Peter Parasol #2 went live this week and features poems that, in very different ways, are inspired by or interact with an artwork by S. Lariviere. The piece "The Gasp Mechanism" is a vibrant hybrid of tapestry, quilt and collage. Bits of text and images come together through what seems to be a very spontaneous and intuitive process. But cutting and stitching these materials also take time, and I began to wonder how these "pauses" determined the placement of certain elements. In Bobbi Lurie's poem, the speaker observes that "the material of a painting allows the brain another region to believe in." This is beautifully stated. There is a long standing, productive exchange between the visual arts and poetry. In "The Gasp Mechanism," for instance, the visibility of the seams and the way in which ribbons created internal frames sparked new ways of thinking of line, break and juxtaposition in poetry.
My contribution to this issue is a poem titled "Mechanism" (and includes an audio reading of the poem). I didn't set out to describe the piece but rather to take certain visual juxtapositions and see what could happen to them in the "blank" space of the poem. Somehow this fused with the myth of Cassandra. The image that appears in this post is a snapshot of one of my favorite details, "the rooster becomes a scythe."
Peter Parasol is currently accepting submissions for issue #3.
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