#if you read closely there's a cavafy reference

[betweenthetimeandsound]

Post-Mortem

I lay wilted roses at your feet; They nestle themselves in the dust, And the petals flap against the wind, Alerting of a search long concluded. All the scents which once existed Melted into a flickering candle For you to glance at The light that defines your Decaying eyes.

You were not born to die in a soldier’s embrace.

You bound yourself on the wishing tree-- Bound to its rotting stump And its incinerated branches. Torn ribbons tie your arms and wrists As an offering for a vengeful god; Crows picking off your eyes Forget that you chased them once Into the skies.

Nobody has wished to sacrifice yourself.

Your ribs were not born to snap, Before building a bonfire For other soldiers to sing songs over. Your kidneys were never for sale to eat To be eaten To be sold to a crying child Only drinking the milk from crushed pearls.

Your hands were not meant to hold the keys To your own destruction.

The sparrows flock towards their nest, But your soul has already left, And has taken a ruby apple From the highest branches. A bloodied ribbon Flies into my hands, And I kiss it, over and over again, In a delirium of my own lies. --Elda Mengisto

Author's note: I wrote this piece in late 2020-early 2021, after the fallout of Nagorno-Karabagh War. I watched a short documentary about the suffering of Armenians and Iveta's singing inspired this particular piece. That said, I hope Azeris can take something out of this poem and both sides could work to understand the other.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: I love your book reviews under the banner ‘Treat Your S(h)elf’ - nice play on words. You have such a wide and cultured range of interests that I really learn something new. Do you read poetry? What are your favourite poets? What are you currently reading?

I love reading poetry because as the poet Robert Frost put it succinctly, “Poetry is when emotion has found its thought, and thought has found words”.

Poets are before anything else in the words of W.H. Auden, “a person who is madly in love with language” and language is the bedrock of any culture and society and ultimately civilisation. When you truly think about it, poetry is meaningless when it has been left to gather dust on a piece of paper. It is simply a memory of an idea conjured up by a writer with something to say. Poetry must be read, it needs to be experienced because it keeps these ideas burning. These meaningful concepts about the nature of life, death and everything. Every time a person reads a poem, a new bright spark emerges in that person’s head. A new way of thinking, a new way of understanding. That is exactly why poetry must be read because it is the essence of our language.

The reasons I personally read poetry, you ask? Here are some reasons I can think of from the top of my head others are too personal to reveal:

I read poetry because poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn. And I read poetry because it is what happens when my mind stops working , and for a moment, all I do is feel. This is good therapy for me as I’m not the most openly emotional or prone to displays of emotion in public. It’s just not how I was built. Poetry helps one to feel. So some poems remain so close to my heart.

I remember when I was about to go on my first tour to Afghanistan I was quite calm and cold blooded because that was and is my nature. My father - who served with distinction in uniform like his father and grand father, and great-grandfather before him - was always proud and supportive of me being the black sheep of the family as the only girl in our family going through Sandhurst and now I was off to the last embers of a war in Afghanistan that everyone had forgotten about. He was concerned - like the rest of my family - like any loving parent about what might happen. But he didn’t question my professionalism or my abilities so he didn’t give me that lecture instead he thrust in my hand both classical literature (Thucydides and Homer in particular) and the works of selected poets. He told me poetry will save your life. He wasn’t anxious about my physical safety he was thinking about my soul. For what happens during war and what comes after if and when I come home. Long story short: poetry saved my life.

By nature I am restless to an incredible annoying degree. I fear being bored. I find it hard to sit and be idle. Poetry is my balm for boredom.

I am incredibly busy and I work punishing long hours. Time is premium. People make demands on me and my time. Poems are like super-condensed stories, and are therefore usually short enough to be read over your morning tea/coffee. In this fast-paced world we live in, sometimes poems are a better alternative to reading fully-fledged novels, or even short stories and poetry gives you the chance to continue to expand your literary horizons even during the busiest times in your life. And becoming more widely read is an incredible way to ensure you are continuously growing, and learning, while becoming a more cultured individual at the same time. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you and when I read some of those beautiful pieces of poetry by my favourite poets it's like the paper is filled with the breathings of my heart.

The most frightening thing is people I know stop growing culturally after they leave university and get on with the business of life i.e. careers, marriage and family. Once on that treadmill they don’t or can’t stop. They are unable to step off and take a breath. Poetry gives you a breather and helps you to re-centre your priorities.  The more you read poetry, the greater your quest for knowledge awakens. Doorways will open inside your mind and unlock your hidden potential for a greater understanding of life. Anyone who reads poetry often can connect with this conclusive sentence formation that defines your very questionable outlook on life.

I also believe poetry allows us to be less rigid in our thinking with an authentic, personal touch. When I read poems, nothing is often straightforward. Every poem has a meaning hiding under it, but it is blocked by a myriad of literary devices such as metaphors and symbolism. It is important to be able to think more figuratively because it allows you to understand ideas and perspectives in a more abstract and possibly more meaningful way. Sometimes I find that having a single page of beautifully crafted words can be enough of a distraction to spark a sudden creative leap in my brain. There have been many times where I've miraculously thought of ways to solve a problem (big or small) purely because reading poetry forced me to think differently from the usual day-to-day thoughts required for general life.

Poetry is best read when you’re hidden from the outside world, in a quiet little spot, somewhere away from all the hustle and bustle. It is increasingly hard to do just that. I have so many demands on my time and limited space but I force myself to carve out the time and space to do this - one must try. As a rule I switch off all social media (not that I have many to begin with but most definitely my phone). The best time for me to carve out time is when I’m traveling as I’m able to shut out everything around me. Usually when I’m waiting for a flight in the business class departure lounge it’s quiet and not too many people to distract me and there is usually a delay to the flight. When I check into a hotel I feel a disconnect to the world around me. I feel like an alien. Poetry helps me to connect again. Poetry calms and focuses the mind. With poetry I can almost reset my day because it’s not just a time zone I have to get used to but also a state of mind - and especially if I find myself being unproductive too!

I often escape Paris and go into the countryside. I love going on walks, hikes, mountaineering, and other outdoor pursuits. It allows me the space and time to read poetry and reflect in peace. And of course I snatch time before I go to sleep to read a poem if I am not too tired.

The point is that I need the head space to absorb the poem and take some time to work out the meaning of the full entity. I try not swallow a whole book in one sitting, instead I read a few poems and leave the book until the next day or a few days depending on my schedule. Sometimes, you can read a poem again and you will find other meanings or pick up on information that you couldn’t see before. That’s poetry, you create the film, journey or picture inside your mind from reading the words on the page.

As for my favourite poets this is of course is a very personal choice. I didn’t read English at university but rather my academic interests were Classics and History, so I profess a very paltry poetic palate. Still, I’m grateful to those friends more versed than I to point me to other poets. So I do my best to keep an open mind and try and read poetry recommended by others or some thing that captures my eye when I browse through book stores or read it as a passing reference in a book I am reading. 

Different poets and poems are discovered at one stage of life and where I happened to live in the world and only take on another meaning when re-read them at another stage. So I tend to re-visit poets I used to read as a teen and then see how it resonates now.

The majority of my poetic readings are in my native English and Norwegian languages but because I have varying degrees of fluency in other languages (because I grew up there for instance) I love widening my poetic palate. One of my regrets is not knowing Japanese and Chinese to a sufficient degree to really read poetry in those languages even if I have basic fluency in literature and everyday conversation. So reading Ezra Pound is one way in English to appreciate these Eastern poetic influences. I’m also ashamed to admit that I only know a woeful smattering of words in Scotiish Gaelic - my Anglo-Scots father knows it fairly well but even he struggles - and really I must find time in the future to learn more of it because it’s such a fascinating language (not least because it’s also dying out and that is tragic).

So below is an eclectic and random list from the top of my head and in no real order of preference:

• Homer (Greek) • Sappho (Greek) • Rumi (Farsi) • Mirza Ghalib (Urdu and Farsi) • John Milton • John Donne • William Shakespeare • Dante (Italian) • Robert Burns • William Wordsworth • Samuel Taylor Coleridge • William Blake • John Keats • Emily Dickinson • Christina Rosetti • Gerald Manley Hopkins • Walt Whitman • Oscar Wilde • W.B. Yeats • Rudyard Kipling • Wilfred Owen • Alfred Tennyson • Rainer Maria Rilke (German) • Cavafy (Greek) • T.S. Eliot • Hilda Doolittle • Marianne Moore • Sylvia Plath • W. H. Auden • Olaf H. Hauge (Norwegian) • Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (Norwegian) • Aslaug Vaa (Norwegian) • Rolf Jacobsen (Norwegian) • Sarojini Naidu (Hindi) • Gulzar (Hindi)

Living in Paris I tend to read more French poetry these days. By osmosis it helps me appreciate the French language and French culture even more.

• Charles Baudelaire. • Paul Verlaine • Jacques Prévert • Arthur Rimbaud • Alphonse de Lamartine • Alfred de Musset • Paul Valéry • Paul Eluard • Jean Genet • Françoise Villon

Poetry is an art that combines the essence of life through the fabrication of reality. Poets challenge and nourish me with their wisdom, philosophy, love and journeys beyond what used to be the limits of my own creative imagination. They push my boundaries ever so more. In doing so they grow my mind for understanding, my heart for empathy, and my soul for wisdom. It would hard to disagree with Robert Frost who sums up what poetry means to me, “a poem begins in delight, and ends in Wisdom”.

Thanks for your question

[nofomoartworld]

John O'Reilly on the Literary Muses That Shaped His 50-Year Art Career

After graduating from college, photographer and visual artist John O'Reilly started working as an art therapist at the Worcester State Hospital. He had taken some courses in psychology and psychoanalysis when he was at school and started working at the hospital to support himself while he made art. O'Reilly's career started slowly and only really took off in 1995, when he was asked to participate in the Whitney Biennial. More than two decades later, the prolific career of the now 87-year-old artist is on display at Worcester Art Museum in a new exhibition entitled A Studio Odyssey.

John O'Reilly, Two as Three, 1988, Polaroid photomontage, Courtesy of the artist

O'Reilly is perhaps best known for his photomontage and collage works where he explores notions of transgression and subjectivity by juxtaposing contemporary imagery and his own self portraiture with visual fragments of art history. Through this contrast, O'Reilly uses the work of other artists throughout history to contextualize his own imagery with the hope that it will extrapolate an original perspective on the human form and the way we interact with each other.

His collage often incorporates nude self portraits in the form of Polaroid photographs, as well as cutouts of pornography, and images that reference artists that have come to influence his work over the years. Through his practice, O'Reilly is able to reflect on his own personal narrative within the context of a larger cultural world history. He addresses issues of homosexuality as an often repressed community while reflecting on his own experiences growing up as a closeted gay man in a Catholic household. Some of his more recent works incorporate old coloring books that reference his childhood, exploring his own feelings about morality and the isolation and anxiety he felt growing up.

John O'Reilly, Apparition, 2014, collage with found printed material, Courtesy of the artist

The new exhibition surveys 85 of O'Reilly's works made during the artist's 50-year-long career, though he doesn't necessarily consider the show to be a retrospective of his work. The exhibition seeks to trace the evolution of O'Reilly's creative process, as influenced by three key literary figures in his life: French writer Jean Genet, American novelist Henry James, and Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. The artist tells Creators, "I'm using them in this exhibition to try and find out how you put on an exhibition that is not a necessarily a retrospective but is long and extensive and creates a sort of visual narrative behind my work."

John O'Reilly, Baby, 1990, Polaroid photomontage, Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery

For O'Reilly, Genet's work represents a sense of trespassing. "He hated beauty, in a sense, so he wrote beautiful filth, and I always felt as though I was trespassing. Growing up where I did as a gay person, that was a sort of natural feeling as a kid. You lied. You lied all the time about it. And the pictures that I take reveal nudity and I'm kind of a gangly looking person who's never completely happy with my look. I always wanted to be something else. And so I deliberately took pictures of myself nude. Which was kind of a trespass even against myself."

John O'Reilly, Nijinsky, 2014, collage of found prints with board and tape, Collection of the Artist, Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NY.

O'Reilly was first introduced to Henry James when he was an undergraduate. He took a course on American literature and became infatuated with James's books. "James, I suppose, is really in my heart the one I identify with the most. He wrote a lot about the psyche and anxiety of art and I think I capture a little bit of all of those things in my work. To me he is kind of representative of going into the unconscious and probing people. You read his stories and come out with your own psychological interpretation."

Cavafy was a Greek who lived in Egypt who tied together ancient Alexandria, going back to the BC period, with the contemporary world. "He goes back and forth mixing them up. And I don't believe in time either. So I try to make the future, the present, and the past all one time. I don't think of my work as being in a particular time. They move, they're things you walk into but you encounter all time in them."

John O'Reilly, Self-Portrait, 1965, black paper, various printed matter, gelatin silver print, and casein montage on Masonite, Chapin Riley Fund

O'Reilly worked closely with artist Nancy Kathryn Burns, the museum's Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, to curate a show that removed itself from a traditional format. The structure of the exhibition is unique in that it doesn't follow a linear timeline of the artist's career. "Something done in 1977 might be sitting next to something done last year. They paced the exhibit in rhythms of groupings. When you go to a photography show, nine times out of ten you see a line around the room of photographs. Its called the bathtub line. And we didn't want to get any where near that. So one grouping might feature two pictures while the next one over has three pictures up over each other. So it kind of sets up a musical play through the show."

John O'Reilly, Eakins Posing, 2006, Polaroid photomontage, Gift of John O'Reilly and James Tellin, 2015.47

A Studio Odyssey is on at the Worcester Art Museum until August 13. Learn more about the show on the museum's website.

Related:

This Artist Recreates Memories With Photographic Collage

These Handcrafted Collages Are Hopelessly Lost in Thought

Collages Embrace Imperfections with Quirky Mismatched Faces

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