Ekphrasis X 2021 Virtual Exhibition
SET 3. Visual Artist Initiators and Writer Responders, cont.
H. SHARON GARNER, Hat, Chair, and Window, photograph. Response by poet ELIZABETH VRENIOS: Your Hat Still on the Chair.
I. DAVE FLAIM AND SARAH WAGNER, Radiolarian, photomicrograph. Response by poet JONATON PAZER: Radiolarian.
J. SHANTI BENOIT and SEV ICKES, The First Star, collage. Response by author Nancy Wallace Nelson: Velvet Green Ulva.
SET 3. Visual Artist Initiators and Writer Responders, cont.
H. SHARON GARNER, Hat, Chair, and Window, photograph. Response by poet ELIZABETH VRENIOS: Your Hat Still on the Chair.
I. DAVE FLAIM AND SARAH WAGNER, Radiolarian, photomicrograph. Response by poet JONATON PAZER: Radiolarian.
J. SHANTI BENOIT and SEV ICKES, The First Star, collage. Response by author Nancy Wallace Nelson: Velvet Green Ulva.
Initiating artist SHARON GARNER: Hat, Chair, and Window, photograph.
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A note from the responding poet: I was delighted the first moment I saw this photograph. It spoke volumes with such an intensity that I felt as if it was a poem in itself. The bars of dark and light entering the picture through the curtains and across the room, through the ornate chair culminating on the hat image, all provocative and inventive. The picture already tells a story that I felt I could respond to, and the image urged me to speak to the reasons that the hat was left on the chair. The artist presented a broad palate of images that allowed me to speak to the amazing ideas behind the photo." E K-V. |
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Your Hat, Still on the Chair by responding poet, ELIZABETH KIRKPATRICK-VRENIOS when our room was as numinous as words, when we yearned for the future, that burned in the air, there were moments we didn’t see the darkening gold of the past that stole through the curtains casting a barred shadow on the chair. You and I, distracted from the truth of silence, didn’t realize the setting sun weighed more than the horizon or that cardboard devils were everywhere. Even the angels turned their backs to us. Lies we buried burst wordlessly into the approaching dusk. You moved forward without me, I knew you would. I asked you to. |
Initiating artists SARAH C. WAGNER and DAVID FLAIM Multilocular Radiolarian, photomicrograph.
Radiolarian by responding poet JONATHAN PAZER
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She hung in the trusses dispassionately, champagne still clinging to her side. Christened Radiolarian-- an inspired name for this ship. A wild and cosmic inversion of the scale of our ambitions. Also a fine warning. Be careful who you call infinitesimal. We are like a tiny, microscopic sea creature that awakens to contemplate all the seven seas of Earth. The once transcendent wonder of those seven, seven times vast to the mariner’s earthbound eyes, now a quaint notion, easily dispelled from orbit. One world. One world ocean—bounded, finite. A thin delicate coating of life that sheaths our rocky, water planet, traversable, knowable, home. |
Radiolarian swallowed again and again, stuffed with cargo, supplies and sailors. Then she was full, and we made ready to slip the clamps of port. Cocooned in their berths the boldest crew: accountants, milliners, baristas, astrogators... called to serve aboard this city that takes flight. Cloistered within her insulated flanks, pocked by acre-wide portholes, now all luminous with promises, kissed ever so lightly by time, we scream through the white, featureless, alternate infinity of hyperspace. * * * A single mote of dust, back home in my living room, shimmering in the late afternoon sun, as compared to earth, is incomprehensibly larger than this great vessel, set off against the infinite expanse of our own, specific universe, the one into which we have this day set forth. |
Poet's comment:
A Radiolarian is a tiny microscopic sea creature that is among the greater class of zooplankton and more specifically it is a protozoan with an intricate silica-based shell or skeleton. These come in a very wide variety of shapes. They are predatory and eat other things smaller than them…
As for the poem, as soon as I first saw the image, my mind went immediately to the white void that surrounded it and the fact that the object had no identifiable scale. Even though I could guess that it was something small, it still took me to the place of imagination where the scale might not be what was expected.
As soon as I thought of it as big, it immediately popped into my head that it was not in “ordinary space” and that it could be in hyperspace. So the mission of the poem was born. - JP
A Radiolarian is a tiny microscopic sea creature that is among the greater class of zooplankton and more specifically it is a protozoan with an intricate silica-based shell or skeleton. These come in a very wide variety of shapes. They are predatory and eat other things smaller than them…
As for the poem, as soon as I first saw the image, my mind went immediately to the white void that surrounded it and the fact that the object had no identifiable scale. Even though I could guess that it was something small, it still took me to the place of imagination where the scale might not be what was expected.
As soon as I thought of it as big, it immediately popped into my head that it was not in “ordinary space” and that it could be in hyperspace. So the mission of the poem was born. - JP
SHANTI BENOIT and SEV ICKES, initiating art: The First Star, designed paper collage.
Response by poet NANCY WALLACE-NELSON: Velvet Green Vulva
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The heart of Mother Earth
pulses midst sparkling galaxies, as she weaves her seamless rounds of fertility. Earth suckles golden fields, nurtures mountains and hills, bears fruit in sweet profusion. Mother Earth’s velvet green vulva undulates gracefully, as she is luxuriously fertilized by the strong rolling waves of Father Sky. |
The majestic Moon
sits regal and bright, eternal witness to the blessed coupling. The Tree of Knowledge, man’s break for freedom and fulfillment, stands blackened by hubris. Its stark frigidity bears mortal threat to the sacred coupling that once kept man safe and warm within the opulent folds of Mother Earth’s velvet green vulva. |
