After spending time in the sunny garden, attempting to catch up on NaPo Poems this morning I have logged into the site to digest the new prompt.
To see the prompt in full click here.
Featured participant is Algae and Silt, where the 20-little-projects prompt for Day Five resulted in a multilingual tour-de-force.*
Our poetry resource today is an online poetry journal, The Ekphrastic Review. As its name suggests, this magazine publishes only work inspired by works of visual art.
Today’s prompt is ekphrastic in nature – but rather particular! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem from the point of view of one person/animal/thing from Hieronymous Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. I hope that you find the experience deliriously amusing. Perhaps you might write from the viewpoint of Bosch himself? Very little is known about him, so there’s plenty of room for invention, embroidery, and imagination.
I discovered that the misrouted links have been updated. So the link to the participant’s site is now active at the top of this thread. And that’s where I went before starting on my poetry writing.
Fantasia in G Minor*
is a poem of beauty by Nikita Parik. She uses some wonderfully rich images, absorbing lines and visions that linger long after the read. If like me, you are ageing – you may need to increase the size of the page on the monitor (CTRL and + is one way of zooming in) as the font Nikita has chosen is particularly delicate. But it was worth the wait of the search and broken link days.
I am amazed at all the fabulous NaPo poetry I am seeing online every day. I sometimes wish every poem would end up this polished. It isn’t always the way, it is about catching glints rather than whole diamonds, so try not to (metaphorically) beat yourselves up! Even our ‘rubbish poems’ can offer a line or two, a phrase, a word even.
I love The Ekphrastic Review and writing Ekphrastic poetry – in fact I am working on a project currently which involves this. I also found out about a Photo project yesterday through the BBC which is connected to the global coronavirus crisis – I was of the army of creatives who to begin with thought I would avoid writing about CO’19… but then as we live through weeks of self isolation/social distancing it becomes life – and that’s what we all write about. So I am trying to find a different way in. Two COVID poems have just slipped out.
I always enjoy a dip in TER and today was no different so I spent some time on the site – you should too.
I decided to use the option to wander through the painting myself before taking the audio/visual tour – which digitally interested me as I was part of BMAG (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) collaboration / Hackathon a few years ago where we worked with artists and made Art pieces interactive.
I was immediately drawn to the Bosch Bird. I got totally lost in the garden for hours. I could write every day for a year around it! In fact, I might! Love NaPo for generating new ideas// projects. That’s two today – good job we’re in lock down!
I will be back later to update posts and talk through today’s writing process, which at the moment consists of a lot of observation, reading and thought.
There is so much darkness and life in this work – I kept seeing something new.
I sat with the image for a while and picked which birds to focus on from the interactive artwork (not tour) then I searched for a picture of that part of the work to keep focus on.
Then I stared playing with the extra story text (elemental found poetry) and jotting down my thoughts – back at the screen this time. Then I pushed and pulled the threads and twined the layers together to create a poem.
awritersfountain 