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      September 22, 2016Throwback at Art ShowCarol Kanter

      Photograph: “Clay Hands” by Heshani Sothiraj Eddleston. “Throwback at Art Show” was written by Carol Kanter for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, August 2016, and selected as the Editor’s Choice winner.
      Did these modern sculptors take a pledge
      to flaunt here 3-D work that’s cutting edge
      and spurn expected, classic forms sublime
      as poets, at all costs, today spurn rhyme?
      They aim to grab the public’s throat or heart;
      but in their midst, on one small shelf
      a dove gray bowl presents itself,
      a throwback to the days when art was Art.
       
      Slipped from modest earth and kneaded smooth
      then spun and pulled a funnel shape, it soothes;
      a dark tobacco glaze, precise and prim,
      runs a lazy loop around its rim
      and sends a web of taut stripes down inside,
      connecting random dots as though
      a spider moored her mites in rows
      then tiptoed off to find some place to hide …
       
      her center nest sits empty and unlined,
      a blank plate its creator never signed;
      it rode the fulcrum where this pot once twirled.
      And should some cataclysm befall the world
      this urn could sweet-talk drinker, viewer, bard,
      to reconstruct its simple schema
      (now passé as Ottava Rima)
      when a newer age unearths it, shard by shard.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “Sometimes I feel downright desperate for a little light verse, so when I come across a poem like this, that’s playful, clever, and rhymes, it’s hard to pass up. This poem is itself, of course, an ottava rima, a form I haven’t come across in ages. It took me to a completely unexpected place, unique among all the entries, and made me smile.”

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