Ekphrastic Folk Art Season 2, #4

        What Happens When Folk Art Gets Ekphrastic?

Wooden Box

To find out, I invited several writers to mix it up; to play with this folkloric image. Using their literary talents, they did just that. Jumping right into the challenge, they created inspiring storylines and conversations.

But before I show you the results for this issue, the final one of Season 2, here are brief explanations of what folk art and ekphrastic are. 

What is Folk Art? 

Folk art, in general - art made by folk - is 'decorative' art applied to functional (everyday) items. Popular examples include weather vanes, furniture, quilts, and hand painted plates.

What is Ekphrastic?

Ekphrastic is a term that describes the practice of using words in poetry and prose to comment on or about a piece of visual art (i.e., painting, photograph, sculpture) and, for many, is often limited to what we call 'fine art' by trained artists. But, in fact, ekphrastic writing about art that embellishes common items has been around since ancient times. For example, in The Iliad Homer provides lengthy discursive accounts of elaborate scenes on Achilles' shield (an every day, functional item).

The word ekphrasis is a combination of two Greek words: ex (out) and phrazein (to point out, explain). 

Be sure to check out Season 1 in our flipbook library. 

Now, onto the excellent and innovative writers who complete Season 2: Daniel Bueno, Basiliké Pappa, Merril D. Smith, Judith Vaughn!

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The Burial
 
There was a little couple, two spiders, who—somehow, some way—gained immortality.

 
They outlived their children. Another set. Then another.
Then they knew.
They embraced—each other, time.
They held change.
 
They saw differently after. Cold from their little mouths. Hidden breaths.
 
One day, visiting a new settlement of the other kind of immortals, they found a carved wooden box—open, colorful, strange. Symbols along its sides. Just the size of a nook beneath a root.
 
One spider crept inside.
The other paused. Waited. Tilted its body, listening.
 
Stillness.
 
Nearby, a young immortal couple—were they fighting? Mating?
A slap. A door. One gone forever.
 
An old immortal approached. Closed the box. Without a word, began to bury it.
 
The girl wept—for the love they might’ve been.
The spider watched, still again, as earth covered its beloved.
 
And for the first time in forever,
was alone.
 
Daniel Bueno, MFA (Creative Writing-Fiction, San Francisco State University),  is a writer from Northern California. Awarded the Joe Brainard Fellowship, he is currently teaching English at Solano Community College.
 
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Blooms Across Blue
 
The wooden chest was empty
when Mama placed it in my hands,
my name and the year in brilliant red,
the color of dawn, she said,
 
see how they’re set like an island surrounded
by a flower-sea of sighs and hope,
the crimson bloom of womanhood, the rising-green
a promise.
 
I’ve carefully tucked my dreams within,
wrapped in scraps of wool or linen, a bit
of taffeta, some silken threads enclosing each wish--
adventure, comfort, my first kiss—
 
rose-scented, sea-salted, thirty years of wave-tossed letters—
 
so many dreams I’ve laid in that chest--
so many she’s missed.
 
Merril D. Smith, an independent scholar and poet, writes from southern New Jersey. Her full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month. Her work has been published widely in poetry journals and anthologies.www.merrildsmith.com, blog: www.merrildsmith.org

  
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Secure
 
For your treasures, Father said, smelling of wood, freshly stripped.
For your dreams, Mother said. Her fingers held the earthy smell of paint.
The daughter loved the cambered lid that said her name; the metal clasp, its solid
click.
 
Day by day, her riches swelled.
 
Lace bobbins, linen threads, glass-headed pins.
Smoke-tree leaves, November-kissed.
A morning flight; on the water’s edge, a swan stretched its wings, then took to the
sky. She picked the plume it left behind.
Silver spoons in damask cloth. A pair of silk dance shoes.
A summer afternoon, round and smooth; she kept it as a river stone.
A rose garden inside a cut-glass bottle.
If only, she thought, I had the long veils of night…
 
Bobbins, threads, treasures and dreams—she braided black lace so fine she sold for a hundred sovereigns.
To build a life, she said, securing the lid with a click.
 
Basiliké Pappa, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, lives in Greece. Her work appears in DarkWinter Literary Magazine, FemkuMag, Heron Tree (among others), and recently in Tranquility: An Anthology of Haiku (Literary Revelations). X: @PappaBasilike
 
 ===== 
 
Laugh
 
I look in the trunk I’ve left in the back closet since I got here so many years ago.
A chest for love and possibilities lost. Nothing of interest resides here now.
 
I still adore the smell of the cedar wood, shellacked to preserve. I am grateful to the
female insect who left her secretions of life on that unsuspecting tree for harvest.
 
Though it is flowers painted on the outside that capture my heart. Red, yellow, green,
nature contained on a trunk for containment.
 
I laugh out loud, a laugh the flowers dance to when I turn away -  they have very
good hearing.

Judith Vaughn lives in Sonoma, CA. She is a member of Poetic License Sonoma
and the CA Writers Club, Redwood Writers Branch. Her poetry has been featured on KSVY radio and is published in several anthologies and in online literary reviews. PoeticLicenseSonoma.com

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Ekphrastic Folk Art 1

 What Happens When Folk Art Meets Ekphrastic?

To find out, I invited several writers to mix it up; to play with the above folkloric image. Using their literary talents, they did just that. Jumping right into the challenge, they created inspiring storylines and conversations.

But, before I show you the results, here are brief explanations of what ekphrastic and folk art are.

 What is Folk Art?

Folk art, in general – art made by folk - is “decorative” art applied to functional (everyday) items. Popular examples include weather vanes, Dutch hexagons, furniture, quilts, and hand painted plates. 

What is Ekphrastic?

Ekphrastic is a term that describes the practice of using words to comment on a piece of visual art (i.e, painting, photograph, sculpture) and has been around since ancient times. For example, in The Iliad, Homer provides a lengthy, discursive account of the elaborate scenes embossed on the shield of Achilles. 

The word ekphrasis is a combination of two Greek words: ex (out) and phrazein (to point out, explain).

 Now, onto the excellent and innovative poem, letter, fiction and prose-poem of

 Jody Baltessen, Rhona Greene, Rebecca Rae Pechbrenner, Karen Pierce Gonzalez 

WHEN BLUE

transforms naked wood to sky.
With brushstrokes. Cyan. Magenta.
When yellow sun throws light. Day bright.
And dusk, red gusting, promiscuous.
Stirs a commotion of waves.
Dissolves in water blue as wind.
To sit on a chair possessed by sky.
Straight-backed. Rooted. Leaning
against a wall. While all around.
A restless tableau. Light or saturated.
Bends and bonds and burdens. A loop of days
transcendent. Telling the story of weather.

Jody Baltessen is an award-winning Canadian poet, writer, and archivist. Her poetry appears in Hamilton Arts & Letters (HA&L), Grain, Pangyrus, Poetry Pause (League of Canadian Poets), Prairie Fire, and The New Quarterly (TNQ). 

Ig: jb.presentperfect/

 
  

Dear beautiful chair,
 
I’m sorry. In a jitterbug loop, I can not settle into you. I’m trying to complete a book review I should have done ages ago.
 
I am grateful for your invitation, and if I could, I’d sit on you and dream my life away. I truly hope that time will come.
 
Until then, I send you love from a rainy Irish Sunday morning,
Rhona
 

Rhona Greene, a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from Dublin is published in several Black Bough Poetry editions and The Storms Journal and she was shortlisted for the Dai Fry Award. Her work is also featured in Sarah Connor’s ‘Advent Poems’. Tw: @Rhona_Greene

 Acrylic

It was during the endless dry heat that I found myself following the smell of coconut to the outside of her studio. Sitting in a blue chair, her method of mixing Moroccan Oil into the brush strokes of acrylic would leave the scent of a distant summer on all her self portraits.
“Come in if you’re going to stare.” Perhaps, because I had none and could grow none, my obsession with hers took hold. I mastered intricate braids and would gather fistfuls of jasmine from her garden to stick within the folds. For a time, this is how it was: a dance between my fingers placing the flowers and hers plucking them out to bury within a world of color on the canvas.  “Someday it will all be gone and with it your love.” 

Meeting her eyes in the mirror, I brushed the nest of almond tresses down her spine. “Never,” I whispered. It started with an eyelash, and then with a clump. I would shuffle behind her with a dustpan, hoping to catch and savor each coffee-stained curl. When the rains returned, I entered the studio to find everything gone, save for one composition propped up on her prized cerulean stool. Collapsing on the weathered wood, I hold the painting up to the light, and pull a single strand of hair from the thick black letters of my name– still wet. Still warm.
 
Rebecca Rae Pechbrenner's work has appeared in several publications, including The Sitting Room: Home. She  can be seen wandering the shores of Dillon Beach with her husband, daughter and two German Shepherds. She resides in Sonoma County, California. Ig: heyrebeccarae/ 

 
  

Homage
 
I painted you when promises were spring, when stars swirled in the moonless summer sky and sunlight was just over the autumnal horizon of my shoulders. My bit of heaven in winter on the dry shores of this cobbled sidewalk, you hold me up when the toils of trying so hard to balance on the endless waves of this world, I almost topple.   
I rest easy in your embrace; my two legs upon your four. You are a comfort long craved – a singular refuge of wood.  

 

Karen Pierce Gonzalez’s work include True North (Origami Poems Project 2022),  Coyote in the Basket of My Ribs (Kelsay Books 2023), and Down River with Li Po  (Black Cat Poetry Press 2024). Her writing and assemblage art have appeared in numerous publications. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Fb: karen.p.gonzalez.14

 

Image: Pixabay