“The Room as We See It” by Andrew PaytonPosted by Rattle
Image: “Unsatisfied Externals” by J. Stormer. “The Room as We See It” was written by Andrew Payton for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2022, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
Comment from the artist, J. Stormer: “I am astounded by the variety of thoughts and emotions that my print inspired in the poems submitted to this challenge. It was especially interesting to see what details others found compelling. Although there are a few poets and poems I have appreciated over the years, I have never formally studied poetry, or any form of literature. So, my choice is entirely subjective without reference to any criterion other than resonance with my personal and idiosyncratic feelings. All the poems I saw were interesting, and there were several that made choosing a single poem almost impossible. I think poetry is really meant to be heard, so I read the poems aloud to myself, and the way the poems sounded to me was also important in the final choice. This print is unique in my mostly representational body of work. It was inspired by a vague memory of things seen when I was too young (according to the experts) to have memories. Perhaps this was a dream then. The central etching was done first, but did not catch the feeling of the memory as I experienced it. Many months later, experimenting with colographs, I came up with the outer, more abstract part of the image, which to me suggests the dreamlike state. This poem, for me, captures the idea of of things seen with incomplete remembrance and subject to mental revision.”
Penny Harter: “After a pandemic year of writing frequent poems focused on offering hope to myself and others, I gathered those poems into a forthcoming collection. For some weeks after that, I stopped writing, but now it’s spring, I’m celebrating having gotten the Covid vaccine, and it’s time to move on into new work. The older I get, the more I realize we are a sum of all our memories, both easily accessed and well buried. In different ways, I feel these newer poems are simultaneously visiting both past and present.” (web)
Glenn McKee: “I suffer from a 60-year-old habit of tearing poetry off my life. Not many pages of my life remain, and those that do hang on like surgical tape plastered on a hairy body. Nevertheless, I intend to write myself out of life.”
Stephanie H. Fallon: “The way we tell love stories are too often focused on the early, personal stages: coming-of-age, sexual awakenings, first heartbreaks. We are trained to think of love in the first person singular, and that the story ends with the wedding. So it comes as a shock how deeply we can believe in the love stories of others—our family and friends, the people we hold most dear. This poem is about the faith we build through our promises to each other, a reminder that the vows we make root into each other, beyond just a partner, beyond even ourselves.” (web)
Angela Janda: “Kyle Doan, 5, was swept away from his mother into California floodwaters on Monday. He has not been found. It is difficult to speak to such a tragedy—the boy was here, and now he is not here. Everyone made decisions with the best information they had. He was a kindergartener. Four foot, 52-pounds. Black puffer jacket. I dropped my 48-pound kindergartener in his green puffer jacket at the school playground this morning. The click of the car seat belt. Every effort we made to let them grow and keep them safe. This poem speaks to the terrible second-guessing; could I have done better? Was it enough? I have experienced enough near-misses as a mother to know the thin distance between here and out of reach.” (web)
Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck: “I used to write fiction, and the first line of this poem was one I had in my head for years as the first sentence of a story. Nothing came of it. When I started to write poetry, I recalled the line—iambic, after all—and the poem followed quickly, almost as if it wrote itself. It knew what it wanted to be more than I did.”
Anna M. Evans: “Recent polls suggest that about two thirds of Democrats do not have Republican friends. Bucking this trend, I spent five summer days in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, visiting a woman I first met outside of both our home states, and it was blissful, even though our political views are complete opposites. Poetry can be used to explore such large, complex subjects, and because form needs to match content, this subject called for a heroic crown of sonnets. I have been advised that some people on my side of the aisle may object to the congeniality of my poem, and that is, of course, part of the point.” (web)
