“You Don’t Have to Choose” by Beth CopelandPosted by Rattle
Image: “A Lonesome Border” by Carmella Dolmer. “You Don’t Have to Choose” was written by Beth Copeland for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2023, and selected as an Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
__________
Beth Copeland
YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHOOSE
Between the cube and the circle,
the container or the eddying drain,
the cardboard box or the manhole,
the collapsing star or the burning house,
the fiery floor or the raspberry arch that becomes a rainbow
after a thunder storm,
the missing door or the haloed saints that hover
in the Tuscan afterglow,
the embodied self or the shadow
holding your hand,
the green selvage of the world
where everything grows—grass, kudzu, weeping willows,
Comment from the editor, Megan O’Reilly: “I love the way this poem begins as a literal, generalized description of Carmella Dolmer’s piece—‘the cube and the circle’—and then progressively becomes more abstract and metaphorical—‘the haloed saints that hover,’ ‘the waterless well.’ Like the artwork, whose rich simplicity hints at more complex truths, ‘You Don’t Have to Choose’ seems to suggest that the cube and the circle are archetypal here, and the poet vividly and imaginatively explores this symbolism. The last stanza completely detaches from the imagistic nature of the rest of the poem to deliver objective statements, and the creative whiplash of this transition, combined with the undiluted truth of the statements themselves, renders the ending affecting and meaningful.”
The Towering Text series explores the architecture of language, thinking about letters as the bedrock for the programming of the mind. On the other hand, letters are asemic objects, ink (or pixels) randomly arranged that become meaningful by convention and repetition. These towers nod to Babel as both the site of human ingenuity and incomprehension, as the hub of technology and linguistic divide. These works are AI generated images that have been doctored and collaged. The 20th letter in this series of 26 artworks exploring the architecture of language. The idiogram is the message.
Gregory Betts: “We haven’t done very well by digital art. The traditional gallery spaces will sometimes put out screens or even more ambitious attempts to replicate the analogue gallery experience for digital works—but they are always marked by the inadequacy. There has been no robust economy for digital art. I was drawn to the blockchain because it seems like we finally have a space for not just the storage of digital art but their circulation and purchase. Artists are getting paid, leading to an explosion of new works. A genre, multiple digital genres are emerging. Collectives are forming, boundaries are constantly being shattered, and all the other markers of a vibrant arts scene. The crypto-bro/pyramid scheme side of things is decidedly uninteresting to me, but the emergence of a genuine economy for digital art is significant and substantial. It is an interesting space to try to imagine, and doing so has opened up new aspects of visual poetry for me.”
Erin Murphy: “I grew up near I-95, a major artery of the East Coast. Until last week’s tanker crash and collapse, I hadn’t given much thought to how many of my memories are tied to 95.” (web)
Lana Hechtman Ayers: “Poetry reached out to me at a young age, across time, distance, culture, gender, and religion, and showed me I wasn’t alone in my despair, that even the darkest moments could be survived. Poetry made meaning of the light of metaphor.” (web)
“After the Death of Cormac McCarthy …” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by Rattle
Dante Di Stefano
AFTER THE DEATH OF CORMAC MCCARTHY, I LOOK AT THE LOCUST TREE OUT MY CLASSROOM WINDOW AND TRY TO EXPLAIN THE VIOLENCE AT THE HEART OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE TO MY CHILDREN IN THE MANNER OF AN ERIC CARLE BOOK
Over there, there is a green thing in the way,
under the silver of the moon that isn’t shining
because it is the daytime, and on its many arms,
there are so many thorns you could call it a coat,
a thorn coat, and there is always someone climbing
its trunk and hurting their hands so much so.
A little boy is climbing and a little girl is climbing
and with them the ghosts of their dead grandparents
and their unborn children’s children and a caterpillar
who only knows how to eat and eat, thorn and leaf,
on the way to becoming a butterfly and a brown bear
and a goldfish out of water flopping upward
and a wolf pup and a lion cub and an eagle without
a nest and you and me and every mother and father
and son and daughter who ever was—we are all
climbing and climbing and climbing until our hands
ache and ache and ache and make a cradle of that ache
and hang a lullaby in the air above that cradle
and we are all going up and up and up and it is
painful and strange because we are all also falling
down and down and down, deeper than the deepest
part of the ocean, which is singing to us in the way
a humpback whale does or in the way the waves
sing to the shore and if you listen very closely,
you can hear a great great writer whispering
to the waves in us and the trees in us and the thorns
and all that climbing and all those cut palms
and bleeding fingers. Listen. He is ending his book.
He is ending the great book of his life. He has no
say in this, but he is saying on the last page: fly them.
Dante Di Stefano: “Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite novelists. I wrote this thinking about his death this week and the ways in which McCarthy’s books have helped me understand our nation’s romance with brutality. I was also thinking about how I might explain some of this to my small children. I’ve read The Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? a thousand times in the past five years. In Carle’s books the world in all its wonder unfolds. I thought it would be interesting to look at McCarthy’s grim fatalistic view of human nature through the lens of Carle’s imagination. The last two words of the poem are the last two words of my favorite McCarthy novel, Suttree.”
Peter Coghill: “I’m a physicist by profession, and math was my first love, followed by the outdoors. One droughty summer when the parks were closed by fire it was time for second loves and strangely I found myself reading and writing poetry (Louis MacNeice and Carol Ann Duffy, I just loved her). Something that was a complete surprise to me, and my wife. From there it has only grown.”
Dan “Sully” Sullivan: “I’ve been thinking a lot about learning to love the body I am in, coming to terms with the cyclical nature of my conditioning, unearthing where unhealthy rage resides and waits, and the intersections of memory, joy, and trauma. If I don’t confront my own narratives, they will always come back for me. What space can I carve for new ones?” (web)
