Special Section
Palm Beach Poetry Festival's
Art Couture Ekphrastic Poetry Contest winners 2020
Art Couture Ekphrastic Poetry Contest winners 2020
1st Place
Shtick, A Riff on Adhesif by Erika Michael
based on Adhesif, by Caroline Dechambay
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Shtick, A Riff on Adhesif
French for glue, the picture sticks to the mind’s recollection of collecting, those black-framed rectangles on the white stucco walls of Dutch rooms, Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks and such, old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box, how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like leaded edges of stained glass in churches around Paris when he lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society, Mme. Blavatsky’s psychic order of occult spiritual views inspiring his theory on the use of hues that can’t be mixed from others — put a lid on green -- and were not to drift beyond their grid. Some dodged those picky rules, no mentor’s such a fool they don’t occasionally push the edge of self-restraint and break the code, but only when their Shtick sustains the neoplastic look of it. Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows — all that frenzied beat of drums from Broadway clubs & shows. The tape suspended from the artist’s fingertip, what role d’you think it plays as she surveys her wall. Rebirth of Montparnasse? Not a bad call! This Mondrian thing flows — nifty rigor of her tresses, outfit’s hot, a twenties take on sixties Saint Laurent. De Stijl still rocks. I like the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there. |
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About the first place poem Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “What a riff this is, taking us through works by Mondrian, segments of his life, places, art, influences—those on him and him on others—the lines in this poem sticking like adhesif, “French for glue” (line 1), as the picture by Caroline Dechambay sticks, “to the mind’s recollection of collecting” (lines 1-2), as we, like the model, regard art, and then us regarding her as part of that, as being that, those “black-framed rectangles on the white stucco/walls of Dutch rooms” (lines 2-3), that are “Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks/ and such” (lines 3-4), Mondrian’s beginnings, the “old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box” (line 4). The poem spills forward, textured and rich in sound and image, like “how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like/leaded edges of stained glass in the churches around Paris when he/lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society”( lines 5-7), the poem enriched with Mondrian biography, and then enriching us with more of it, “Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie/ killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows” (line 13), and then at the end returning to Mondrian as Dechambay’s Adhesif, “De Stijl still rocks. I like/the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.” Style in that closing couplet does still rock. Wonderful. |
Erika Michael is an art historian and poet living in Woodway, Wash. With a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, she’s taught at Trinity University, Oregon State and the University of Puget Sound. She has participated in workshops with Thomas Lux, Carolyn Forché, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Tim Siebles, and Major Jackson. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade: Journal of the Washington Poets’ Association, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Mizmor l’David Anthology, Bracken Magazine, Bracken Anthology, The Winter Anthology, The Princeton Institute For Advanced Study Letter, Belletrist Magazine, and elsewhere. She received honorable mention in the 2018 Palm Beach Poetry Festival's Looking Glass Ekphrastic Poetry Contest. |
2nd Place
An Old Husband's Tale by Vivian Shipley
based on Meghan, by Rick Lazes
Says Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “It’s easy to see how Rick Lazes’s Meghan inspired “An Old Husband’s Tale.” This narrative is a wonderful, and chilling, retelling of the Daedalus-Icarus myth, this time with both characters being female, mother-daughter rather than father-son, and, with this version, though being perhaps more liberating initially, is, in the end, as with the original, cautionary.” |
An Old Husband’s Tale
Daedalus was not a man, Icarus no boy. That’s a myth. Without a husband to bind her, Daedalus turned nature inside out, taught her daughter to fly from earth; after all, men couldn’t fence air. Feathering Icarus in sequence as a panpipe rises, Daedalus twined quills to mold two sets of wings sealed in an icing of white wax, stiff as bridal lace. Daedalus hovered, warning: Keep mid-way; water weights and sun burns. Always follow me. Icarus rose or was pulled up, casting her shadow on a ploughman, head lifted from his rut, who grumbled, A woman’s place is in the home. The mother tried to lift her arms higher to buffer her daughter but blue enveloped Icarus who cried, Let’s fly all the way to Trinacria. Knowing Samos was north and Calymne east, Icarus ignored the earth’s warning being traced out for her by the sharded coast of Crete. Unlike the moon that eclipses the sun, filial duty cannot blot desire. Hopefully, the joy gleaming in Icarus’ green eyes flashed, mercifully blinding, and blocking the sight for Daedalus: her only child encircling wings, writhing like a corn snake carried aloft by a hawk. Imagine the girl, her mother’s support failing, the aerial lift and impulse spent. Dripping to the sea, only the wax hissed, floating as islands do. Daedalus did not fly again. Unused, feathers yellowed; wax stiffened in her wings that stretched out more like a shroud than a swan in flight. |
Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, Vivian Shipley teaches at SCSU. She was awarded a 2020-21 COA Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, her 12 book, An Archaeology of Days, was published by Negative Capability Press in 2019 and was named The 2020-21 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. The Poet (SLU) and Perennial (Negative Capability Press, Mobile, AL) were published in 2015. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, (2010. SLU) won 2011 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, NEPC’s Sheila Motton Book Award , and CT Press Club’s Prize for Best Creative Writing. Shipley won 2018’s Steve Kowit Poetry Award for “Cargo” and has also won Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Prize, Robert Frost Foundation’s Poetry Prize, University of Southern California’s Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Marble Faun Poetry Prize from the William Faulkner Society, New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Prize and Kent State’s Hart Crane Prize.
3rd Place
Skin by Sheila Kelly
based on Expensive Taste, by Becky Rosa
In the words of Contest Judge Stephen Gibson,
“Becky Rosa’s Expensive Taste gives us a woman in close up, actually not a woman but a mouth with its tongue licking a melting shopping-bag dripping like a scoop of ice cream atop a cone, the shopping-bag-ice-cream dripping over the slender, curled fingers and polished fingernails holding the cone. The poem “Skin,” a sonnet, is a terrific response to and exploration of that work. The “expensive taste,” of course, is not the dripping cone but the woman, the mouth, and so the sonnet gives voice to that mouth, to what it craves, and to tell us what we crave, wanting it.” |
Skin
after “Expensive Taste” by Becky Rosa Supple voluptuous sac I put my vitals in. Consummate suit. See me strip to a syncopated rhythm. All hail, drool, salute. Tuesday’s torture is Wednesday’s delight. Make captive. Skin is elegant bait. Moan spells pleasure/pain alike. Eviscerate. Hermes, Fendi: Fat me. Shear then stretch me. Dry me. Dye me. Pattern, cut me. Stitch & praise me. Better than some, my luxurious fate. Swallow, wallow in. Spend till you sate. Sheila Kelly leads generative writing workshops in libraries, community centers, art galleries, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. A retired psychotherapist, she believes in the healing power of writing in a supportive group setting where writers can connect, experiment and develop their uninhibited voices. Kelly’s poems have been published in journals, anthologies and a book of craft; most recently in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicineand Diane Lockward’s The Practicing Poet. |
4th Place
Sonnet for 2020 by Michelle Winkler
based on Dorian Gray, by Sonia Sanchez Arias
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Sonnet for 2020
Will you speak for us all, dear Dorian? Of days gone by, of now… and what comes next… For you, too, perfect attic mannequin Enveloped in the grays of time and sex. Beneath the resilient bow of hope and fears Headdress of femininity and fields- Behemoth shadow of lecherous jeers And all the cold-weighted chains history yields. Linked maille bodice, slight antebellum waist, O keeper of secrets, millennials’ muse, Your sultry slit will be slut-shamed in haste But your daughter is heir to sensible shoes. To be clear: backhand equity will be fought And pride reclaimed… whether you tell or not. Michelle Winkler is a Professor of English at Palm Beach State College. She holds an MA in English and a Doctorate in Education. |
Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “This work, as the gown-on-mannequin construction that it responds to, is formal to the point of mannerism, with that formalism-mannerism, as in Sonya Sanchez Arias’s piece, undercutting each other. The gown is late 19th century, as is the Dorian Gray title and Oscar Wilde allusion, but the material of it is not. So too, the poem: a conventional-looking sonnet that strikes at the conventional: the past may try to hide but will give up its secrets.”
5th Place
Modern Masque for Mondrian by Django Bisous
based on Adhesif, by Caroline Dechambay
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Modern Masque for Mondrian
Piet indeed No piety here. Her soft edges layered On hard edge technique. Abstraction of abstraction So representational. The artist with the art, in the art, the fiction complete. The photographic reflection, One dimension, two dimension, Three dimension, four. Primary colors Primal desires. |
According to Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “This spare, brief, thirteen-line poem delightfully engages the art work—and the reader’s ear, with its slant rhyme use used to slant meaning in relating its sly view of Dechambay’s equally sly piece.”
Django Bisous is a Canadian and divides his time between Toronto, Europe and Key West. Poetry is a relatively new pursuit for him, with most of his creative time usually focused on writing creative non-fiction or fiction in the short story format and keeping a blog for his friend. His current major undertaking is the completion of a book in the epistolary style. His work can be read at djangobisous.com
While submitting his prose for publication and to various contests has been an active pursuit over the last several years, this is the first ekphrastic poem he has written, the first poem acknowledged by a judge and first publication of any kind for Django. Accordingly, he cannot stop grinning.
Django Bisous is a Canadian and divides his time between Toronto, Europe and Key West. Poetry is a relatively new pursuit for him, with most of his creative time usually focused on writing creative non-fiction or fiction in the short story format and keeping a blog for his friend. His current major undertaking is the completion of a book in the epistolary style. His work can be read at djangobisous.com
While submitting his prose for publication and to various contests has been an active pursuit over the last several years, this is the first ekphrastic poem he has written, the first poem acknowledged by a judge and first publication of any kind for Django. Accordingly, he cannot stop grinning.
Honorable Mentions
Five HONORABLE MENTIONS were selected: henry 7. reneau, jr., “Jackie Kennedy in Pink Chanel” and Susan Carroll Jewell, “Georgia O’Keeffe Buys a Pink Suit” (both inspired by Timo Weill’s Pink Suit); Victoria Otto Franzese, “DGS” and Amalia Mavrafrides, “The Dress” (both inspired by Sonia Sanchez Arias’s Dorian Gray); and Stephen Mead, “Yum” (inspired by Becky Rosa’s Expensive Taste).