(2:33min) Videopoetry: Magnolia Stellata, an attempt...

Claire Elek wrote:

"You're from another time Brenda..the time of troubadours, "mad" women, the Lady of Shallott, Ophelia.. I don't mean to suggest.. I just love your drama, your temperament, your authenticity.. Your poetry.. It should be in a beautiful box with flowers on it tied with a purple ribbon.. You made my day as I set out to teach small children.. You're a drop of fresh water in this world of hum drum.. thank you for being you..."

Blessings,
Claire

I love what you wrote, Claire! Ah, yes, let's be "mad" creative women, Sarah Bernhards & Isadora Duncans... through the weeks of taping this poem the versions just got sillier until this late one night.

_______
Nov 12th

For weeks I have been trying to record a poem, Magnolia Stellata, in various outfits at various times of the day using either the built-in Webcam (as in this clip) or my older Canon GL2 video DV camera. I promised myself to post something, anything since I purchased equipment to produce videopoetry. Hence loading this little hilarious clip to Blogger. It's taken hours to produce, and there was no editing since I used a clip as is! Sigh. Probably I have a better clip, but NaNoWriMo awaits and it's already almost tomorrow.

Mostly the time was taken up with trying to deal with the background issues, which I resolved with a still worked on in Photoshop Elements and imported into Final Cut Express, and then the video made slightly transparent and cropped inside of. I chopped and cooked a chili, ginger, vegetable and pork stir-fry for my son during the time it took to render, and then render again.

The jammies? Oh, sigh. You know, and this isn't by way of excuse, I've lived in or near Chinese communities for many years, and in Vancouver how many dear Chinese folk were out in their pajamas after 9pm at night?

Look, there was the white nightgown Butoh-based dance video. Maybe I have a thing about sleep attire?

I share an enclave with a Chinese woman who's always in her pajamas. And my daughter (who's vegan) lives in hers, putting them on as soon as she comes home.

I got in the habit...

Women In Summer

If anyone knows the code to reverse the order of a Flikr slideshow I'd appreciate it. It's currently running backwards, from finished painting through all the stages to the drawing, which is a bit awkward. Women In Summer, I'm happy to say, is finished.

(Clicking any of the images will stop the slideshow and provide more of the info I included for the picture.)

Also, I've grouped this series on one page by the tag, WomenInSummer, at Flickr, here.

Almost Finished Painting

(28.5"x20.5"; 72.5cmx52cm; oil & watercolour on Waterford paper, click here for larger size & press F11 for full screen)


The women on the right appeared ghostly from a distance.

The greens of Nature and the poppies and marigolds much stronger.

She wondered if that was a statement.

The ocean has turned into green.

She had to put the water back in for depth.

Otherwise she'd be flooded.

Where was he anyhow?

Why were the women always waiting.

They were naked and waiting.

Even she who was born from a seabrush
of sea foam.

Mirror of Venus

I am the mirror that I watch my
self in.

Behind the mirror is where I see.

Only ask for the 'freedom to revolt- psychic,
analytic, artistic- a permanent state of questioning,
of transformations, an endless probing of appearances,'
......found on the dustjacket
......of a book by Kristeva,
who wrote about revolt, and love.

Everyone should love wholly once in their life, as
the daughter of fortune knows.

The tenor of love demands it.

Love, illicit, a revolt against the order
of the rest of it.

The amatory moment is poetry, open-ended,
without a story to guide it, what's behind the mirror
where I watch your face.

Venus, Goddess of Love, married to Hephaestus, master craftsman.

Of course love is wedded to art. How else
could it be?

The block was a red clay-baked brick which took two hours to smash. It revealed
itself, heavy, smoldering with beaten passion, betrayals and intrigues, over my heart. Cracks of light appeared that became white-red lava that disintegrated slowly the faster I danced.

When I melted into the mirror, love flowed freely.

Venus, Goddess of Love, but she knew her Ares, Mars, God of Fire and War.

Venus undid her bodice and melted
into his arms.

Illicit. Love.

Sometimes I prefer the quietness
of my own thoughts.

Prep drawing for painting

India ink on paper with acrylic matte medium brushed over the drawing, 73cm x 52cm, 28.75" x 20.5"

Prep drawing for a new painting. Combining figures from lifedrawing sessions and a very famous Venus, to become part my current work-in-progress: the Botticelli Venus Suite of Poems (I've included some tiny bits of text from my poems which may be lost in the paint, who knows).

Click on image for larger size, & the tiny quotes from which poems.

Venus like a Visitation

'the state of love in the world...'
...................she whispers

.........tendril of a curl curves
around her cheek, brush
stroke of honey-toned
watercolour; her eyes, full and
frightened, water saffire

..........her lips, parsed & pale, she
hovers on a scallop sea shell
above the waves, though she is tossed
to & fro by the windswept whitecaps

..........her voice a lament,
a soprano singing the ending of
Mahler's Ninth, grief disappearing
but never leaving,
the wind blows more strongly
until she's gone, a pearl of the sea
into the white horizon

..........echoing in the conch shells
held to our ears, her voice
ringing over rising waves, 'we do not
put each other first'

The White Ocean

She stopped to rest.

Momentarily, in the field of pure possibility, her position unfixed, indeterminate.

Without hovering, or insecurity.

It was an image of being in the vast field of life.

Without knowing. In a position of unknowing, positionless, I suppose. Existing without location or momentum. Vibrating with possibility. It wasn't exciting or fearful, just what is.

Nothing is fixed or certain, though there are always solutions to problems.

Then she continued on.

She didn't doubt her certainties.

Adrift

Out of the fertility of the ocean, sea tides within, rhythms following the moon's wake, I sought you.

My planet of fire.

You'd disappeared into steaming mist. I lost you in the clouds. Perhaps you'd transformed into the raptor flying overhead. Or the dark loam of the shore looming.

You were always only figments,
imagined.

Pink roses
falling in the wind.

What could be fired her desire, kept her enthralled. Only now she sees what is.

For love is beautiful and painful, this is its nature. "A great love carries within it a mourning for love." [Edmund Jacobs.]

The way the processes of love unite what is disparate, the longings and communions, and hold us to our wanton paths amidst the fluxes of the heart.

Venus
adrift...

In the Throes of Love...

If there is a ground,
it is a quantum of vibrating molecules.

Like walking on water during a storm at sea.

No guides in this emotional terrain,
it's new.

I don't know where I'm going or how to get there. Logic has failed; intuition, senseless.

Furies and lies and deceptions blow like crazed winds everywhere. Nothing can be trusted to be what it seems or purports to be. The stories you are told aren't the real ones. Secrets are everywhere. The underside is sleazy, riven with seething. And you wonder how you missed the way through, or if it ever was there. And when the revelations come, and they do, like light through the floods, you don't know how to survive them, and if you do, what direction you should be travelling in now.

Rudderless, without navigation.

How can you find ground when there is no ground?

What is continuous in the discontinuous?

What lasts in impermanence?

What is it in the wavering flame that doesn't go out? Even in the storm I travel though.

Perhaps on a scallop seashell, a Venus in lament.

She Who Came Forth

The Embrace. Their children couldn't emerge into the light. He was heaven and she was earth. Uranus and Gaia, his wife, who he loved and refused to separate from. Creation waited. The embrace was tight, intimate, sensual, blissful, deeply in each other, unending. Cronus, his son, time, cruel time, cut off his genitals and threw them into the sea. Heaven and Earth separated. Out of the foam, Aphrodite was born. Love.

Aphrodite, who she was to the Ancient Greeks, though she was older than that, and linked to Ishtar-Astarte, and probably brought to the Greek islands by Phoenician sailors, Aphrodite, who later became Venus to the Ancient Romans, is one of the world's oldest divinities.

She was born from an act that separated Heaven and Earth. An ancient divinity present at the beginning of time. She Who Came Forth at the birth of the world.

Or, this is Hesiod's version in his Theogony. Aphrodite represents pure and spiritual love. From her foamy birth the Three Graces received her and wrapped her in rich garments and decorated her with gold ornaments.

The Goddess of Love.

Aphrodite Urania, or Celestial Aphrodite.

The Venus Botticelli saw, painted, understood.

Oh, there was another one, Homer's in his Iliad. Venus Pandemos or Common Aphrodite. She was born from Zeus and the Titan Goddess, Dione. This Aphrodite was baser, lust-driven and associated with physical satisfaction...

Humanitas, the flowering

Venus - 'Humanitas,'
guiding force of the Renaissance
precious fantastic spirit
which transformed Western
civilization

Allegory of Spring

Spirit of the Renaissance

Out of the Dark Ages
with the rediscovery
of classical antiquity

Herald of the golden age
flowering of arts and sciences
under her tuteledge,
the great goddess
in her many
guises


What if Venus bucked
her symbolism as
spiritual value and
swung her scallop
shell around and
dove into
deep seas,
an intensity
of dark
passion?

On the Mystical Theology of Spring

*the consequences of
what the composition is
centred around are of
great importance*

theologica mystica
the deep interior

Botticelli's Venus, innocent and flowering, beautiful
and fragile, a powerful goddess and
untouched maiden, a blossom of love
that is the garden itself...

Who is the
birth

of

Hidden Masterpieces

Botticelli's Venus
like pure meditation.

Sky and sea and shell.

Fabric of wind blowing.

Is she a heliotropic metaphor, painted by a man whose preference wasn't women, who presented an idealized version of woman without her dark burning orchard?

No contrary opposing forces
dark intrigues, smoldering
passions
erupting
like the fire rock
that buried Pompeii.

Nor is she a poetry of free association, drifting over the waves opening out towards non-meaning but fully signified: beauty, love, goddess.

She doesn't point us to the conflict of the unrepresentable, but to a representation of
beauty, a solar vision, of innocence, of love.

Botticelli's Venus carries no arrows, or armory.

A surface of
sweetness
idyllic.

No lusty, passionate,
vengeful goddess.

Appearing fragiley
on the ocean's
horizon.

Thin layers of translucent
paint.

The Birth of Venus and the Primavera kept from public view for almost five centuries, and then she rose like the morning star, radiating feminine beauty far and wide.

Pallas & the Centaur, Primavera, and The Birth of Venus commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de'Medici in the late 1400s for his Villa di Castello in Florence.

Secret, hidden masterpieces. Not seen by the public until the 19th century.


Venus, the spiritual birth of Humanitas.

Lofty ideal. Hunger of hot desire
absent.

The messiness of reality
can't be faked.

"the soul establishes itself
through loving itself in the ideal"¹

______________________
¹ Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (Columbia University Press, 1987), 110.

The Green Wire Shelf

It's a rickety wire corner piece with soldered leaves trailing in green over which I hung a couple of strands of small white festive lights. It fits in the tiny corner of the tiny room. The bottom shelf has a few scattered printed poems that I read into his voicemail, not that he should be the only one to receive them, and you should know that, and manuals for the Tivoli stereo and radio and the Bang & Olufson headphones; the middle shelf holds a refurbished black plug-in Northern Telecom phone with good unfuzzy sound, real retro; the top shelf, a small stack of articles and art books on Botticelli.

When I meditate I unplug the lights, and after lie down and close my eyes and let the silence take me deeper, when I come up from the depths I roll over and place the jack of the lights into the plug on the middle shelf, the one with the retro phone.

Oh, the books have fallen a few times. I know I should have fixed the wobbly wire garden corner shelf to the wall but I didn't have a large picture hook and the store I went to didn't have that size.

Of course it happened. The books tumbled and rolled and fell onto my head in the dark while I was trying to attach the plugs for the small trellis of lights.

I was stabbed by the hardcover corner of my favourite one, the prints are so lush, and I stare at them in the evenings wondering how the Renaissance master painted them.

I have a bruise on my right cheek bone. It's pale grey, and slightly sore. I cover it in a little tinted moisturizer.

My Botticelli bruise.

frozen seas
currents
hot and cold
intermixing
where Venus
wrapped in shawls
of frost
treachery of winds
is this cold
reception
poetry
in the world?

a la scallope

innocent and lyrically sensuous, fragile, beauty,
powerful goddess and untouched maiden, a blossom

of love

figure of spiritual ecstasy

incarnation of love under a paintbrush, in a vision, a feeling, expansive,
a Botticelli pink rose, Venus in her purity, born from the seafoam, coming into
being, music to ears that hear the seawinds bearing her
towards us

Ocean of Ice

Ice floes, sharp, jagged icicles. Hidden, floating icebergs. Tearing, sinking, drowning. We struggle amid snow squalls and tears of fire burn our cheeks. It's a dance of avoidance in the avalanche of the Arctic waters. Do not freeze, or turn to ice.

Ice moves quickly, unpredictably, in response to ocean currents and wind. Ice, like tectonic plates. Frozen earthquakes and ice mountains, ridges and blocky ice rubble. O be wary, what impales the heart, tides of ice.

Ice floes surge and spin, ice moves in packs, networks of cracks and patches of open water, pushing broken ice, loose chunks of ice, and ice jams. Icebreaking.

But the currents are intermixed in this strange painting of love, surging warmth and rigid cold. Where deceptions occur: what looks solid, isn't. And then the ice so thin it's a mirror down into the depths.

Venus comes aloft on her scallop seashell amidst the ice floes; the Zephyr winds are cold and northerly. The Horae await with a cloak embossed with delicately beautiful ice flowers, as fragile as morning frost. Where is the warmth? The sea is awash with cold and hot waters, whitecaps of ice or steam. Which currents are to be trusted?

Sun-washed Blossoms

Ishtar's high priestess, Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, of the rising and setting star in the East, Venus, sexual mystery of the darkness, not the sun-stroked beauty of Botticelli's.

Unclothed, unashamed but virginal, an untouched goddess of love blown in by waves whose whitecaps are like flocks of flying white birds. Botticell's Venus not the sensual 'come-hither' of Inanna and her Shepherd-King, Dumuzi. Or she of the Song of Songs.

Botticelli's Venus is the Virgin in a pagan landscape of delight in the beauty of the world. Fragile becoming on the wind-washed shores of our being. Her beauty not lustful but ethereal; the innocence of unblemmished spirituality.

Only, Botticelli, man who remained like a monk, single, dedicated to art, and art alone, your gorgeous muse causes all of Nature to bloom in your paintings where it bursts out of your canvases, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera.

Where is the sultry goddess of the dark gleaming gold temple of love?

Valentines Day

Those of you who have been reading my latest series of poems will understand the humour in this image, I say laughing. You never know where she will appear! Happy Valentines!

birth of beauty

times of decrease, recession, turmoil, depression, upheaval, war, loss and degradation, fear and grief, the unpardonable, what can't be retracted, the birth of love borne by beauty on the waves of the sea

Savonarola's body burnt in the Piazza della Signoria, it is 1498, he who convinced you to renounce the sensual pleasure of beauty - The Mystical Nativity painted in 1500 so different to when

you and Leonardo da Vinci, a friend who you studied with in Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s

those angelic visions

art historians speak of spiritual tautness in your work, of the grace of line and that your figures are holy heiroglyphics

she appeared under your delicate sable brushes in 1492 and disappeared for centuries until the Pre-Raphaelites resurrected her and now she is a definer of feminine beauty in the modern world

with my curls, when I was a young woman, people used to compare me to 'Botticell's Venus'; I, too, have borne her...

rising from the sea

the rush of waves in my ears

listening to you


beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, fragrant perfume and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Sandro, and

yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae

washes of colour, seaspray of roses,

translucent robes

poetry we weave ourselves with