered another form to express creativity when I wasn’t writing. I was drawn to the tactile and grounding nature of working with clay.

DV: In your various artistries, do you have any guides, role models? Specifically, what have you learned from them?

KH: My earliest guide was Walt Disney. Then he was replaced by Laurel and Hardy ... and they were replaced by James Joyce ... then he was replaced by John Lennon and Bob Dylan, who were replaced by Dostoevsky and Henry Miller, with garnishes of Kerouac and Faulkner and Virginia Woolf on the side ... and overall the poetry of William Blake and Jesus rained down on them -- and in reality none of them ever replaced the other, but joined in a nurturing web of soul and brilliance that taught me to how to see, and taught me who was doing the seeing and what was being seen... Until now, when I have no guides and role models.

DV: Here's another nice mess.... Now I have to think about how Mortimer the Slug operates in a Joycean universe. Maybe Samuel Beckett would be a more obvious kind of model. Hmmm. Maybe I'm overthinking the relationship....

AG: As a writer my first and only mentor was Fyodor Dostoevsky. I found him when I was 16 and his work resonated intimately with me, showing me the transformative powers of language. He taught me ruthless honesty, but above all, the necessity of spiritual commitment in art. My second mentor came as my teacher and friend Elizabeth. She was a great sculptor and a formidable woman – fiercely independent, solitary and never relinquishing her joy in artistic discovery even when age started to debilitate her. She was the best possible teacher, as she guided me through the craft of sculpting while giving me room to seek out and pursue my own inspiration.

DV: It's interesting to me that both of you reference Dostoevsky. One of my own strongest literary memories was my teenage reading of the "Grand Inquisitor" section of his "Brothers Karamazov." Certainly its ambiguity and moral relativity and role reversals opened my mind to all sorts of writerly possibilities, some of which I still explore as I contemplate and comment on the life around me. Are there any specifically Canadian contemporary artists you resonate to?

AG: The question has two things I don’t care about as someone who does art or when experiencing art – nationality and time-era. Great art might reflect those things or use them as part of their backdrop, but ultimately it must transcend those barriers, and any art that doesn’t is boring to me. 

KH: I don't recognize nationalistic borders.

DV: Well, then, what about the future? How do you see your art developing from here?

KH: I hope to continue getting deeper into the art, going as far as I can with it.  However many years I've got left to live, I know I'll keep doing it, and for me there's no point in doing it unless I can get to newer deeper places, in whatever medium I'm inspired to work in. That's what makes it exciting for me, and my goal is to keep excited!
AG: I don’t know. I’ve just completed a goal of having all the poems I wanted published published or accepted for publication and it has left space and a sense of freedom inside. I just feel open, patiently in-waiting and somewhat excited to see where my writing takes me next. 

DV: On that note, I'd like to thank both of you for allowing me to intrude into your creative and personal lives. And, of course, I hope we all get to see, or hear, much more of your work.


PS:
AG: I just got a book of selected poems published by Creative Talents Unleashed (CTU Publishing Group) and Kyp's novel was published by Nightwood Editions. Amazon links to both below… maybe you can add those links to the interview?


Sunday, May 29, 2016

ApBob Mitchell

Arlene Corwin writes



Sitting Outside A Day In May 
      
I find myself not only wondering [but] 
Thirsting, needing to know when and how they died, [but]
Thoughts or suffering or not: in short,
The state before and during…

I observe a skin that’s wrinkling,
Drying out and shrinking,
Hear and spy a bird in tree,
See the freshness, spring’s new growth,
The only thing I really see is death, a passing.

I allow myself my breaths,
The moods, desires -
All that goes along,
Forgetting for the most part.

Deep down I see the buds of parting
And an emptiness because
I have no answers.
All that I can do is wait and act and meditate
As if life equaled all time-in-the-world.

Every year in spring
I find I’m writing,
Charting age unconsciously,
Literally marking time.

Not sad, not glad but emptier
Than years before,
(or maybe more).
Noticing, acknowledging a substance;
The substantial underlying all the grandeur.
 
One Day in May -- Birgit Kirke

Paulette Spescha-Montibert writes

No more peaches
in our vineyard
my friend
no more corn in the fields
no red poppy
the rice is ripening
in the paddy
persimmons
pomegranates
swing
in our all blue
Korean autumn
let's relish the now
there is no yesterday
my friend
let's be happy today
awaiting
the morrow
 
 Persimmons 1 -- Jennifer Park

A. V. Koshy writes



An Epic on Childhood - 10 - The First Cut

the mark of a fresh wound
on a small child's knee, bleeding
tastes, like tears, of hard rock salt.


 Image result for bruised knee of child

Pramila Khadun writes

The lanes of love

Love is not an open field
Where we run about joyously
Without a fixed destination,
Spreading our arms to light.

It has three lanes,
Very definite and as clear
As the crystal moon,
Glittering like a wreath of pearls.

The first lane is shady, flowery,
As pellucid as Spring
Where star-bright companions
Meet in a 'love at first sight',
Like the glinting dew, twinkling all bright.
'You are destined for me', say the hearts
And the lovers nod their heads in glee
With serendipitous gleam in their eyes.

The second lane is a fast track.
Meetings and marriages are arranged
And love too, albeit in a different way,
Evoking empathy and tenderness.
Hearts are unlocked and love flows
As slowly as it grows.
Sweetly like a convincing crescendo
Confidence is established
And the ride may be bumpy or smooth.

The third lane is full of pathos,
Over-flooded with the tears
Of meandering rivers flowing
From the sad eyes of lovers.
It is a meeting of ancient souls,
Interesting and effusive, palpable
That the hearts recognize
With the speed of lightning.

Emotions are intense and pure, a catharsis,
As old as History and as reliable as marble.
There is pain everywhere----
The pain emerging from not seeing,
Not touching, not feeling, not kissing,
Not being able to hold each other,
And be together.
Sometimes fate, at other times the world,
Separates the lovers, pining for each other
And sadly enough, death embraces them
To give them the meeting
That life couldn't.

Step not in this third lane
For in this lane
There is sorrow and self-destruction
Unless you are armed with a heart
That defies all,
Breaks all barriers
And conquers all,
For in this lane,
True love reigns.
 
 Image result for 3-lane highway images