Writers International Edition

Poetry

THE OTHER SIDE OF AETHER poem by vaslilici

THE OTHER SIDE OF AETHER : Poem by Vasiliki Dragouni

Darkness is approaching my window,
looks thoughtfully at my tangled hands
and withdraws into silence.

You live there now, where you can hear the voices of the sea,
where you can wear snow like a garment around your shadow.
You wander in the twilight of strange dreams
like an angel who lost her way.
You move like a flash of light in the river at the edge of sunset.
You recall the memories of trees in the loneliness of autumn
and then you withdraw into silence like an absence.

I speak to you through the universe of silent things
with the white vowels of the sky.
Here, in a landscape of hearing where languages ​​hush
I won’t be waiting for you to answer me.
Here, where I can hear your voice
calling me out of sleep as the other side of aether,
there is no need to hug me anymore.

I look out of my window at night constellations
searching in the abyss for your fading face.
I believe in what has not been said yet, mother.

Poem by :
Vasiliki Dragouni
©
Vasiliki Dragouni

THE OTHER SIDE OF AETHER poem by vaslilici

THE OTHER SIDE OF AETHER: Poem by Vasiliki Dragouni

Darkness is approaching my window,
looks thoughtfully at my tangled hands
and withdraws into silence.

You live there now, where you can hear the voices of the sea,
where you can wear snow-like a garment around your shadow.
You wander in the twilight of strange dreams
like an angel who lost her way.
You move like a flash of light in the river at the edge of sunset.
You recall the memories of trees in the loneliness of autumn
and then you withdraw into silence like an absence.

I speak to you through the universe of silent things
with the white vowels of the sky.
Here, in a landscape of hearing where languages ​​hush
I won’t be waiting for you to answer me.
Here, where I can hear your voice
calling me out of sleep as the other side of aether,
there is no need to hug me anymore.

I look out of my window at night constellations
searching in the abyss for your fading face.
I believe in what has not been said yet, mother.

Poem by
Vasiliki Dragouni
© Vasiliki Dragouni 2022

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

dr. shalini yadavProf. Dr. Laksmisree Banerjee is an established Poet, Writer, Editor, Literary Critic, Educationist, Humanist, International Scholar, Rotarian (a Multiple Paul Harris Fellow) & practicing Vocalist, with many National and International Awards, Assignments, Books & Publications to her credit. She is a Senior Fulbright Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar and a National Scholar in English from the Calcutta University, India. A University Professor of English, Poetry & Cultural Studies, an Ex-Vice Chancellor of Kolhan University, she has taught, lectured & recited in Universities and Literary Festivals across the globe. She has been widely anthologized with Eight Books of Poetry (the Ninth and Tenth forthcoming) One Hundred Twenty Research Publications and Several Academic Books. Of the many Awards she has received, a special few need to be mentioned viz. Sahitya Akademi’s “Avishkar” Honour for her multiple expertise, cited as “A Scholar-Artiste and Poet-Musician”, her UGC Postdoctoral Research Award for her path-breaking Literary Work on the Comparative Studies of World Women Poets, the Honour of The Connossiuer of Creative & Literary Arts by the Tunisian-Asian Poetic Society, the Kala-Ratnam Award and the Reuel International Lifetime Achievement Award 2021,among others. Dr. Banerjee happens to be the Indian Rashtrapati’s Nominee on Boards of Central Universities & believes in using her Pen and Voice for Social Justice, Transformation, Peace & International Understanding.

I PAINT: Poem by Smaragdi Mitropoulou

Ι paint
a sun …
a basil on the windowsill…
and a love among the bougainvillaeas.
Ι paint
a well with water
to quench your thirst
a nightingale to sing to you
and a moon
to keep you company at night
not to be afraid.
I paint
a road full of stars
a path full of dreams
and a golden line to show you the way.
I’m waiting for you
the clocks broke tonight
I’m waiting for you
and I paint hope

ΖΩΓΡΑΦΙΖΩ

Ζωγραφίζω
έναν ήλιο..
έναν βασιλικό στο περβάζι…
κι έναν έρωτα ανάμεσα στις βουκαμβίλιες.
Ζωγραφίζω
ένα πηγάδι με νερό
να σβήσεις τη δίψα σου
ένα αηδόνι να σου τραγουδά
κι ένα φεγγάρι
να σου κρατά τις νύχτες συντροφιά
να μη φοβάσαι.
Ζωγραφίζω
ένα δρόμο σπαρμένο άστρα
ένα μονοπάτι σπαρμένο όνειρα
και μια χρυσή ακτίνα να σου δείχνει το δρόμο.
Σε περιμένω….
σπάσανε απόψε του χρόνου τα ρολόγια…
Σε περιμένω…
και ζωγραφίζω την ελπίδα….

Σμαραγδή Μητροπούλου

Poem by
Smaragdi Mitropoulou
© Smaragdi Mitropoulou

About the author

Smaragdi Mitropoulou was born in Athens. She has studied history and archaeology at the University of Athens and had postgraduate history studies at the University of Cardiff, in Great Britain. She serves in secondary education. She is also a CreativeWriting graduate (Diploma in Creative Writing) from the Writers’ Bureau College(Manchester, UK), and has studied theatre writing at the International TheaterInstitute and directing at the Foundation of Culture in Tinos island. She has received awards in Greece and abroad for her poetry and prose. Also, she is a Programme Coordinator & Member of the Executive Board of Writers Capital InternationalFoundation. So far, she has written six books, which have been published and launched in Greece. Two of them, “One moment just an eternity” and “Sounds in the
Silence” was translated into English and was published in 2020 and 2021respectively by the English Ontime Books Publishing House. Her poetry has been translated into Bengali, Chinese, Taiwanese and Spanish language and has been published in online and print magazines in the Philippines, China and Taiwan, Mexico, Chile and Peru.

 

POETIC LANGUAGE AND VISUAL ART. FROM POETRY TO IMAGE AND PERFORMANCE

Although the image can be considered a resource of desire, poetry is, instead, a voice that comes from within. Image and poetry are governed by a figurative and sensual design, evoking a union to create something new in an interdisciplinary way. Poetry makes you fly, and the image makes you dream. The poet represents the image using the word, so the language of poetry is given over to the task of imagining the image and making the unthinkable see. In turn, the artist represents poetry using the visible, so that the language of art is given over to the task of representing poetry and making the message visible. An intrinsic and empathetic relationship arises, externalizing and intensifying the mimicry of a unique world, expressing feelings and emotions, thereby pursuing a representation of an innovative vision of the environment.

In this context, we can speak of poetry, characterized by the close interaction of verbal and visual language, where the image accompanies the verse, while the visual discourse of the image interacts with the word to elaborate the poetic world. The visual appeals to emotion through action, while poetry, in turn, emphasizes the predominance of a verbal register, both fields focused on philosophical and intimate reflection, with a message that is wanted to be transmitted both with the word and with the visual. From this interaction of verbal and visual signs, a sense is born and develops that establishes a synergy and a relationship of interdependence, that is, constituting an indivisible and unalterable aesthetic and formal unit.

The collaboration of the poet and the artist will be decisive in the relevance of the image or visual art in relation to poetry, linked to the internal organization of the components of the work, bringing the poems to fruition combined with the images. In some cases, it is about poetry created for images, in other cases it is the reverse, it is about images created for poetry. At this point, both poet and visual artist can decide the degree of autonomy or dependence between poetry and image, so that each image-poem can be read independently or maintain a unifying sequence, where the illustrations are presented together with the poems, in a certain order that suggests a journey through an aesthetic and thematic unit, both from a verbal and visual point of view. The interaction between images and words in the construction of meaning is considered essential, neither poetry nor image are a secondary complement to each other, both have their own characteristics attributed to the poetic self and the artistic self.

Poetry is characterized by its internal cohesion, its rhythmic and sound qualities, the predominance of poetic connotation, a meaning, freedom, expressive and linguistic creativity, linking with the artistic dimension characterized by its interpretive qualities, emotion and sensitivity. , expressive creativity and the aesthetic part of art. In this way, both expressive elements (verbal and visual) form an aesthetic unit and converge in the construction of meaning, resulting in a work made of words and images.

When image and poetry evolve into live art, performance art&poetry appears. Art in action or performance, as avant-garde art linked to poetry, shows actions carried out by the artist within an interdisciplinary context. Here, the performance needs the presence and execution of the artist himself, who plays an important and fundamental role, involving time, space, the body and the relationship with the public. His goal is to generate a reaction, sometimes with the help of improvisation and a sense of aesthetics, linked around concepts of visual art. It is not just a stage performance, it is a unique and sublime experience, where it merges with the poetic message. Poetry in performance emerges to distinguish vocal interpretations based on the word from artistic interpretations, in a joint work of scenic and visual interpretation. Performance poets draw on the rhetorical and philosophical expression of their poetics, while the artist often challenges the audience to think in new and unconventional ways, to break the concepts of traditional arts and to transform the traditional and academic idea of ​​the art into an aesthetic experience.

Analysing the various aspects of poetic language and visual art, we can see that there is an innovative journey that goes from poetry to image and performance, or on the contrary, from visual art to poetic language. The two have always had a very close relationship. In this way, we can say that “art is silent poetry and poetry is speaking art”, as Simónides of Ceos (VI-V BC) already expressed and later Horace placing poetry dependent on the image.

From this dependence between poetry and art we can affirm that poetry can build something that does not exist or represent the plastically unpresentable, while visual art can represent the entire underlying world of poetic language and give it scenic life, either as an “epogram”, a verbal inscription on an object or body in a subsidiary relation to the word, either as “ekphrasis” that allows a detailed description of the object or body and places the image and the word on the same plane, or as “emblem” or “emblematic poetry”, where the object or body is more than an image, it is a code, it cannot be silent and needs the support of the word.

Article by Articles / By Joan Josep Barcelo & Filippo Papa

CYBERWORLD: Poem by Irene Doura-Kavadia

Towards the end […] it’s like towards the end of a masked ball, when the masks are removed. You can now see who those with whom you came into contact [ … ] actually were. For the characters have (finally) revealed themselves, the deeds have borne their fruit, […] and all delusions have crumbled…
A. Schopenhauer

A fancy, shiny new world
Stretches right before your eyes
Picture, colour, enticing word
A brand new reality luring
Out loud for you to enter, cries,
With the bright shiny smile
of a toothpaste commercial star
constantly with attractions pouring
draws you along to travel far

God, it looks so enticing!
Undeniably, unchartered waters
For all the globe’s seafarers
-Amateurs and experienced alike-
Always prove utterly inviting
For you to cross all borders
And reach out for the spike

With a bright shiny flashing smile,
Skillfully pulling the wool over your eyes,
There stretches out all-hiding cyber vile
And sweet reality soon turns into hideous lies
As virtual truth no real virtue bears
And when the going gets really tough
Only the tough ones shall get going

While the rest, all graces and airs,
perform behind a foggy curtain
the tantalizing seven veils’ dance
of Salome, the utter femme fatale,
and meeting their demands ends up in death most certain;
and they can equally be a female’s or a man’s
leading inevitably to heartbreaking results

A fancy, shiny, stardust-sprinkled world
Stretches right before your eyes.
Beware! It won’t be long before
The veil drops, rearing Medusa’s ugly head
That venomously turns it all into icy stone
Or to a hellish devouring fire, scarlet red,
Till even your last breath’s tear dries.

Thus, do not wonder, dear, do not cry
Don’t even dare to ask how or why;
The fact is obviously evident yet wry
-as at times willingly by most overlooked-
That for reality there is absolutely
no possible substitute, even when rough,
difficult, harsh, or undoubtedly tough.
So, listen to my sound advice and not ever try;
better prove wise and not get hooked!

Poem by
Irene Doura-Kavadia
© Irene Doura-Kavadia 2022

My Love: Poem by Sujatha Warrier

My love is all my own,
I dream about its rainbow hues,
I wind my way often
down the lanes of its memory,

I smile over its expressions,
revive its passions,
ruminate on its reflections,
ramblings and rants of long ago,

I keep at bay the fears,
wipe away the tears,
revel at the joys
buried in the deepest fathoms
of my heaving heart,

The tears, fears,
joys, sorrows,
thoughts, dreams and all
will be mine on call
to relive as is my wont,

It’s not in me to give them away,
It’s not in you to take them away,
It’s not in them to just go away,

My love’s been about me, always,
I’m its master, I’m its slave,
It’s in me to give you the reins

or take them away.

Poem by Sujatha Warrier
© Sujatha Warrier 2022

About the Poet

Sujatha Warrier is a writer and editor by occupation, and a poet and translator by inclination. Her articles and poems have appeared in magazines, literary e-journals and anthologies. One More Line and Other Poems is her latest collection of poems. The Attic & Other Poems is a collection of her poems, with illustrations. Fireflies is a collection of her micropoems. Totally Owordosed is her blog. A few awards and jury recommendations have come her way.

A LIE: Poem by Dr. Sreekanth Kopuri

For CHARP

woven with the void of
years in the African sands,
borrowed from the
life’s incomplete pages

sits in secure flat seated chair
bought from the supermarket
as a highest bidder at a secret
safe government auction

the natural defensive uproar adorned
in showy kinesics, entreats for scraps
of learning from another that
proclaims the biography of its own
blunder written with the stolen letters
from the pages of a ruined history

it picks up the leaves and windfalls
spilled under growing trees in the
government orchard with more lies
that socialize a life whose belly
bulges with the voracity for wealth

(First published in A New Ulster Ulster, Northern Ireland, November 2019)

Poem by Dr. Sreekanth Kopuri
© Dr. Sreekanth Kopuri 2019

About the Author

Sreekanth Kopuri is an Indian poet, current poetry editor of Kitchen Sink Magazine, Alumni Writer in Residence, Athens and a Professor of English from Machilipatnam, India. He recited his poetry in University of Oxford, John Hopkins University, University of Florida, Heinrich Heine University, University of Gdanski and many others. His poems appeared in Arkansas Review, Christian Century, A Honest Ulsterman, Chicago Memory House, Heartland Review, Lannang Archives, Tulsa Review, Expanded Field, A New Ulster, The Rational Creature, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry Centre San Jose, Underground Writers Association, Athereon Review, Word Fountain, Synaeresis, Wend Poetry, Vayavya, Ann Arbor Review to mention a few and are forthcoming in many. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of Golden Book of the year 2022 & finalist for the Eyelands Books Award Greece, 2019. He is the recipient of Immanuel Kant Award for his collection of poems on Silence 2020. An independent research scholar in Contemporary Poetry, Silence, and Holocaust poetry, he is presently working on his research work “Silence in Contemporary Ecopoetics of Transcendence”. He lives in his hometown Machilipatnam with his mother.

Palazzo della Pietà hosts OMNISCIENT the exhibition of Filippo Papa’s photographic works and Joan Josep Barceló’s poems in Venice 

Venice was the place where art and poetry met a new vision and experimentation through the representation of the REGENERATION performance by Filippo Papa and Joan Josep Barcelo creating a new way of making art, the union between photographic and performative art, holographic technology and poetry.

The Palazzo della Pietà in Venice hosted OMNISCIENT the exhibition of Papa’s photographic works and Barceló’s poems, curated by Mac Art, included in the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation Biennale. On the occasion of this exhibition, the commemorative book OMNISCIENT was published by the Setteponti Publishing House, with the preface by Paolo Giansiracusa and the afterword by Michele Lasala, where the various photographs and poems of both artists are collected. In the first part we find the twelve works of Omniscient accompanied by the twelve poems of Barcelo and in the second part, a tribute to the ten-year career of the artist Filippo Papa with the publication of ten works, one for each career year, always accompanied by poems unpublished by the poet Barcelo.

This whole concept materialized in the presentation of the performance REGENERATION at the end of April, with two representations, where Filippo Papa, live, as a visual performer, showed expressive art in his own body through a wonderful performance full of colour and interpretation, and where the poetry of Joan Josep Barceló adopted the holographic form, enhancing the act.

“Filippo Papa and Joan Josep i Barcelo travel in unison on the curvilinear paths of the universe. They adopt the same synthesis and love the musicality of silence. One captures images that push the gaze toward the Empireus, the other “rebuilds in the ceiling of the sky with every heartbeat”. It would seem that their poetics are entirely constructed by admiring the infinity that dominates our presence. Both look upwards as if looking for a trajectory that pushes the soul towards the place where everything is destined to converge. In this regard, Barcelo weaves verses as light as air, as burning like fire, and reminds us of everyone’s destiny in “asking only to die in the belly of the dome”.

Paolo Giansiracusa

“Filippo Papa and Joan Josep Barcelo, the photographer and the poet, the Sicilian and the Catalan, united in a journey called beauty. Moved by the desire to grasp, in the most varied forms of things, the most intimate essence of being, the two brave wayfarers unleash the weapons they know best. Papa does this by using light, with which he rewrites and describes the order of the world and admirably discloses that silent grammar that lies, eternal, under the heavy blanket of the visible. Barcelo does this by using the word, with which he illuminates, like a powerful beacon, the darkest and most hidden corners of the spirit of man. Two languages apparently distant from each other, but which actually show and prove to be basically the same thing. In fact, photography and poetry are both forms capable of capturing, imprisoning, freezing and crystallizing in an image or in a word the fleeting moment, the instant, the moment; what by nature is destined to live in a short space of time and then soon be swallowed up in the infinite darkness where everything is cancelled out. But art, photographic and poetic, has the strength to steal the moment that is about to dissolve from its evil destiny. At that moment there is the secret of the world, there is the whole sense of being. It is that light that pierces the darkness and illuminates the conscience of man, and that art reveals precisely. An image that, in Papa’s wonderful photos, finds full concreteness in the elegant shapes of a dome pierced by a mystical ray of sunshine. Seen from below and from inside, this almost looks like a circle of light, surrounded by the deepest darkness that eats away and cancels the rest of the church. In Barcelo’s profound lyrics, however, takes on the appearance of those words that no one understands and understands, which however herald a possible tomorrow. In one way or another, the presence of the transcendent is felt in the captured moment; the presence of what is far beyond the narrow schemes of reason. Absolute knowledge, or omniscience, whose most perfect symbol is not by chance the circle, among the forms, the one that best expresses the Umgreifende, the all-embracing of Jaspersian memory, where the possible is understood as well as the impossible”.

Michele Lasala

to multiply all hopes by four to irrigate with desire
the dome in the bud of each of the auroras
among celestial songs of guessing angels
what must be a martyrdom of symphonies of numbers

to savor the solitude of the hours that enter the night of the bodies
with a firm step on an oblique path

to fall completely into the lap of luminous forests
and of a twilight sky under the light weight of the eyes of a sun
that draws the most beautiful shadows in the world

*****

to try to sleep to talk to the angels about who is the most powerful
and to ocupy all the spaces feeling how their hands
are placed on the other hands

to feel no ties and cover nudity with rays of light
to combine their blood with other blood
to usurp the place in the shadows and not leave the fire of the circle

to ask only to die in the belly of the dome

*****

to unfold eight numbers on a distant and dark background
of the paradise of the eight gardens with eight doors

a circle of perfection in a mystical limit of light and dark
eternity between wind swirls and words between dream images and stars

to explain everything with drunkenness without depending on someone
who speaks a language that no one understands

(Poems by Joan Josep Barcelo)

William Wordsworth poem writers edition

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth