Poetry Postcard 13 & A Guest Postcard Poet

Deep into the 44 Postcard Project, several poetic themes are emerging. There are poems about birds, poems about marriage and relationships, and poems that allude to myth.

Osiris and...

Odysseus both have cameos
in the postcard poems.

Poems 12 (Paul Klee, see post here), 13 (photo of Georgia O'Keeffe, poem below) and 17 (painting by Sulamith Wülfing, post to come) are all ekphrastic. Each poem was written in response to a work of fine art featured on its postcard.

Maryland poet Michael Ratcliffe is visiting today to tell us about another postcard poem project. This one was run by the Paris journal Do Not Look at the Sun in 2011. (Mike's poetry blog is here.)

Thanks for visiting Author Amok, Mike!

Paintings, Poems, and Postcards

My poem “Thoughts While Viewing Van Gogh’s Fishing Boats on the Beach at Les Saintes Maries de la Mer” ties in nicely with Laura’s postcard poems project and her discussion of ekphrastic poems.  I wrote the poem for a friend who, when I mentioned I was going to the Netherlands and planned to visit the Van Gogh Museum, told me the painting was her favorite. 

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

She liked the rich colors of the fishing boats, and said she felt a sense of sadness when viewing the painting. So, there I was, in the museum gallery, viewing her favorite Van Gogh without her. The poem came out of my engagement with the painting, and wishing my friend was with me to enjoy it. Most of the poem came to me quickly; the ending took longer to find. After several drafts, it seemed right to move from viewing the painting to imagining being in the painting, and to end by asking if she would be in one of the boats sailing away, or standing with me on the beach.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saintes-Maries_(Van_Gogh_series)

A month or so after writing the poem, I ran across the quirky Paris-based journal Do Not Look at the Sun. The theme of the Spring 2011 issue was “Postcards from Paris,” with poems printed on postcards and mailed to various addresses around the world.

Until that time, I hadn’t considered publishing the poem, but the journal’s theme intrigued me, and I had a postcard of the painting to offer if needed. Why not have a bit of fun when publishing a poem? The poem was accepted, and copies mailed on postcards to random locations, including one to my friend.

The message/poem on Mike's postcard. Posted with permission of the author.

Do Not Look at the Sun continues its quirky themes and distribution methods.  The Spring 2012 issue’s theme was “Paper Plane Poems;” my son and I engaged with poetry in a new way by flying paper plane poems at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. The video of our flights on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZfhysBLUxurWNz68w3eJ2w/videos. 

The theme of the next issue is “Stories Sent to Sea.” I have had a poem accepted, but the issue apparently is delayed.  If it does come out, I will be sending out poems in bottles from undisclosed locations along the Potomac, Patapsco, or Chesapeake Bay.

And, by the way, my friend’s response to the poem’s concluding questions was that she was in a boat on the beach waiting for me.

Thanks for sharing the poem, Mike.

Michael Ratcliffe is a geographer, who after years of writing memos, academic papers, and Federal Register notices, started writing poetry again. His poems have appeared in Symmetry Pebbles, Loch Raven Review, Little Patuxent Review, Do Not Look at the Sun, Poetry Quarterly, The Copperfield Review, Three Line Poetry, Dead Beats Literary Blog, The Beatnik, and You Are Here: the Journal of Creative Geography. When he is not writing poetry, he manages geographic programs at the Census Bureau and teaches population geography at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. 

I love how the postcard page at Do Not Look at the Sun is set up. If you hover your mouse above a postcard, you can flip between the front (art) and the back (poem). I hope you'll have time to check out the other postcards/poems at the journal's website.

There are many directions one can take with an ekphrastic poem. Some of them are:

• finding a personal connection, as Mike did in  “Thoughts While Viewing Van Gogh’s Fishing Boats on the Beach at Les Saintes Maries de la Mer;”
• speaking in the voice of a figure in the image (remember Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George?);
• using the visual elements of the artwork to express emotion.

I took the third approach with Postcard 13. It is a famous image of the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, taken by Alfred Stieglitz. (Find the photograph here.)

As I've mentioned, I have to a tendency to over-do visual images, and this photograph is filled with small details. Composing the poem was a matter of asking myself which details best tell the story, as I see it.

Thinking about Georgia

After Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, Alfred Stieglitz

dressed in his bulky sweater,

thin cushions at the edge of --

not really a garden --

more a bed, leaves

dark as spades, her skirt

white as teeth in a face,

she looks right or

somewhere else, not at his lens --

a sketchpad, her boots, a tray

he takes it all into the frame,

corner of the house,

watercolor paints

on the dirt path beside her

a fluted, ordinary glass --

already, the water is muddy

by Laura Shovan

Obsessions

I would probably never write a thing if I didn't pay attention to my obsessions.

I'm not talking about chocolate, much as I crave it.

He drives me wild.

This is a different type of obsession -- when something catches your eye or ear and you immediately feel, "I want to learn everything I can about that."

Normal people don't let these "catch your ear" moments develop into full obsessions, but doing so is key to how I function as a writer.

Writers have obsessions, and that's a good thing. The more involved we become with an idea, concept, or tidbit from history, the more deeply we can express these things in a poem, play, story, or essay. I know it's a true obsession when I am researching or writing and I go into hyper focus. My kids know not to interrupt me then. It's almost a physical pain to be called out of what I'm working on to help find a missing shoe.

My current obsessions are:

• The Roc-A-Jets, 1950s all-girl rockabilly band based in Baltimore
• This painting, by Vincent van Gogh:

All it took was one look at that ocean of a beard, and I thought, "That painting might be a good subject for a poem." It only took thirty minutes of clicking around the Internet to find out that van Gogh had an uncharacteristically close relationship with his subject, postmaster Joseph Roulin, and Roulin's family.

What happens when obsessions collide? I don't have mental space for them both.

I'm writing down as much as I can about Roulin now, when the idea has energy. As long as I capture the initial impulse, I can come back to Roulin and van Gogh later.

Then, it's back to work on my piece about the Roc-A-Jets. Roulin looks like he would have enjoyed a good rockabilly show.

Stay tuned.

One of my favorite examples of a writer clearly obsessed with a subject appears in the novel The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje (here is one blogger's review). Chapter 7 covers Kip's bomb squad training in the kind of attentive detail that can only come from deep research.

Come out to Ahh, Coffee! in Annapolis this Saturday evening and to hear the end result of one of my obsessions. I'll be featured at a reading, along with  my friend Fernando Quijano III. This will be my first public reading of a long ekphrastic poem. It's based on a work of fringe art -- the title of which I can't repeat here. Seriously.

Amok in Revision

When I'm teaching poetry revision to elementary schoolers, I write on the board: Re/vision.

We parse the word. "Re"  means to do again. For "vision," I draw a pair of goofy glasses on the board. Revision doesn't mean editing or proofreading. It literally means to see again, with fresh eyes.

Often, those fresh eyes see something I don't want to look at. Like an entire scene or poem from a book that's not working. Ouch. But my revision glasses work like the glasses I put on every morning. They help me see better. If I tried to drive the story without them, I'd be all over the road.

Today, I'm revising my middle grade yearbook-in-verse, THE COUGAR CHRONICLE.

Here is a persona poem in the voice of a girl from my fictional fifth grade class. My writer friend Marjory Bancroft said, "I got nothing in this poem -- no sense of story, rhythm, character, personality."

Ode to My Twin
By Sydney Costley

I love the whooshing sound
when the glass doors open
and kids rush out for recess.
Basketball, four square, tag,

Double Dutch, monkey bars,
laughing, yelling, running.
But then Ashlie had to start
teaching all the girls cheers.
If Mary Rose wants to
prance around copying
stuck up Ashlie Hauk
I got no time for her.
I told her so.
And she said, "Fine."
I went behind the school to hide.
My sister Sonya followed me.
She said, "Cheerleading's dumb.
I'd rather make a jump shot
than jump for joy when some boy scores."
We played hoops one on one
for the rest of recess, me and my
number one BFF,
sister Sonya.

I sat on Marjory's comments for months, hoping I could rescue the poem. I liked how it described recess, touched on problems Sydney was having with her friend (a thread that shows up later in the story), and developed the relationship between Sydney and her twin.

But the revision glasses told me it was time to chuck the poem and start over.

I used one of my favorite tricks and tried a different form, keeping in mind the story and character elements I liked in the original. So...let's see if an ekphrastic poem will work better for Sydney. She's a hands-on learner, likes phys ed, recess and Art. I took out a Van Gogh portrait that I use with elementary schoolers when we write self-portrait poems. Here is Sydney's new poem.


Self Portrait
by Sydney Costley

Miss Hill said we could make a portrait
just like in art class, except instead of colors
we could use words to make the picture.
And I remembered that portrait
Ms. Musay showed us in Art
where Vincent Van Gogh painted his face green!
Blue green swirls all around him,
vines of blue crawling on his jacket.
It looked like his clothes wanted to move.
I know how that feels.
My name is Sydney.
My color is green.
My words say there is green grass behind me,
under my feet on the soccer field,
under my head when I look up at the sky.
My face has blue lines curving down
when Mary Rose spends recess learning cheers
from Ashlie Hauk instead of shooting hoops with me.
When I'm running, I like the way
the sun shines on my dark blue windbreaker
like waves sliding across the ocean.
I wish I could jump into my portrait poem,
forget about school and dive into that ocean.
I'd swim away.

What do you think? Did the revision glasses do their job?

(Sydney is thinking about playing with the shape of her poem, to give it a swirly feeling like Van Gogh's painting. -- Still revising!)