74 MARCH 2020 http://www.writers-online.co.uk
POETRY WORKSHOP
Long exposure
Alison Chisholm explores an
ekphrastic poem inspired by an
artist famous for dramatic contrastsForever against the world,
he settles nowhere,
dozing clothed and fully armed
under stained blankets
in midnight realms.Predatory, psychopathic –
less lovable than Mercutio,
and ungovernable as Tybalt,
he’s Capulet’s kin. Shakespeare
might have invented him.He’s real, though. With Italy’s heat
in his blood, a flick of the wrist serves
for both sword and brush.In the catacombs of his mind,
he conceives characters both sacred
and profane. Careless of offence, anarchic,
he chooses reality over artifice
every time – Madonnas
with dirty feet, and naked youths
of ambiguous sexuality.At one with its layers
and nuances, he can paint darkness
as tactile as velvet, expose
frailties in merciless floodlight.Twisting in vain to escape himself,
he’s the shocked Goliath
of a final commission, caught
in the unforgiving glare
of his own chiaroscuro.CARAVAGGIO
HIS FUGITIVE SPIRITW
hen writers,
artists,
composers
or craftsmen
create
something new, they are adding
to the world’s store of material
that will keep their memory alive,
and so buying into their own
immortality. When another such
person comes along, a week, a
year or a millennium later, and
produces something that reflects
on the original creators or their
creations, we are presented with
another reminder, a fresh slant on
their immortality.
Honouring somebody else in
a poem provides you with the
opportunity to indulge in some
fascinating research, then to sift and
select what you will use and how
you will use it. It’s an absorbing task
to pick one aspect of the creative
person’s life and explore it through
study and imagination.
An ekphrastic poem, describing
or commenting on a work of art
or craftsmanship, allows you freer
rein to put your own interpretation
on what you see. In the case of a
popular target, you have the chance
to look at the way other people
have seen it too, in poetry and othermedia. The architecture of London’s
Westminster Bridge, in one or other
of its incarnations, has been given
added status by Canaletto, Turner,
Wordsworth, the Daleks and James
Bond. Add your poem about its
architecture to the other things it’s
inspired, and you are extending its
fame still further.
In her poem, Corinne Lawrence
of Bramhall, Greater Manchester,
offers a fresh look at an artist. At
once Caravaggio and his body
of work, already celebrated in
paintings, articles, biographies, TV
documentary and other poetry, gets
a further boost.
The poet provides a commentary
to go with her work. ‘My idea of an
alternative “heaven” would be a state
of existence where, like Leonardo
da Vinci, I possessed equally high
levels of skill in all areas of the arts.
In my youthful days, I laboured
under the delusion that anyone
who is artistically gifted has to have
a character as elevated as the work
they produce, but maturity has
taught me that all too often these
great gifts go hand in hand with
equally great flaws, so life stories
of these giants of creation are often
cautionary tales of human frailty.’
Her poem about the artist