Robbi Nester Verse-Virtual 2016 January

January 2016

To all appearances, I inherited my poetic ability from my maternal great-uncle, the WWI British poet, Isaac Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a painter as well as a poet. While I didn't inherit his chops in visual art, I have always been drawn to ekphrastic poetry, writing about works of art, generally visual, but sometimes including other media as well. Following this inclination, I have completed a manuscript of ekphrastic collaborations with mostly visual artists, Together, which is now seeking a home. It contains about 76 pages, about 35 of which consist of mostly color plates. If you have any ideas about publishers who might be interested and who have the graphic know-how such a project entails, please let me know.

Author's Note: I wrote this poem, which was originally published in Levure Litteraire, in response to a challenge from poet Brendan Constantine, who wanted works that took up the title of a section of Stravinski's Rite of Spring for a group reading at The Ugly Mug, in Orange, CA, a venue I frequent

Evocation of the Ancestors
“Of course [the classic work of art] is wonderfully beautiful, only when it is a thing irritating, annoying, stimulating, then all quality of
beauty is denied to it.” -Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation”

In 1913, Stravinsky made music
out of a toothache.
Nijinksky  turned it into dance
that shocked the Paris monde.
The dance unleashed a riot.

The subject and the substance
of the piece seemed so outrageous
at the time, the music strident,
the dance grotesque, mechanical.
How ill-mannered
to remind this cultivated audience
their ancestors too
once prayed to savage gods
of tree or sky
engaged in human sacrifice
hunted the hoofed beast,
eating the raw and bloody
heart hot from its chest.

And on the battlefields
of World War I, the rites
would soon resume.
Our ancestors are us
or, more correctly,
we are them.

To be immediately embraced
new art must shield us
from this truth
and history distract us
from the past.