Poetry Prompt: Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando

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Aerialist, Black Venus, circus performers, Degas, ekphrastic poems, high flying, impressionist, La Femme Canon, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, mixed-race women, National Gallery, poetry prompt, poetry prompts, Sitting with Art, strong women, Syliva Plath, Victoria Hallerman, writing prompts

Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879)–Degas, oil on canvas

 

Degas’ only painting of the circus, repeatedly called “one of his most surprising canvases” by biographers, it is now housed at the National Gallery in London. Find out more about the unique artwork and the mysterious mixed-race aerialist here.

Two poems for additional inspiration:

Aerialist by Syliva Plath

Aerialist by Victoria Hallerman

Share your own high-flying poems in the comments!

 

 

 

New! Sitting with Art

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Brandywine School, By the Evening Fire, Charlotte Mason, Collier's, ekphrastic poems, Elizabeth Shippen Green, fiction experiments, flash fiction, From the Women's Canon, Girls at the Beach, Harper's Bazaar, Howard Pyle, Katherine Pyle, labwork, Looking at Art, Love at First Sight, Mermaid Mother & Child, picture study, poetry lab, prose hybrids, Red Rose Girls, Sarah S. Stilwell-Weber, Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's, Sitting with Art, SSS, The Golden Age of SciFi, women artists

 

 

 

 

 

Starting this week, we will take a more meditative approach in our lab work for awhile, trying on something called “Sitting with Art,” aka “picture study,” in which we will take a very small sample of a given artist’s work and contemplate its fruits.  Or as the late educational reformer Charlotte Mason describes it, we will

 open [our] eyes and minds to appreciate the masterpieces of pictorial art, to lead…from mere fondness for a pretty picture which pleases the senses up to honest love and discriminating admiration for what is truly beautiful – a love and admiration which are the response of heart and intellect to the appeal addressed to them through the senses by all great works of art.

 

Go cut ‘n paste style into a journal, an index card flipbook, or onto real picture paper. Tape to a wall above the computer or sink or just use a screensaver or a virtual album on your phone.  The point is to find some way to live with the chosen artwork for the week, with each piece getting as much “face-time” as possible.

For as Mason reminds us, (in speaking of children, but it is as equally applicable to adults), with such a close study

we cannot measure the influence that one or another artist has upon the child’s sense of beauty, upon his power of seeing, as in a picture, the common sights of life; he is enriched more than we know in having really looked at even a single picture.

 

Now then! Long intro, short, this week’s artist is a lesser-known “Golden Age” artist/illustrator self-styled as “SSS” with a portfolio as interesting as her bio:

 

Sarah S. Stilwell-Weber (1878-1939) was a “Golden Age” Illustrator as much loved for her sumptuous Collier‘s magazine covers as her intimate portraits of women & children.

A less-recognized student of the “Brandywine School” of Howard Pyle, she also worked with his sister Katherine Pyle, in bringing to life Katherine’s writings and poetry in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Scribners and the Saturday Evening Post in the early 1900s.

Some dubbed her work “mere kiddie covers” for her extensive use of small children engaged in imaginative play for most of the magazines’ covers.

But they did not know her larger body of work, or that she was also heavily influenced by the style choices of fellow female “Brandywine” illustrators like Elizabeth Shippden Green–one of the Red Rose girls–who like the rest of that trio was a part of the “New Woman” movement that bleed into art as a risingly educated class of women entered the workforce.

Paintings such as Stilwell’s “Woman with Leopards” & “Love at First Sight” were as highly skilled as any of the male pre-Raphaelite’ romantic masterpieces, and certainly worthy of praise beyond just their strength in selling magazines.  Alas, that is another story…..onward to the art!!!

 

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Some helpful handouts for this exercise & going forward:

Perspectives in Writing Ekphrastic Poems

Looking at Art

 

The goal with this batch of labwork is to enrich both our language and senses, as well as to transfer the discipline gained in focused visual analysis to building new structures in our writing.

 

Just a few more interesting thoughts on ekphrastic poetry from Anne Marie Esposito of Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute:

 

1.Poetry and art can often influence or challenge our perceptions and prejudices, forcing us to re–examine and re–evaluate our opinions, values, and attitudes.

2.Poetry and art can help us to better understand the significance of place and time when evaluating or interpreting a literary work.

3.Poetry, like art, must be read, and reread, for both meaning and appreciation. The length of a line and the choice of a word can alter meaning just as easily as the stroke of a brush and the use of color.

 

Essential Questions

 

1.Is a work of art a representation of the subject or the artist’s interpretation of what is already an individual viewpoint? (Representation of a representation)

2.How can a poetic response to work of art be a fuller representation of a subject than the work of art is?

3.How can “reading” a work of art and/or poem challenge our perceptions and prejudices about people, objects, and personal/societal beliefs or values?

4.How does the length of a line, the choice of a word, and the clustering of details or images contribute to a poem’s meaning and effectiveness?

 

Just, please, do not feel pressured by these last thoughts to writing only poetry.  Move your narratives out into prose, into hybrids, anywhere the muse might lead.  Have fun and send along some things you are adding to your notebooks.

 

2sDay Poems: The Delicate Brushstrokes of Poet-Artist Ruth Bavetta

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2sDay Poems, ekphrastic poems, Embers on the Stairs, Fugitive Pigments, Future Cycle Press, Memories Suspended by Filaments, Moontide Press, poet-artists, Ruth Bavetta, Visual poetry, women poets, Women's Poetry List-Serv

Ruth Bavetta is a widely published poet and a talented artist whose work is infused with a powerful starlight. I first ran across her work through the Women’s Poetry List-Serv (WOM-PO) and fell hard for her visual poems. Our first selection, “The End and the Aim”, is one such example.

Find more lovely pieces in the visual poetry section of her website.

But beyond those eye-catching beauties is a whole body of work that is more traditional but as equally captivating. At least, in the fine way that the painter’s delicate brushstrokes are woven into its words.

Fugitive Pigments (from Future Cycle), a gorgeous collection of Ruth’s ekphrastic poems, is not surprisingly my favorite of her current publications. Our next selection is one of Ruth’s favorites from the book:

Memories Suspended by Filaments

                                              –in the voice of Joseph Cornell

The house is small, but it has room for dreams.

For birds, books, stamps, stars, marbles, butterflies,

balls, dolls, my brother Robert, maps, romance,

playing cards, lace, lobsters, small sticky hope.

Eyes down, I walk the streets of Manhattan,

eat pastries, sweet, stale, talk to pigeons, find

orphaned desires in gutters, in dime stores,

in second-hand shops with dusty windows.

I discover, gather, magpie away.

My treasures hibernate waiting, sleeping

in basement shelf rows, labeled by heartbeats

slowed to a drip. When my dossiers have lived

together long enough, I take them out,

let them speak, cherish them in my boxes,

where parrots talk of sunsets, and clay pipes

float and fill with a summer of bubbles.

Behind glass, my birds and my women sing,

locked into universes I create,

where lovers are dancers, princesses, queens,

secrets detained in shining glass bottles.

I sing the juene fille Lauren Bacall,

slender Botticelli, silent in blue,

construct a pink palace with sapphire stars.

I mediate history for the Prince

of the Medici, give him a compass

so he finds and he follows true love. Oh,

Bebe Marie, you are so beautiful,

pale pink, hidden among silvery twigs.

Also available for your enjoyment is Embers on the Stairs (from MoonTide Press), her second collection. A third book, No Longer at This Address is on its way later this year.  Can’t wait to snatch that one up!

 

 

 

**Readers, have your own favorite poet-artists? Please share your recommendations.  One can never have too much poetry in this life, somebody once said. Picasso? Or maybe Naomi Shihab Nye.  Post your thoughts on that too.  Looking forward to hearing from you!!