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Rock On
A red ochre depiction of two giant extinct birds on an overhanging rock in northern Australia could be the one of the oldest paintings in the world. Scientists have calculated the artwork, slightly smudged after thousands of years in the wilderness, pre-dates European settlement in Australia and could be up to 40,000 years old.Read More
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Spoiled Children
John Latta mines the visual art and thought of Patrick Swift to reveal the muddy-headedness of certain trends in our current verse. Funny that what seems so clear when we talk about art becomes so cloudy when we talk about poetry.Read More
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Maggie Taylor Images with Javier Navarrete Music
Thanks to Aleks at New Times Arrived for posting this amazing video.Read More
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Poetry and Conscience
Here’s an interesting passage from Octavio Paz’s introduction to his Essays on Mexican Art: Between 1830 and 1930 artists formed a society within society or, more exactly, a confrontation with it. The rebellion of artistic communities against the taste of the Academy and the bourgeoisie manifested itself, brilliantly and consistently, in the critical works of a number of poets: Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Breton. I have mentioned only French poets because the phenomenon occurred most strikingly and most decisively in Paris, which was the center of modern art during those hundred years.Read More
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Rimbaud par Ernest Pignon-Ernest
I ran across this image of Rimbaud on Al Filreis’s blog… … and thanks to the image’s filename was able to track down the artist, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, whom I’d never heard of. What a gap in my awareness! I highly recommend a visit to his site.Read More
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Bacon on Blake
This haunting study for a portrait of William Blake by the painter Francis Bacon is worth spending some time with: Click here.Read More
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On The Letters of Ted Hughes
I’ve been reading The Letters of Ted Hughes, which I’m finding impossible to put down. Like all letters written by people of genius, Hughes’s letters are a magical mix of erudition, crank notions, unguarded humor, soap opera, and authentic emotion. Hughes—who for my money stands as the greatest British poet of the last century—has more valuable things to say about the practice of poetry than anyone I’ve read. Herewith an example: “Up to the invention of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after, all reading was done aloud. Most people were incapable of reading silently.Read More
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Super Ekphrasticalistic!
Engaged as I am at the moment in writing a poem based on a painting, I found this essay by Alfred Corn on ekphrasis especially interesting. The challenge, it seems to me, is how to describe while moving beyond description to convey the emotional/intellectual content encoded in the forms.Read More
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Blakean Visions in South London
“In honour of British poetry’s greatest visionary, I have been looking for angels in green and pleasant Peckham Rye.” >> Read the whole story.Read More