Sketch of a Saluki

A very simple sketch of a Saluki (smooth variety). Saluki are the oldest domesticated dogs. Saluki-like dogs have been found on Sumerian seals dating back to 7,000-6,000BC; they are in pictures in ancient Egyptian tombs from 2134-1650BC. They are also called Persian Greyhounds, and are an Egyptian desert dog, and often travelled across the Sahara to the Caspian Sea with nomadic tribes. They are extremely thin, sleek, fast, and intelligent. No idea how I'll finish this sketch - design, or paint - but sharing a little scan. No, not my dog, but an extraordinary animal.

                              

Solaris

Guess what I was watching tonight... actually I watched Tarkovsky's Solaris last night, along with the American re-make with that just-arrested at Sudanese protest, the arresting George Clooney (while a great sight better to look at, sorry George, and Steven Soderbergh, the director of the re-make, Tarkovsky's film remains a small masterpiece). Tonight it was the interviews with those who worked in and on the film with Tarkovsky. Amazing insights, and I couldn't grasp it all and will watch again. I completely fell for Tarkovsky many years ago, when I first saw Nostalighia, which became my favourite film for the next 20 years, and is still among my all-time favourites.

To say something about Solaris? What in death doesn't die...

( a line from my prosepoem, Whaleskin, sorry, it rose, so I said it)

                              

What is Poetry?

(What is poetry to you...? In this prose poem, I indicated the craft, what wordsmiths poets are, as well as what the essence is to me, but realize that I made poetry sound perhaps rather sweet when there is also grunge, slam, anger, pain. Yet again, as a long-time meditator, I find writing poetry is like the deepest meditation, so the anger and pain are like storms on the ocean, a froth of waves, while the ocean itself is full with steady presence.)



We speak in tongues of poetry, rare spun silk woven into our raw edges.

And echoes, cadence, melody of image, for whom detail, hidden or overt, reveals breadths of vision.

Finesse, complex filigree patterns, considered interlacings of feelings in the verbal clusters of stanzas.

A poem of many voices, strands, cross-currents, opposing winds, and I prefer this to a single slant on, say, Rumi-esque love, or American violence.

Just as the ocean forms each spilling wave wetting our feet while the sand dissolves beneath us, poems should be carefully crafted with total emotional disclosure.

The surfaces, smooth, but buckled.

A self-consciousness of style, a sensitivity, the art of writing fine poetry.

Poetry emerges from our secret words to join the ocean of language through which we communicate. Poems play with grammars. The speaking voice is a tessitura, offered, sung in all its ranges.

Poetry is not only about your feelings; it is about the possibilities of language.

A poet, a jeweller of words, creating a cloisonne of images, a vessel of many colours and opacities like a turning shadow lamp.

If it is not alive, it isn't real.

Not to forget the dissolution of us.

The best poetry is the writing appearing and disappearing at the edge, on the precipices, of the known world.