Voicing Art Book
exploring the cartography of the unseen through space, place and time
Our Debut Book
Voicing Art:
Poetry of Space | Place | Time
is now available!
Poetry inspired by works of art, the art of nature and the exploration of beauty, perception and insight through the cartography of the unseen.
Excerpt Poems
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
Written In Response To:
‘Unwoven Light’
By Artist:
Soo Sunny Park
This was a “spontaneous challenge poem” written during the 10-minute break at the Words & Art Poetry Reading in Houston, Texas.
SPONTANEOUS POEM | ROCK N' ROLL
Rock n’ roll is dead –
they say.
But I say it’s alive + well.
She rocks + rolls in glitter
eyeshadow,
reveling in the curves
that are now disdained.
We hesitate to look
at ourselves
in the shards –
fearing the distortion –
we are already too fat.
We already strain
to be pretty girls.
What we are isn’t good enough.
But, why do we glory in these
spectacular rounded forms –
these organic shapes
in a beautiful glass room
+ they shame us in ourselves
+ are shunned?
Something is broken
when art is more beautiful
than human form,
when little girls cry
because they cannot see their beauty.
When a famous actor who
played Tootsie
cries in an interview –
because dressing as a woman
+ told by makeup that they’ve done
as well as they can
when he asks to be made beautiful –
he realizes all the fabulous, interesting
women he has lost the opportunity
to know
because of some warped idea
of beauty
we all hallucinate is real.
Something is broken
when art is more beautiful
than human form,
when little girls cry
because they cannot see their beauty,
+ boys turned to men
cry because of what they have
lost.
THE VIOLIN
Written In Response To:
‘Large-Scale Political Paintings’
By Artist:
Al Salzman
This poem was inspired by the smaller-scale ‘rondels’ in an exhibit of otherwise massively-scaled paintings.
THE VIOLIN
The stories I could tell you
would make your spirit unbound
to its widest shores
and would break your heart.
They say Robert Johnson
went down to the crossroads
and traded his soul with the Most Unclean.
I think he just had the sorrow of legions
pouring out his fingers.
They say Wolfgang’s Requiem
drove Salieri around the bend in a jealous rage.
I think he just had the unleashed paralysis of poverty bleeding out onto his strings.
They say a red violin shaped like a beautiful woman traveled down through the ages making legends.
I think women must be tired of such comparisons, of being played and pampered and pounded like
a coveted doll in a case by day
and despised and undone and left
by the side of the road in the dark.
They say a certain Italian
member of my family
is worth 3.6 million dollars.
I say that is mad;
we are here to be shared freely,
and I am weary witnessing children’s promise whittled away by lack and the emptiness of zero.
But out beyond words,
“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”
stirs the innards of even the most doubting agnostic to sense the universal music within their heart.
Out beyond words,
I rested on a shoulder on 3rd Street in Santa Monica and loosed one of my most beautiful odes from across the ages out onto the empty sea of commerce
and re-awoke beauty.
Out beyond words,
I cause elephants to sway,
and dogs to relax,
and fish to distinguish between Stravinsky and Bach.
I am not surprised.
I am not the possession of Arrogance,
who would own the world to destruction and devour its delights to death.
Out beyond words,
I joined peoples across borders,
across the bitter divide of religions,
to flow their irrepressible love and laughter through dark nights and
long years of potatoes
until the dawn of day.
Out beyond words,
out on the plains,
up in the hidden mountains,
hand-hewn by roughened hands,
whose grandparents were lost to black lung, and parents to alcohol,
and children to pills and powder in the veins, I weep for lives lost,
but also share the stories of the tender love that gets us through.
I will splinter one day.
My strings will dry out.
My bow will break.
But from the dust of the memories
I will leak into the loam,
a delicate shoot will seek the light
of a new dawn and a new day,
and new hands will be waiting
to tell new stories
of a new world.
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