#ekphrasis

[alexanderbayon]

Joris Hoefnagel, folio 40 in Mira calligraphiae monumenta (after 1590)

Butterfly, snakeshead, English walnut and sweet cherry

from here

[betweenthetimeandsound]

Mary of Magdalene

--prompt from @trickstersaint (8 April)

It is morning, and swans swirl around your sanctuary. You've seen suffering through His wretched hands-- trembling for a rescue rope, they ache for your embrace-- something which you possessed when you grabbed His feet.

He trembles with horror, like when you wandered through the streets, demons hiding in your blood orange hair as orange blossoms wilt across your feet. They assumed that you gave them to Him when you anointed His feet with your oil. Did it give you satisfaction? Divinity was your prize.

Yet with His glistening form in the back of your eye, descendants still imagine your ecstasy, curving back to meet God with sweat and sweet skins. Your hair undoes itself, time and time again; jasmines scatter across the floor as your devotion reignites again, like kindling in the longest night.

What will you tell the prophets? What would you demand of their stories, to bring your dainty face to light? Shattered perfume blossoms give you delight, but you will not see God in a pomegranate flower?

The swans swirl, and are ready to call. Yet you hesitate on which one would bring you to your righeous fate.

[miiseryloves]

After my mom's old dance clothes.

[contremineur]

Anthony Hill, The little street

from here

Johannes Vermeer, Het Straatje (oil on canvas, 1657-8)

see here

[waywordsstudio]

𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗪𝗮𝘆𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱𝘀: “𝗡𝘂𝗻𝗰 𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘂𝗺” -

𝑃𝑛𝑒𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝑚𝑢𝑚𝑚𝑦 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑗𝑜𝑖𝑒 𝑑𝑒 𝑣𝑖𝑣𝑟𝑒

𝑊ℎ𝑜 𝑤𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝?

Another ekphrastic poem, a reflection upon visual arts, but this a bit more ironic in tone and topic!

https://waywordsstudio.com/verse/nunc-est-bibendum/

[othellho]

"Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, or The Mulata" by Natasha Trethewey, after the painting by Diego Velàzquez, ca. 1619.

[kekidion]

tbh relic fragment from explorers and harmony scarves from super mystery dungeon are the best things in pmd to write ekphraseis with ngl

[uwmspeccoll]

Celebrating Brenda Cárdenas as Wisconsin’s Poet Laureate!

Today we’re thrilled to celebrate Wisconsin’s new Poet Laureate, Brenda Cárdenas! Cárdenas is the author of 2023’s Trace (Red Hen Press) and Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009), as well as several chapbooks. She also served as co-editor of Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest, for which she was recognized by Chicago Women in Publishing. She served as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate from 2010-2012, and is Professor Emerita of English here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Cárdenas frequently collaborates with artists in other mediums, and recently her poetry has been set to music by the Greek trio Starwound, and by composer Daniel Alfonso. Much of the work in her recent collection, Trace, highlights her inter-art, inter-textual, ekphrastic practice, as poems recognize the work they respond to, and follow from: prints, paintings, sculptures, photography, film, and other poems. This ekphrastic impulse manifests in incisive, multi-sensory description that surrenders to memory, or imperative, or history, or feeling. Responding to the art of El Anatsui, she demands: “Plant / feet so firm, will takes root. Plant will / so wide, ears sprout ancestral maize.”

Her poems conflate human bodies with material, modern life, and with capital-N-Nature – not a flattening, but an enchantment, as objects, landscapes, people are animated by and through one another: “How many stones did I have / to swallow before my legs / believed their own weight?” Grief over a dead sparrow found in one’s bathtub. Grief over a family drowned in a river seeking a better life. A litany of plastics overwhelming the page and the planet. Playful language of children’s literature – P is for… — juxtaposed with a “blood-splashed underpass” and “peyote tongues.” Religious iconography. A stone that “hissed like a radiator” and chatter that scattered “like mice”.

As Mauricio Kilwein Guevara puts it in the introduction to her 2005 chapbook, From the Tongues of Brick and Stone, “These feathered poems come with heart and lungs, bones, muscles, sinews, claws, and tongue.”

Cárdenas will serve as our Poet Laureate for the next two years.

Linocuts by Jeff Abbey Maldonado, and featured in From the Tongues of Brick and Stone.

Read more poetry by Brenda Cárdenas.

Listen to a recording of Alfonso’s “Para los Tin-Tun-Teros.”