November: 3/5 Day Writing Challenge

Inspiration:

A piece of artwork. While you might not be able to zip off to the nearest art museum (if you can, do!), zero in on a piece of artwork - a painting, a sculpture, a ceramic piece... here at the St. Louis Art Museum, you might even be moved by a mummy, as we have some doozie Egyptian mummy pieces! You can use an art book or get online and call up a piece that rocks your socks for one reason or another. We're going to take a shot at in response to visual art.

Process:

• As you look hard and long at the piece of art, make a list of colors and what those colors might mean to you.

• Have a conversation with that piece. Talk out loud to it. What does it say back to you?

• Notice how light plays into and onto the piece. Does it generate any of its own light, and if so, where does that come from? Is there a sense of action with the piece?

• Place your piece of art - while we might view it in a museum or in an art book, somehow I just can't wrap my head around the idea that the artist created this piece to sit in a museum or end up on a coffee table - Place your piece of art in an apt environment - let it live there.

• Play with the life of the art piece and words that help it speak to us.

• OR imagine the artist creating this piece - let us see the artist toiling over this piece, or bringing it into life.

• Send a jpeg of the art piece to Sarah Donavan so she can upload it with your poem. She will try to get the artwork onto our blog pages.

• Only if you feel like it, play with rhyming. The mentor poem is a terzanelle. Free verse is just as dandy!

[Vincent van Gogh, Seascape near Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (1888)]

“Seabreeze and Sanity”

Pale yellow and turquoise green, White foam cresting on the waves Washing over and over in the sunlight’s gleam

Clouds sprinkled across the sky Light refracting on the water glimmering, glowering on the eye

Soft winds brushing strands of her hair No hurry to leave Or be anywhere

Rather, a speckle of salty drops splatter her face as the water meets edge and audibly slops

Sea touches the horizon and there are no limits She traces the line with her hand

She basks in the feeling of sand between toes She tilts her head towards the sun, as if she already knows Peace is found looking at the sunlit sails light, calm, water, and warmth never fails